ould depend on the budget allocated in the direction of council um okay to make yeah in your budget in the current year you only have the money to replace the trees that have been taken down is that right and a little bit more i think um cost of this has gone up i think even since the last time i think you spoke about this but i think we have enough currently to replant the ones that were removed and perhaps do a little bit more we're actually trying to pull the bid documents together but not for various vacations we probably have that out already so a little bit might include treating some of the larger trees or are you saying a little bit more replacing more trees inter planting so doing more planting like jesse said okay we do not have treatment in our action plan at the moment per past direction of council um it was replacement um was was our plan okay tom so i appreciate how you've approached this conversation because we have gone gone back and forth on this for some time now i just remember four years ago and before we started all of this uh justin rabid who came to us and like we need you to the council to know we're going to propose chopping trees down and people don't like that and so that's where we are now my question to you is why have you not recommended the treatment the pesticides in the trees prior to now if you could refresh our memories why was that not part of our original treatment plan that was so thoughtfully presented that we did approve council chiton i hope i didn't confuse folks i'm not recommending that right now i'm just speaking in response to the natural resource council committees memo uh where they're again requesting this um so i i think oh yes or so i think it's a couple reasons right um sort of the industry standard where people were doing around the state around the region was the replacement there's concerns about liability um of these trees as the emerald ash borer moves in becoming unstable falling over things of that nature i think those were the big risks um and why with our number of trees that we had that we were looking to just sort of just replace them in this case yeah yes have any of those risks resolve themselves so that now in your perspective that treatment makes more sense or are those same risks that led us to not recommend them some time ago still there um so i don't think anything has changed largely um i know the council spoke with a tree expert from a local company uh recently where he maybe he talked a little bit more about more the effectiveness of treatment perhaps it's a little higher than i thought previously but i think in general i don't not aware of any major changes since the last time the council spoke on this topic okay other i'll garden i'll add my other understanding is that the uh treatment is um really targeted toward the ash borer and does not harm other living species that's anyway what the report then has been delivered to us so i don't know yeah look so it's an insecticide it isn't safe but it can be used safely um and from what i've read as well it's doesn't have impacts to other species it's the boring species that are getting in the ash trees thank you tim so i i appreciate the hybrid approach and i would want to rely on our arborist to make recommendations and work with the committee to understand the best path forward i think that would be a logical conclusion right because the arborist has the the background for that um and this could is this one of the items that was on the survey for the arpa funds i mean you have to allocate by a certain date and then use by a certain date so depending upon how much money that is you know well i think the arpa funds have to have some connection to go do they not no no connection to anything the last we heard right oh really i thought they had to be have some connection with an impact from covid no so the the ideal is that they are connected to covid and they are transformational but because we got under the ten million dollars the federal government the treasury has loosened the guidelines to say we can use it for any general government oh okay all right good i stay corrected it is still one time money though so i think we would want to think about if we're going to use for going to increase greatly our funding for ash or treatment with arpa funds how do we kind of how we've used it with staff how do we step that down over time because it will be an ongoing cost right it's not just a one-time cost unless we're only doing uh replacement yeah it's a three-year track right you give the do the injections three years 25 years oh it's 25 years oh yeah but it's much according to the nrcc it's much less than the cost of cutting down and replanting over 25 years yep i mean the replacement process i mean has been working pretty well the trees on midland are thriving they look really good and they've grown a lot in the last year i really surprised you know um but if you have big diameter trees and they have a beautiful canopy and you don't have to cut them down right away and there is a chance that you could save them for another 20 years or whatever with the treatments i think that we need to really look at doing two things in parallel right but it depends upon some waiting factor by neighborhood by street by quantity whatever you know whatever the simple solution is if there is one right and if we can manage the money for it uh it's probably the best way to go because you want to preserve those big canopies so we also had a request um from one resident to you know pay for it or herself uh on a tree that's on the you know right away so it's not really her tree it's the city's tree and that's kind of another nuance i guess about whether we allow that or not i i tend to respect what tom wrote in his memo which is that's really hard for their staff to manage the individual requests so what i'd like us to do is to have larry take the memo that tom prepared back to the nrcc and prepare a set of recommendations for the council then to provide in fiscal year 24 since we've already got fiscal year 23 laid out fiscal year 24 moving forward so i thought that your memo was really helpful tom and i think that it will be to the nrcc as well and then you larry and and the fellow members you can come back to us and say we've digested tom's memo and we've you know kind of coalesced around this this action plan i think that that's a great recommendation i agree with you all hardly yes i i think that that that that seems fitting with our recommendation and our willingness to continue working with staff around providing some help in this regard so yes i'd be glad to do that great and i really appreciate the tom's comment about the chemical and use of pesticides along right of ways i think that is a one aspect of it that we actually didn't consider so i think we should add that to our thinking as well okay rosen greco has asked to speak so if the council is done making comments rosen thank you for the opportunity to speak i today i read the berlington free press later in the day or else i would have sent you this article but there is a front page article in today's berlington free press about the ermal dash borer it starts with williston but it then moves to berlington and you had a discussion earlier today about um you know taking the example of berlington when you're talking about the ordinance for fossil fuel use well i encourage you to see what berlington is doing regarding the emerald ash borer i won't read through the whole article but basically what they're doing is it says is choosing not to preemptively take down ash instead they are focusing on planting replacements next to the doomed trees all right the pesticides are a hundred percent effective you could right now it's every two years but they're moving to every three years and they they do not harm other species they're targeted in the tree trunk for the emerald ash borer but they are a hundred percent effective they've been used for a decade in different parts of the country um so i i am i am i am encouraged that you stop the clear cutting of the ash trees i i know we've lost about 200 or so since the since the plan was put together but new information is there other places are using it so i really encourage you to plant first as berlington is doing at least on my street which is predominantly ash and the city arborist came out and said that there was a room sufficient room to put a tree in between the ash trees so we grow you know a few of i did and a few of my neighbors decided to spend our own money and plant trees they're small little trees of the 10 15 years from now they might be a you know property the size of the ash but they'll they'll be compatible if the ash are allowed to live through the injections and our trees have beautiful canopies um on four sisters so thank you for at least discussing this thank you i think for the moratorium on cutting down the trees and and being willing to pursue you know another way of addressing the emerald ash more besides clear cutting so thank you and i encourage you to save as many ash as you can it is cheaper the injections are cheaper um i think the nrcc memo shows that um and i encourage you to read the um article in today's berlington free press um about how berlington is choosing to address this our neighbor to the north thank you well it sounds like we're sort of doing what berlington is doing you're planting trees in between of a different species when i say inter planting yeah that's exactly what i mean yeah okay well good all right thank you very much thank you larry and we're going to take just a five minute break and we'll come back for a discussion on the ballot item for the communication union district that's huge it's huge it's what well i'm glad to know that that isn't all parking right because i'm thinking holy moly who do they think it's gonna you know this looks like it will work in darien connecticut maybe but what in the world has gone on it's not for update complete but then all the language was in chinese in chinese well it looked like it i hit the wrong button you know i had a card no i guess so and i was i know it's welcome to ipad yeah i can't even use this thing it's yeah welcome is okay let's get back to business sorry um so i'd like to call back to order the south berlington city council um we are an item 11 discussing and possibly warning uh general election ballot item to establish a chitlin county communications union district and andrew is going to take us through sure so at the last regular city council meeting we received a presentation from the ccrpc as well as the vermont brought state of vermont broadband um should i forget the name of that agency on the top of my head but um the uh i asked requesting that the city potentially enter into a community warn a ballot item to enter into a communications union district um since that date date i know that jerrick the town of jericho has uh decided to warn the ballot item uh the town town of shellburn it was looking like they were going to uh essex has it on their agenda tonight and wilson has it on for tomorrow tomorrow evening um there are a couple of questions that council had at the end of it we just asked sort of what additional information you might need to warn that item um and the city attorney was able to put together answers to those and that that is included in your packet along with the ballot language and a recommended warning were you to warn this for the november election um and there was also some question about costs that's addressed in there as well this would not be one of those uh union districts that would that would have the statue that has the statutory authority to levy against the the town itself um this would be sort of set up a little bit like our enterprise funds are where it's self-sustaining and can only raise revenue through grants or through revenue bonds and um recouping that through the rate structure okay those of you who had questions were they answered okay uh tom they absolutely were a great memo but for the public at home just to restate what uh is kind of deputy manager that bold bold duck just said i want to say correctly this will not cost the taxpayers any money nor will this unified district be able to assess us and in the future and if they were to try to do so we would have the right to withdraw from the union district so i would move that the recommended ballot language be put on the ballot of a special city meeting that a special city meeting be warned for november 8 2022 and approve the special city meeting warning and notice attached to this memorandum okay that's okay we got a twin seconds is there any further discussion i'll just add that not only does this not cost us money it will i believe uh increase our ability to um kind of um what i want to call it um ensure that there's a competitive market and so we'll bring our costs down for the user so i think that a c u d is ultimately not only uh it's not neutral it's actually a benefit in terms of cost to to the end user so i hardly support this ballot initiative okay ready for the vote this is to information what the rea was to electrification starting in the middle of the great depression right the rea just brought power to the back side of metcalf pond back in 1985 or something like that so this this will help to i mean we we already have a lot of coverage in this area but this will help us get a little further and hopefully bring some equity if it's if it's possible through competition right because we're trying to get people up to speeds where they can do something and it every you know five years something doubles in in in its capacity so good yeah okay so if you're ready for the vote all in favor signify by saying aye aye and it is adopted okay item 12 yeah that's good work andrew thank you discussion impossible approval of the f y 23 policy priorities and strategies great thank you um so a couple of comments and some ideas on direction so first let me just say again thank you for your time um at the retreat in july um and your efforts kind of reviewing all the materials i know there's a ton of information here um and i really appreciate the whole leadership team really appreciates you engaging um so enthusiastically and so thoughtfully so what i've provided tonight is um upon reviewing the data that you all provided and then a further conversation with the leadership team um i've provided um all the council and leadership team votes bear in mind there are much more leadership team members than council members so take that with a great assault um and then a set of um kind of the questions and thoughts for consideration to guide our conversation tonight um i want to walk through some of those certainly if you want to just take all of my recommendations and adopt them as is tonight or have conversations you certainly can do that you can also provide me additional direction and and approve this or approve something on august 15th um so just walking through the document a few um questions and thoughts one we thought it was interesting that only four priorities no priority received unanimous vote from all of you only four received four votes um which were an interesting combination of ccpsa cip projects for paying for pass mutmit stations which we we had a good sorry leadership team laugh about that um and updating permitting systems i do want to call out that no no counselor voted for um our butlet Bartlett bay treatment plant upgrade and that is going to be a huge endeavor for us going into this year so if it is if it is i think it was an assumption that you all thought we were just doing it so you didn't go on it that was my assumption i just wanted to check that yeah i had to do it right and that was true in a number of places yeah like right yes of course we're gonna do that yeah which is what we thought i just wanted to check that assumption um we had a conversation about child care in the room um so we are recommending adding the endorse let's grow kids child care campaign as a city um they are actually currently working with on logic paul uh connor intended an event with those two organizations recently and they are doing a huge amount of advocacy around a lot of the um issues that councillor emory identified so i think as a city there may be some interesting opportunities to partner with them around that priority right um there's a box here then in the memo about um priorities that received uh zero or one um votes that we propose to eliminate and our notes about why we're eliminating them kind of where they are in other priority areas um all things that will get done but don't necessarily rise to the level of this kind of strategic priority list and then um there's a whole section on items that are on the bike rack that that the question for you is should they be moved to the active work plan or eliminated um so we have a series of suggestions um here that i can talk through if you would like um or you can read through them i think they're relatively self-explanatory um i do have a question that around the and this is my fault i had neglected to put on the bike rack the expansion of the planning commission and drb so it didn't it was on there but it didn't have the same kind of um prep as the other ones did and it wasn't voted on so i just want to check that that is really something that should stay on the bike rack for future years um and other than that things are just should we it move from the bike rack to another priority isn't that the charge of our charter review committee going forward this fall um that was more of redo all districting expanding the council and potentially identifying districts i think i don't know but i'm thinking you know i think part of our conversation had also included thinking about the planning commission right um as well yeah because i had asked the question before we voted and you said yes is my recollection that that that was part of it so i assumed i may have said that and i'm not remembering it it is hasn't been part of their conversation to date but it certainly could be they're only on meeting two okay um is that the consensus that both the commission the planning commission and the d rb we wanted the charter committee to look at making them a little beef here if it may matt you don't the d rb i don't know yeah it was just the planning commission yeah just the planning commission just the planning commission yeah okay well so should should we have um jesse add that to the charter committee i think okay i support that i just want clarity i think you sent this in a follow-up email um city manager baker um that if i can just say jesse um that uh we don't need a charter change we just need a community vote now is that correct so if we were solely expanding the planning commission um yes we would need a just a vote of the community we wouldn't need a charter change having said that while we're updating the charter anyway we should probably change and we're interested in this expansion we should probably take the number out of the charter and have it be a community vote cool okay that sounds good that's we ballot vote so would we think of next march then is a potential time when they go up for the vote we missed the general right august ninth is so the governance charter change conversations at the charter committee are actually targeting town meeting day 20 24 this is a much smaller question so this is something they could move it much faster okay thank you well that would be good because all right okay got it yeah any other changes you would like to see anything you don't like that's listed here or you do like that's listed here so i very much like the three things that the three council votes went towards on the bike rack so do we need to answer that question are there any items on the bike rack that should be moved to the work plan i would say yes to the three they've got three votes yeah and i also like the find and publicly report on data on cities carbon emissions reductions it seems like the task force is receiving that information from the ccrpc so i was just assuming that that would then would be reported to the public yeah we're going to do that anyway that was well yeah we'll report but i don't know as we have a mechanism to then in in a year report on reductions or two years i mean isn't that sort of what this is talking about i would think so yeah i mean i think the ccrpc is only setting the baseline that's what we asked them yeah that's what that's what those numbers were in the report or are in the report yeah because the ccrpc is following some kind of plan or schedule with regard to climate change they are and i don't know if they are tracking for each community that would be a good question for them but somebody ought to otherwise you won't know if you've made any improvements right i think that is part of the plan going forward is to the greatest extent we can be regularly reporting so we know we're measuring our progress right but i don't know if we're going to depend on the ccrpc maybe we should because it's their dime time because it's not i mean it takes time yeah i don't know if there's already a reporting structure in place i don't i mean yeah i don't know the state plan but i i think we ought to yeah and it makes sense for it to be at the regional level but yeah i i don't know so we would want to know on a city-wide level i think right if we're planning different activities for us to embrace to make change here they make it in wanuski it doesn't help but i mean it does help us in the whole thing but well i would think that the ccrpc would be receiving those numbers from the individual towns and cities no i i just don't know how we measure it in south growing town the right i mean the fundamental problem with tracking and transportation emissions is where what what do you choose is your metric do you choose where the gasoline is purchased distance miles traveled i mean it's a little bit you know you can look at a power plan or a the home heating and sort of make a determination on yeah savings it's really hard to do with transportation to determine where you can credit you can take the sales of gasoline and simple do a math but they don't you don't where you buy gasoline isn't necessarily where you drive right yeah that's the hard that's the challenge of counting carbon right and i think you would one would want it to be consistent across the county yeah no it would have to be traffic counts right you have to be what traffic counts i don't know but but if someone's driving from shellburn to burlington through south burlington is that our carbon or their carbon the key whose carbon is it we all enjoy it right well for transportation i think that has to be regional for housing you could definitely do that well they managed to there's some formula that somebody used to come up with south burlington numbers for the task force yeah ecd or the ecc um american communities census or i forget the acronym but that's where you can get the numbers on who uses what fuel and okay so are you saying you'd like that put on the yeah so so we were recommending move it to the climate action plan priority because i think there are recommendations around the climate action plan that are going to include reporting so it's going to happen anyway okay all right so these are all in your mind happening or you're recommending i'm recommending these all yeah okay and you of course correct me if i'm off on something like the drb that's a good correction so the question just going back to my previous request here for the rental registry is that something that could be combined with the inspection officer do you want me to answer that well that's what burlington does if i'm not mistaken right their rental registry generates revenues that pays for bill ward so that you can respond to rental uses so that's why i have been an advocate for a rental registry because they would address the safety issues that we have and i think you could also tie in energy efficiency in our rental units and a funding source but sorry i didn't mean to cut you off jessie yeah no exactly i think that how what we did change the wording on this one a bit you you might notice of um if the following ordinances are considered by council we're not we're not necessarily prior saying that you're going to do all of these ordinances this year that's for you all to decide but if they are we would put enforcement mechanisms into place that could accomplish all of those so not so it may be scalable we may not if we were going to do all of them at once we may need three inspectors and if we just do one we need one inspector but yes the idea is that the enforcement and education team can be cross functional right well why would we need three inspectors i well oh yeah i'm just saying right now we have izzy and we have stretch code that are not being enforced so we already we're starting from the beginning you know we're not doing any single family home inspections now anyway so if we wanted to do that over time we only right now we have two and two building inspectors that you know we might be able to i mean these are all things we need to unpack to give you a good thoughtful recommendation okay then we'll wait for that thanks we're not doing fire safety inspections for any rentals except for multifamily right did you have a comment yeah i guess we can that's what we're discussing oh when we get to it do you want to or do you have a sure go ahead it's still on not lengthy i certainly support moving um the what you just discussed the and education regulation enforcement team moving not to core government this may be new to jesse but you've heard from me before i really don't support placing on priority on planning for recreation center i really believe we have to be sensitive to the need for the school district to have better infrastructure and um i know it's it's hasn't succeeded but it's it's looming out there and it will be a major tax burden to implement and i just see that as higher priority than than moving forward on a recreation center if you move forward on it you create an appetite for it if you don't continue you know if you don't move to fulfillment then you've got frustration i really think that we need to think about our school's needs and our residents pocketbooks on that one it sounds like you're already going to look at the emerald ash borer program so certainly moving that forward and i'm fine i was just wondering on the city's carpet emissions does that mean the entire city or i was thinking the city government had done a lot of stuff on reducing emissions and i didn't know if you had any data on before and after and whether that was what you were talking about measuring but it sounds like you're talking about measuring all emissions on any from any source in south berlington so that was that's my comment on that thank you okay moving so and then you have one that you're just going to put back on the bike rack and this is the what's chloride t and i thought that was something tom was going to go ahead and do that's with regard to non chloride salt in the winter for and educating businesses so that he's now saying put that back on the bike rack i don't want to talk for him because i'm not remembering what he said in this moment in the room okay it was one that we felt that with other other cleaning green priorities being voted on more highly that this was one that wasn't so we could move that to the bike rack for staff capacity but something that is important to you certainly you know it's important to tom it was on the list to begin with yeah i think it's pretty important for our lake i think that it's i had understood from tom but i might be miss miss remembering that it was going to be happening but i remember the same as councilor emory i thought he used this as an example of we're going to do this but i could be wrong yeah okay i have to do it because the state's probably going to mandate it it's necessary for our lake okay all right and then moving to the bike rack it's the camping and domicile and public property if i could say something on this too sure so i just i would actually echo what i just heard sandy duly say regarding the recreation center um nothing for one additional reason um when the school comes forward with the funding requests i think that the the recreation center is less likely to have be a successful bond vote so i i too have cooled my my adamant support for pushing that project forward until the school gets their their facilities in order yeah i guess i feel very strongly that this is the time to leverage our arpa funds for that very lasting um legacy um and i think that the the impact fees the school impact fees is something that we will be moving forward with with the schools to be quite honest i i i you know i did some questioning with regard to the pbc's and i'm not receiving answers that would indicate that we have to tear down the high school so i the 210 million dollar bond vote i really hope that they if it truly has to come down to that again that it has to be stated much more clearly their case because it's just it's not convincing to me um and i i think that um you know short of a really clear and convincing case for that that it's going to be additions and renovations uh on a multi-year plan which would mean a multi-year impact fee plan um that we would be approving i guess incrementally with regard to the school impact fees which i'm on board with um depending on the project of course um but as i you know just kind of laid it out there that's how i would see us as a realistic way to move forward and i really think we need an indoor recreation center i think the the outcry i heard from residents um you know uh with children is the city just did not come through during the covid uh pandemic um that they were stuck at home and couldn't get their work done and they also had young children in their care so that was i think it's i think it's a true need pbc this the plastics or the um what is it pcb by carbonates thank you it's in it's in the window um caulking but in our high school it's just in the windows that's all i've heard not anymore they dream they did all the windows in the high school like six years ago they stopped because of the pcb's they did all the ones that were facing the parking lot in the front and they did the whole facade so i don't know i'm getting then conflicting information yeah i'll bet we are okay well back to camping um that's for the police to say if that was something that they said we aren't ready to drop because that was a policy right that the police were going to drop so okay so put it back on the um we're okay with putting it back on the bike rack yeah so what they suggested is that you know it's keep it on the bike rack in case it becomes a more emergent issue okay we could move recommend moving it off all right so um are there other comments about you know i guess do you have other comments sandy on the whole policy and priority strategies worksheet all of the pages clarification um there are some things that were on the affordable housing committees um proposed um priorities and strategies that are not specifically mentioned here but they they um flow into some of the things that are here so for example um we have creating greater measurability in the plan's objectives this is around the comprehensive plan and we certainly support that and one of the things that we believe is really needed to um do that in the housing area um is having a housing needs assessment and uh we also think that would be a great use um someone's leslie black plume indicated probably cost between 15 and 20 thousand dollars um for uh the all the housing um the housing chapter because there hasn't been a need just needs assessment done in 10 years uh so i'm just wanting to clarify that if something isn't mentioned here it doesn't mean it couldn't be part of what's what's done um and um and another suggestion we had was that there be a separate chapter in in the comprehensive plan on equity but i don't i don't know if that's how the plan's going to be organized because i see the like open space i don't know if it's going to be organized by different labels this time and then my last one was um and this is not this is not an affordable housing committee responsibility but it is a high value among the committee and that was that um and this would be consistent with the emphasizing equity in our work and that is doing uh in collaboration with the school district doing an equity audit um the city winewski did want and and what i really liked about it is they hired somebody anyway they went out into the community and and got direct input from the community and it would be a great way to build on your declaration of inclusion that you just adopted at the last meeting and we also saw um arpa funds as being a good source to pay for that and so that so i was just mainly the question was they're specific maybe we got too far into the weeds but i just wanted to make sure that or to see how these um priorities of the committee they seem to fit in um and and do you see them as at least as possibilities yeah so could i say do you bring up a really good point that i i did not clarify well at the beginning so one of the things that has changed this cycle from last cycle is we haven't done the straight across um committee to staff linkages that we did the last round be cut primarily because well for a couple reasons one um committees are all over the place and using this process so far so it was creating some real inequities around how committees showed up in this document but all of the committee's work plans as they presented are included in your packet tonight and you can see those and what they what you all are intending to work on the full words um second things like the comprehensive plan for specifically that you mentioned all of the committees are going to be involved in that um and what we tried to do in that in that specific um goal update was outline those themes that have come up in the different committees work so there is a bullet about maybe we need to reframe it as we get into the comp plan drafting but creating greater emphasis on people community and equity so i think some of that is reflected here you know having um the same um having it be a data data driven document with metrics over time etc so i do think that that is reflected here in the comp plan one and certainly the affordable housing committee and all the committees work plans are submitted are part of the kind of the council accepting all of this um so i guess i will leave it there for claire okay thanks yeah yes the one thing on the bike rack that it's the the city's noise and nuisance ordinances and related ldr's we've had the black rock um we also have the um resident with the neighbor um and the stereo system during the day people who work different hours and shifts uh i i i don't i don't really want to push that off for another year is that at all possible for us to have that added or because we we've been in contact with someone who's probably you know desperate and will give up hope if we truly say it's pushed off another year but if you all want to prioritize it you absolutely can was it something the staff can take up it was the the noise and nuisance the nuisance ordinance with regard to noise yeah and then doing ldr work i guess i don't quite know what the ldr work is on that but um there was i thought it was pretty good on that well it was and it's also with regard to the whole notion of you know what's happening down in burlington's south end with burton and we have no noise standards we have no noise standards like getting down to the negrity of noise standards exactly we have a pretty general noise ordinance that allows people to call the police if they're being bother yeah that's not but there's like no you know there's no teeth well i mean you know you need to have actual numbers for well you do anyway i don't want to have this discussion now because it's late but yeah i mean it does work to a degree and i've seen it work before when it's reported correctly and and then somebody you know get the police going and actually you know make contact with somebody i think it's really hard for the police to do anything if there aren't numbers and i've had that one of my daughter's weddings we got the police came burlington but they have noise standards they don't think they have that they don't have a meter they just have to know that it's between this hour and this hour and you're making noise and they write a ticket and then the landlord makes the students pay it and it works pretty well after the third one you know the price just keeps going up and up and up so it hasn't worked in my neighborhood then i'll say ten minute didn't work over in the um the condos where does she live off of dorset is it the stone hedge condos yeah i think it's stone hedge stone hedge condos so it there are some spots where it's not working so what is the i mean so you want to make this strengthen that ordinance yeah just give it some numbers and i andrew you had said that you had been working on it uh like like months months ago the the noise standards when we were talking about black rock and the the blasting or the boom boom boom boom boom that was going on that you had been working on it yeah so paul and i presented um something to council yeah geese it was 2021 earlier something like that maybe maybe 2020 end of 2020 and that was about a sort of a short term medium term long term solution to some of the noise challenges that we've had in terms of regular you know the regulatory tools that we had at the time and so i think the council moved forward with sort of the the short term ones um and it was kind of on our radar for a while to come back at some point but that was yeah that was a long time ago at this point so yeah so i don't think there's been anything additional since since then so sorry can i make a recommendation about yes you may so bigger so i'll say talk about the noise ordinance at the end at the end i think overall big picture i think you have given me a lot of guidance about what is outlined in the memo i think it's enough changes that i should bring it back to you for final approval so let me integrate the changes we've talked about today the noise ordinance will be a placeholder for you to talk amongst yourself and decide on the 15th um and meanwhile i'll put together a final final draft that you could adopt on the 15th with or without noise so as you so choose okay thank you fair enough yep so we have a really exciting executive session coming up okay so we're done with 12 then so we move on to reports from counselors on committee assignments i have a brief one on the airport commission um i thought it was interesting the numbers of inplanements in june were historic they're they're greater than pre-covid so people are really doing a lot of flying so that's good news from there i'm thinking that you know just like us we used to go to montreal to fly internationally and now we don't because the borders were closed right so i don't know if that's the kind of a factor but um i think some canadians have come back that certainly is part of it but also i think locals aren't going up right yes well that could be but if you're going up oh okay yeah we are too when we go to but whatever um and then um i just thought it was kind of interesting that beta technologies we we had this huge um ground lease for their whole production and um it was just they're being charged 46 cents of square foot and rent who is so beta oh beta for the 75 years yeah yeah then burlington we can go up yeah that's almost as good as the one cent per acre that firestone got Liberia's rubber plantations for back in 1922 or whatever and then what six cents per acre what i thought you would be very happy about all the houses that are being worked on now um for the sound mitigation none of them have the navigation easement if you recall that was a really big conversation because the f a a really wanted to be able to come back or have them say things change you may never again um complain and um with the housing that they're doing now for the upgrades none of them have the navigation easement so there are 10 houses in South Burlington being um there actually are nine because one i can't remember they didn't want to do it or whatever but there's nine going forward and you can look if you go online you can see them and each one is about a hundred thousand dollars and it's weatherization too um that that i don't know is if that's included in the hundred thousand but they are working with um the weatherization people and then and vermont gas systems for um in this restoration or work if they um need a new furnace or there's a more efficient one that's part of the work so or they or they're offered they can do that and it's h vac too yes yeah so um are they going to have a stop motion time lapse camera on the the beta uh you know plant being built does anybody know a what you know how we had a camera watching the the the building of this oh oh no i don't know because it's a private building but i don't know you can find we can find out i think they're really cool and they are we've hired a consultant to help um design a new both a new site and a building for the maintenance buildings if you recall that's what they wanted to do on that change and they have they found some other places and have a um a consultant to do that where will it be hello i don't know they haven't they haven't um figured that out yet and um um that new facility has earmark is with earmark dollars thank you pat lehi and the hotel project the shovels in the ground should be this fall it's 117 rooms it'll sit right where you now can um they have like parking overflow so um and then just sort of a personal thing kind of it was a um a gentleman named greg hill retired after 44 years on airfield maintenance is that all yeah i just yeah it was kind of a wow so anyway couldn't have worked five more years come on and then i don't know if i reported there's a new um appointee from burlington a woman who um robin and i didn't catch her last name um she was a pilot with um jet blue she um flew these huge cargo jets in europe um she teaches or is head of the flight school there for the students with burlington oh yeah so her expertise and questions excellent are just excellent it's slightly the vermont tech center she's a director terrific so it was a very very nice to have a new member who had some expertise and asked you know it was it was pretty i asked her afterwards because i i missed her introduction because she was asking questions like whoa but is is the search committee taking letters of recommendation from the public or from from members of government um he's on it i don't know well i haven't gotten to that point it's ours so his names are in public if we get down to like just two candidates and maybe make that public then i can advocate for that to be part of the process well i would think you could always if you know someone who is applied and want to advocate absolutely right you could always send a letter yeah they may have already been scratched off the list but yeah okay thank you are there any other committee yes um just briefly um betty and barb watching at home um i did bring up the issue about examining the footprint of the dog park at wheeler and jesse confirmed that she's going to investigate and get back to me and the rest of you um on the GMTA we're still looking for an interim director if you want to run the largest transit public transit authority in vermont austin davis is the new president of um gmta volunteer president um and he'd be the one to submit your application okay no you don't i just want to thank sandi for coming and representing the affordable housing committee's last uh the conclusions the last meeting she's always very willing to do so so thank you sandi yeah any other can i piggyback on that yeah just want the council to know um the affordable housing committee and the housing trust fund committee are going to have a joint meeting before your next meeting to review the rsp's and they're giving a whole morning of a weekday time to do that so really generous generous six proposed yeah that was very exciting i'm anxious to find out um any other business all right so i would entertain a motion to go into executive session for the purposes of the discussion of land acquisition with the understanding we will not come back into um meeting so i would like to move that this public body enter into executive session for the purpose of discussing the negotiation of securing a real estate for purchase released by the city of south brilington inviting in jessie baker andrew bouldock collin mcneil and paul conner second all in favor hi all right well that was a one i was waiting for the second act


So first year I've actually tried making the, you know, the slideshow in the presenter room and getting the slides on the screen and testing that out and it worked fine 15 minutes ago. So what can I tell you? Anyway, this is the SQL, no, the Twitter talk. So I'm Chris Sumner. I'm sort of representing a small charity called the Online Privacy Foundation where we've been doing some work to raise awareness or point out issues that I think are of interest and concern to this sort of audience in particular. This is my co-presenter Randall Wald from Florida Atlanta University. He came to the Q&A session last year after our Facebook talk and said, hey, did you guys think about machine learning? We said, well, we don't know the first thing about machine learning. He said, well, I'll sort of help you out. So it's really neat that he's been able to join us this year. So with this talk, we're really looking at the question of, well, can you or can't you predict personality traits through Twitter and, you know, indeed, other social media. We approached it with a sort of healthy degree of skepticism because, you know, this image here is a phrenology, which is, used to be pretty popular not so many years ago and it had a whole host of problems essentially. So we decided, as we say in the UK, to have a bloody good look and see what you could actually determine. So let me just explain the talk outline and you can see if this is the right talk for you. We're going to start here with sort of why we approached this. It's a question we've been asked a number of times in the media. Give an introduction to psychopathy, briefly talk about data collection and processing if people want more input, come to the Q&A session, share the statistical results, the results that we've got from the analysis and then spend a big portion of time talking about machine learning where we'll probably start off somewhat basic and go into something that I haven't got the foggiest way he's talking about, but you might and then finish up with some conclusions and I guess more questions. So why did we start this activity? Well last year we had a project that we spoke about at DEF CON called the Big Five experiment where we looked at personality traits in Facebook and there was a reason we did that is because we're seeing sort of figures and statistics like this. This figure here comes from this year's Jobvite Survey where it's looking at social, it's looking at recruiting essentially and what it's saying is that 48% of hiring managers are always using online searches so we were a bit concerned about whether they were doing that with any real sort of weight behind it, could science if you like support their decisions. Last year's figure was 45% so it's a slight rise so they're making judgments about people and we weren't sure whether those judgments were actually going to be accurate or full of problems. So that's what drove some of our research and also at the time and I think it's probably useful to be kind of open and give that context. At the time I just had a child and anybody who's had a child will probably, no actually my wife had the child but I had some involvement I think anyway, I was involved in anyway and let's move on but sleepless nights and I was wondering sleepless nights actually really affected me pretty badly and I recognise that I was sort of maybe acting differently on social media than I would have been normally and I was wondering whether that sort of stuff could get picked up by people and use perhaps against me as going this guy's a fruitcake we don't want to hire him. Then last year after our Facebook talk we saw this study come out called Hungry Like the Wolf by Professor Jeff Hancock at Cornell. Hungry Like the Wolf is a play on two things one of it's the wolf is a predator a psychopath is a predator but I also emailed him and said hey has that got anything to do with Duran Duran and you know expecting him to say you know go away you idiot and he was like no actually me and the sort of co-author really liked that but he studied the word pattern analysis of psychopathy in criminals but that attracted this headline which is the same sort headline as the talk in Twitter exposed psychopath killers traits and that's what we were that's the question we're trying to at least examine critically and have you guys maybe examine along with us. What his paper actually said was that these findings on speech begin to open the window into the mind of the psychopath know that he didn't say oh it detects psychopaths it's giving some idea that something's going on and might help our understanding of how their minds operate. Bruce Schneier was concerned that there would be a you know a high degree of false positives and quite rightly. Earlier in the year we saw you know this post in the telegraph can't confirm whether it's sort of true or not but it looks like it you know there might be something there FBI using Twitter to predict crime but that doesn't necessarily mean they were using personality to draw the link of crime prediction however there is a paper that came out this year called automatic crime prediction using events extracted from Twitter posts but that is also not personality driven that but it is language driven and there's been some studies into that with the London riots last year most notably from Manchester University. We were either thrown a bone by the FBI or you know in sort of light of the media that came out or it was just pure coincidence but this week there was a sort of FBI bulletin about language and psychopathy and psychopathy and how they sort of deal deal with that and this was a quote from from that piece which is available on you know on the web individuals language is one of the best ways to glean insight into their thoughts and general outlook so I don't know if that was pure coincidence I suspect it probably was. Crime prediction isn't new necessarily this is a system run by IBM to detect juveniles who may go on to become a problem for society we can look at that as being a bad thing but it might be not such a bad thing if you're intervening in somebody's life and preventing them from going down a really really bad path themselves and also impacting other people's lives so I don't think it's as clear-cut as saying this is really bad and spooky but maybe it is there certainly needs to be discussion on that I think. Next with psychopathy you know the sort of the media seem to sort of maybe fixate maybe that psychopathy leads to crime but there are a number of papers that show at least in terms of violent crime that there's still a high false positive rate so just because somebody's scoring highly in psychopathy doesn't mean they'll go on to commit violent crimes and then our paper got some you know sort of coverage in Fox News which we weren't actually saying at all as you'll bear my witness today that we're not going to say psychopaths can be spotted on Twitter so but maybe the answer is not less not so much black and white so let's have a quick look at psychopathy. There's a general public interest in this you've got here the Oklahoma City bummer the night stalker Richard Ramirez and of course you know Ted Bundy who's got a whole catalog of different crimes behind him there's also movies people have got a fascination with these psycho the shining Texas Cheng chainsaw massacre obviously science of the lambs is a good example my personal favorite if you've not seen it it's it's pretty good good film no country for old men it's a guy walks around with like an air canister and just pops people off it's like a cattle machine used for killing cattle anyway it's a great film go and see if you've not so let's look at PCLR which is a psychopathic psychopathy checklist revised from Bob Hare who's kind of like the almost the godfather of psychopathy to some degree some will argue it consists of about 20 areas and you'll score a zero for each of those categories if it doesn't apply at all if it applies to some extent you'll get a one if it applies and it's a reasonably good match then you'll get a two so you can score zero one or two on each of those sort question areas or emit the emit the answer if there's not enough evidence to make a decision and you can have up to five emits if we look at it and this is a way I kind of conceptualize it thinking about an equalizer or low more static than an equalizer most people are going to score fairly low so this is good news for society otherwise we'd all be bumping each other off I hope that translates if somebody scores high in certain categories it doesn't necessarily make them a psychopath they might be an unpleasant individual but they're not necessarily a psychopath or they may just be you know highly charged individual in certain circumstances however when you're scoring high in a number of those questions that's when you've got you know the settings for an interesting problem shall we say so speaking to so I went on the PCLR course earlier this year speaking to read my lawyer who's the author of the psychopathic mind he sort of categorizes it like this or moderate and severe between 20 and 40 although there's a number of psychologists that don't like the idea of a cut-off in general UK population we see about 2.3 male 0.9 female scoring you know kind of within the 25 or over kind of category this is a slightly different scale but it maps to PCLR in the prison community you see that there's a different distribution so this is from a Dutch study where you see between 22 and 37% depending on where you draw the cut-off so there's an abnormal distribution of psychopaths in prison. Psychopathy is really divided into two primary factors personality aggressive narcissism and socially deviant lifestyle and we're going to sort of whiz through these really and there are two there are four facets involved with that interpersonal and effective which is kind of regarding emotion and lifestyle and antisocial sort of burglary crime record and then you've got sex related stuff and relationships under just general so social deviants. So glibness and superficial charms move talking engaging charismatic slick if you watch the TV show Apprentice you'll see these sort of characteristics displayed pretty nicely if you've got I'm not saying they're psychopaths I'm saying that they're sorry but if you've got in the cab way you've got Steve Wynn talking about how good the Wynn is and how you know I mean that that is a good example of superficial charm and glibness I was checked to the taxi driver said does that get in your nerves and he was like tell me a story oh man so and this is one of the things that led to Herbie Cleckley's work The Mask of Sanity where he talks about there being less than meets the eye they deliver a good talk but they can't walk it essentially then we've got grandiose sense of self-worth which is really sort of related to narcissism the cocky opinionated self-assured these are the people that come to training classes that can be taught by the world's leading experts and they're going in with the mentality that this guy's not going to teach me anything because I already know it there's also sort of the concept of a narcissistic takeover where you're claiming claiming success for somebody else's successes so you know so if I was here saying look at this this is really cool they made this all because I was going to be here that would be kind of an example of a narcissistic takeover the fact that it's true is no I'm kidding pathological lying so people lie for different reasons but generally most people lie to manage anxiety in some way but your your psychopath is almost a born liar they're weaving elaborate stories some of them may seem implausible but they deliver it with that glibness of speech so that it you know it translates to it to a lot of people they're doing it all the time and that is almost a perfect toolbox for conning people so I don't know how many people saw the art of con but you know this is say you know a guy scoring high in those traits ripping off these these old people here and he's able to do that pretty well you know making maybe financial advice that's never going to benefit them in the life and leave them distraught penniless and homeless when they've got no opportunity to make any money you don't have to find the media to see that but just because they're like that they're still not necessarily a psychopath that's an important point but they're able to do this really well because they've got a sort of lack of remorse and guilt so they're not going to worry about what they've done when they get home at night they are completely devoid of feeling guilt but guilt is a different construct although it's related to empathy you can feel guilt from running a red light but not necessarily empathy we've also got the concept of a sort of shallower effect a sort of limited range of depth of stony emotional nurse so you know here's a psychopath displaying joy and here's a range of other emotions that the psychopath is displaying there are emotionalist beings almost this you could also look at as being this is a quote from Ted Bundy it says I'm the most cold-blooded son of a bitch that you'll ever meet you could also load the answer to the narcissistic factor as well but you know it really shows that the guy is cold-blooded and then in terms of empathy they've got a general lack of consideration or concern for the impact of whatever it is they're doing and a non-psychopath may look at the dog and think the dog's going to be better off you know with a new home or what have you but a psychopath isn't going to be thinking like that the empathy of the situation isn't even going to occur to them and if you want to read a good description of that there's a great book by Simon Baron Cohen and that name may be familiar because you know it's brother Sasha Baron Cohen or Barra or Ali G or whoever turns out they're both pretty smart and this guy's got some really good this book is excellent if you want to understand more about sort of the general differences between guilt and empathy then you move into this sort of failure to accept responsibility so here a guy is sort of describing what he did doesn't a very detached manner almost like he had no choice I was pissed off he stepped into my space I did what I had to do I had a similar experience buying a soda this morning when I was asked do I want a banana or do you know part of me wanted to to say you know if I wanted to buy a banana I'd have bought a banana as well a psychopath would have maybe taken that step further and smashed the ladies head onto the to the desk possibly I was able to stop myself doing that fortunately so failure to accept responsibility this is also seen in sort of corporate America and that sort of context where this is a quote that's related to the recent LIBOR scandal in the UK where they've been fixing interest rates it was described by one of the senior managers that's no longer senior manager is an unfortunate series of events and that will be a complete failure to accept responsibility for their own actions and you'll see that in the corporate context a lot as well and if you want to see just how ugly that can get in the corporate context then I really recommend reading the book snakes in suits by Babiak and hair who were sort of the the leaders if you like in talking about psychopathy a need for stimulation you know we can look at a skydiver here although evidence suggests that skydivers the risk doesn't necessarily translate into other stuff they're doing so they can make reasonably good financial judgments for example this is more like Vega style need for stimulation but it's not the odd spliff it's it's doing this all the time and having a real fascination for this sort of stimulation another way of considering this if you look at a number of shooting kind of related murders and crimes it's not uncommon to see them describe it as being well I was a little bit bored I wanted to mix things up and just see what would happen and you know you can Google for that and you'll find you know some interviews like that there's a parasitic lifestyle so they're leaching off people and they're going to move from person to person to to meet their basic needs of food and shelter essentially and money which they'll burn on the sensation seeking stuff that's why they're so kind of manipulative people and you'll also see that in work as well they're quite happily let others carry them them along but then they'll then use that grandiose sense of self-worth to have a narcissistic takeover and claim success for a project that they've pretty much done nothing on so kind of you can watch out for that the astronaut here is a metaphor really when questioned in prison settings the psychopath will often not have a realistic idea of what he's able to do maybe wants to be a CEO or something where he's probably more likely to be delivering pizzas but not for long because he's probably not going to hold his job down for too long before he gets angry and wastes somebody this is from Gary Gilmore guy who has been you know executed since and one of his quotes was I wasn't thinking I wasn't planning I was just doing it was very impulsive irresponsibility so repeatedly stoned at work not honoring deaths fired driving under the influence but doing this all the time a consistent pattern in your life hot headed hot tempered there's a caveat on rage boy it turns out you know maybe more of a media thing picking up on him but it's you know it's still a reasonably nice image early behavior problems here this is ages 12 and under history of sort truvency robbery vandalism class destruction bullying cruelty to animals when I talk about cruelty to animals one of my previous co-workers who worked in sort of the psychiatric industry said oh yeah in in terms of cruelty to animals these guys you know they had one patient where it buried a cat up to its neck in in the lawn and ran a mower over it it's that kind of cruelty to animals not burning the odd ant so it's it's pretty bad already at that stage and then it progresses into juvenile delinquency where you've got violence fire-starting murder attempted murder rape and you're seeing all of that sort of stuff over and over again so now you can get the idea that psychopathy isn't just because somebody tells a good lie they're going pretty well beyond that they're probably going to skip bail escape from prison try and escape from prison these are the factors that aren't loaded so promiscuous sexual behavior not you know one or two instances but continuous pattern through their lives many short-term relationships so you know use the image of a player and this was my favorite from the course it's called criminal versatility so you can't just be a good murderer you've actually got to have sort of theft robbery kidnapping awesome you know so six of these will get you a score of two or four or five will get you a score of one so it's not just how you've committed a few a few robberies so psychopaths are more violent they commit more crimes they're more likely to use a weapon in their crimes their violence is both predatory and effective that means they're going to react to something and they're also going to go after people they're likely to go after strangers because they can smell weakness they've got no guilt so they're really the perfect predator so the images a nice match there's discussion that there there's not really any treatment for psychopathy or there's a school of thought that says that but it gets pretty interesting there's a guy called Jim Fallon who's spoken at Ted Talks and he'd looked at sort of brain images and these are the kind kinds of images they saw so the control set here there's more brain activity in the frontal lobe for a murderer there's there's less it turns out his brain was like the one of a murderer so that you know this spooked him a little bit there's more there's more sort of evidence emerging here this says you might think this guy is being a total tosser says Dave Owens an officer for 19 years but when he describes the abuse he had as a child from his father the jigsaw fits and this from a study that's come out in in Norway and is gaining some traction now as well all offenders have experienced gross instability neglect and or abuse from the family of origin so this is either extreme neglect or extreme over controlling and that leads to a sort of a metaphor that Simon Baron Cohen uses in his book we talks about the pot of gold so the formative years of a child's upbringing can influence even the brains you know the brain structure having the having the decent upbringing can reduce the possibility of them going off into a sort of a life of violent crime so there's a there's a lot of research going on in that space now to look at is there some way of essentially an intervention so let's talk quickly about the data collection we created an application the application essentially asked a number of questions I like to get revenge on authorities I avoid dangerous situations that one's reversed payback needs to be quick and nasty people often say I'm out of control it's true that I can be cruel people who mess with me always regret it I have never gotten in trouble with the law that's also reversed I like to pick on losers and I'll say anything to get what I want so we took that and a whole bunch of Twitter attributes from 2927 participants of the study and essentially analyzed that on a little HP microserver running a bun two catch DB with some custom Python scripts to call it the Twitter API now in terms of the answers that we saw the analysis that we saw we saw this distribution which shows that most people fortunately are not high scoring on the the psychopathy scale if we look at that the GB study earlier the Great British study in an hour as you can see a kind of a similar curve almost although it's important to know that we use different measures and scales so there's some variation in terms of correlations between the big five traits what you see here with the blue bars was a study conducted by Dell Paul Huss at British Columbia and the green bars are from from our study so we see for example agreeableness we see similar direction in you know negative correlation and the same with conscientiousness you know that there's a difference in your autism but this could well be because of the measures that we've used. Interestingly though we saw the same sort of correlations when we looked at the attributes in in in Twitter so that is either pure chance or add some credibility so we end up with attributes that were significant were geo enabled number of tweets notifications fairly weak but but nevertheless significant the cloud score for psychopaths was 0.051 for narcissists it was 0.088 so a little bit higher as you might expect for linguistic analysis we got swearing anger death negative emotion filler words you can see that the significance is higher than is for the attributes there and in terms of negative correlations meaning they say less of these things positive emotion family work work relates to the parasitic lifestyle so that's kind of interesting and the use of we because they're not really social creatures so they're going to use less of we us our because they're you know that their lone wolves. This was an area that we found pretty fascinating so we included this into you know coded this into our data set as well when we looked at low scoring psychopathy we saw people tweeting around this sort of frequency. Of course there are differences but generally we saw around you know around this area when we look at high scoring psychopaths we see much more tweets when we look at those tweets they're more angry tweets as well. So we saw see much more erratic tweeting almost and that may be related to sort of this sense of boredom or what have you but overall it's interesting the results are consistent with two other papers that have been done on sort of linguistics and the dark triad but the statistics are still relatively weak for basing as a decision that's going to you know impact somebody's life potentially. So as we look at machine learning I just introduce the topic here. The reason you know one of the things we're attempting to do here is classify the people the tweeters as instances. They're going to have a number of independent attributes so those will be the features that we've selected the linguistic analysis and such like and then the number of dependent attributes either a class high or low or a psychopathy score and then we'll take all of those those independent attributes features to predict the classes and build using training data and validate it with test data essentially. And the reason we're doing that is there's pretty much there's too much data to understand quickly and it's too difficult or it's too challenging really to do with statistical analysis it's not impossible but too difficult and stakeholders will typically want results you know sooner. How you approach this is going to depend on the question you really trying to answer and that will really influence the sort of results you're going to get but for our study we really focus on spotting the top end on psychopathic scores either the top 10% or the top 1.4 as we'll discuss. So we have the concept of true and false positives which I think Randall is going to talk to you guys about and talk a little bit more about the results we've seen through machine learning. Okay so I'm to repeat I'm Randall Wald and as Chris was discussing we have you know true in this case positive is for the psychopathic class. Now obviously psychopathic is not positive but for convenience we refer to the minority class which is the positive class and as discussed psychopaths are the minority fortunately. The true positives are when a model predicts a minority class correctly. False positives is when you say someone is a psychopath but you're wrong they're actually perfectly healthy. True negatives and false negatives analogously true negatives are correctly saying someone is normal.  So problem with trying to evaluate models that have this type use these models false positives false negatives is that you don't have the same number of individuals who are positive and negative. For example this is an example a skew distribution for the majority of individuals are normal the minority are extreme end of the psychopathic scale they're much higher in this measure than everyone else. Now if you try to simply classify and specify what's the most accurate model I can find or I want to minimize the average error of my model.  That will give you a high average a lower average error or a higher overall accuracy but you're going to miss all of these individuals here.  Your goal here is to figure out who are the psychopaths who are in the minority class so you can't just evaluate models looking at your average error or looking at the overall accuracy. So you need to use some performance metrics that are based on more refined views of these things for example true positive rate which is true positives overall positives false true negative rate just true negatives overall negatives false positive rate etcetera and then arithmetic mean geometric mean are ways of trying to find models that balance your true positive rate and your true negative rate because you don't want to have extreme for either of those that's just not going to give you a useful usable model and one way to find models that try to balance these well is what's called using the ROC curve. This is a graph as you change the decision threshold you change how likely you are to classify a person as positive and you move this along you're going to affect both your true positive rate and your false positive rate and this graph shows you how this value is changed over the full scale of the threshold and you see the dotted line going up the middle there that is if you had a random model you'd expect that as you increase the threshold you increase both true and false positives a good model should do better than that it should go to the upper left of that curve it should be giving you higher values and one way to try to evaluate the quality of a model is instead of looking at any one point on this curve using what's called the area under the curve AUC which is just integral of the area under the curve and the higher the value the better one would be ideal but you take what you can get. So I'm going to let Chris talk briefly about Clef. So one thing we did was we found that there was this data this might be interesting actually the data science company in San Francisco called Kaggle.com and they host data science competitions you can either run them as public competitions and invite people from all over the place to participate or private competitions where it's closed and just limited to a number of data scientists. They work with you to shape and create your data set. Essentially then you host a competition where data scientists from around the world will compete with the best models. This we felt in terms of crowdsourcing was an interesting way of looking at how we can find maybe the best models that you know the quickest. In doing this we had 113 teams compete and created over 1000 models. So in terms of if you've got a data science problem but you don't have the skills actually we found this actually quite quite useful and for non-profits the fee is minimal. So Randall's going to talk a little bit more about the results from that and then talk about some of the results that he's had in his research. Okay so this curve is exactly what we were looking at earlier. It's a RSE curve with true positive rate and false positive rate as you change the decision threshold and you have across the middle you have that gray line which is how well the random model would do. Now the other two lines you'll see are the black line which is using the benchmark Kegel model which is a simple random forest model it's going to the Q and A if you want more details but then the winning Kegel model was able to do a little better than that. See this the red line there. And you saw across the side kind of small the area under the curve the benchmark Kegel model was able to do a AUC area under the curve of 0.64 while the winning Kegel model got 0.6 0.66 and some of the other models did more poorly than that. Now again it's important to look at the AUC and look at all the decision thresholds because if you look at accuracy you get very misleading results. For example these are the same results the same models looking at it in terms of accuracy and it's a dotted line at 90% which is the accuracy of the random model because in this case we're considering 10 we're trying to classify the top 10% psychopathic individuals versus 90% normal so if you assign everyone as normal every single person the model is as trivial as possible you're going to get 90% accuracy which sounds good until you remember you're missing all the actual positive instances. So you can see that the Kegel winner and the Kegel random force benchmark are very close to 90% in terms of accuracy but they don't necessarily do what you want they don't necessarily capture the actual positive instances. For example this is the confusion matrix for the winning model you see of the 125 individuals who are considered to be psychopaths here only two were accurately correctly predicted to be psychopaths. The other ones were all false negatives people who were really positive instances but labeled as negative. On the other side there were no false positives so it always is a matter of finding the threshold that balances your errors and the way you want them to because you can never have no false positives and no false negatives you need to decide where you want to draw the line there. So my own research has focused on a slightly more difficult problem rather than looking at the top 10% of individuals as being psychopaths looking at the top 1.4%. That's a very small number. The data set we're using had about 2,9 2,914 ish instances plus or minus 38 plus enough. Only 41 of those were considered psychopaths from this data set. So the goal is to build a model which could actually detect with some accuracy some performance those very small number of individuals while minimizing as much as possible are false positives and false negatives. So one way to try to alleviate the problem of having this hugely imbalanced data is to use what we call sampling. And the principle here is very simple. Your data set is imbalanced. You want to fix it to make it balanced. And a simple technique to this is just to either randomly remove instances from the majority class i.e. remove negative instances until the balance is more like what you want or to duplicate extra copies of the minority class instances, the positive instances. And now it sounds very like naive. You're just throwing away data. You're just duplicating data. It actually works extremely well. We've done research comparing this to other techniques that are more algorithmically intensive and this actually works extremely well. And the one other benefit of under-sampling specifically, which is what was done in my research, or it was Chris here, is that it also reduces the data set size. So you can get your results faster because you're not working on 2,900 instances all the time. You're working on a smaller number because you've thrown away some of that data. Now obviously to throw away data like that you're going to have a weaker model. It's not going to be as accurate. One way you can try to fix that is called ensembles. Two heads are better than one. So you want to take these multiple weak models and put them together to give you a stronger, more powerful, resulting model. So one trick here is that if all the weak models are just the same, added them together does nothing. You need to have these diversity among the models so that even if one only captures part of the data, one only captures certain ways of identifying psychopaths, you put all these models together and you're able to get an ensemble model that will actually give you accurate results. So one technique we developed is called Rust Boost, Random Under-Sampling Boost. This combines Random Under-Sampling, which discussed earlier with boosting, which is an established form of ensemble classification. The premise of boosting is you build a model and then you look at which instances, which people were classified correctly and incorrectly. And you give extra weight to those who are classified incorrectly and reduced weight to those who are correct. Then you build a model again. And you iterate this process multiple times each time building the model and trying to change the weight so that those that were done incorrectly are more likely to be classified correctly in the next round. Then once you have all of these models, you put them together into your ensemble weighted by the accuracy of each model to try to take different views of the data. So each of these individual models will classify certain instances based on how accurate they are, but collectively they'll give you good performance over all of the instances. And Rust Boost is a variant on this which applies random under-sampling within each round of the boosting to provide an additional source of variation and also to help the models work better because they are the more balanced data. So the model building process would normally fail with 1.4 percent minority class. Suddenly it's not doing so poorly. It's got much more usable data to work with. One other aspect of the data we have here is there are a number of different features. Discussed earlier features and classes. In this data set we had nearly 100 features between the profile information like number of tweets, frequency of tweets, number of friends, and then the text information like obscenities, anger, we, all those text attributes, almost 100 of them collectively, but they're not all going to be equally useful. So feature selection will rank them by their usefulness towards the class and then say I only care about the top 20 of these. The rest of them are all irrelevant. And this will help reduce your data set size because you're using many fewer features to build your model and also can give you more accurate results because the irrelevant information has been thrown away. So the combined model we're using for using all of these techniques together is called Select Rust Boost. Select Random Under-Sampling Boost, which has feature selection. I'm going to talk a little bit about how this works, trying to go quickly. Unfortunately I can't shoot the laser around the corner so the red dot is where the laser pointer would be if I had one. So the model starts with your data and you have a initialized weight vector that has, that all values are equal. Everything has starting weights of, you know, equal to each other because you don't know anything initially. Then you're going to repeat this algorithm n times, so the study n equals 10, basically going to go over create 10 models. Each time you first use random under-sampling to sample your data to figure out to reduce it down, make it more balanced and using the weights as well for that. Then you perform your feature selection on your sample data to figure out which features are most useful from that data toward the identifying psychopaths. Then you actually build the model and you're actually going to do two things. You see two lines coming off of this. You're going to save a copy of this model for the final ensemble, but you're also going to evaluate it to say how good this model is based on what you have. You store that weight parameter on the side as well and use that in the model to figure out what your new weight vector should be. To update which instances were correct, which instances were incorrect, so that when you repeat the entire process, starting, you know, back at the sampling, you're going to focus more on the instances that were classified incorrectly. And finally, once you've done this as many times as you want, you combine all of your models into the final model based on the weights to give you the classification values for your instances. So the results of using both Rust Boost and Select Rust Boost on the data as follows. With six to the seven underlying modeling techniques we're using, we found that Rust Boost was better than using No Boosting. However, with the Select Rust Boost, we found that it was always an improvement. We always got better AUC values, better true, the different true negative rates than when we had No Boosting here. So this shows the importance of these ensemble techniques when you have such complicated data as such imbalance data, you need, individual models are going to be weak and not as powerful as you'd like. You need to use ensemble approaches to combine them and create more accurate models. So, are we cross-performed ANOVA analysis and Tukey analysis to verify that our using Boosting, using these ensembles is statistically significantly better with alpha of five percent than not using ensemble. So this is validated statistically. And the best results we had using our, the best choices of modeling techniques, feature selection, number of features, et cetera, we got a true positive rate of 0.707, a true negative rate of 0.719 and AUC area under that RSC curve of 0.746. And to put that into confusion matrix terms, you can see we have of the 41 individuals who are classified as positive, really 29 percent we got correctly. Now 12, this one of nine individuals I should say are correct. 12 individuals weren't correct, unfortunately. Those are false negatives. And we had 808 false positives, i.e. people who were not actually psychopaths between nonetheless a model set of psychopaths. And this underscore is the problem that you're never going to eliminate both false positives and false negatives. You need to make sure that when you use the model, you deal with that fact. And I think Chris had some additional comments to make sure about that and concluding rocks. Thanks very much, Randall, which appreciated. I mean, this is one of the points that we've seen. There's been a number of news articles over the last couple of years about Facebook can be predicted within 10 percent, but you know that really falls into the whole accuracy issue, which Randall described earlier. So, okay, so you know you're identifying 29 out of 41, but you've also pulled in 808. You know what possible use is that? So, you know, first of all, we see 808 is a sort of high number of false positives, but if you combine that with closed source data, such as the criminal records or backgrounds, genetic history, or what have you, you're probably going to be able to lower that margin quite considerably. There's research from a gentleman called Mietje Bach, who's looked at combining multiple measures of personality and in all cases increased the correlation coefficient significantly, so improving the accuracy of personality prediction. So, if you had access, let's say, your, you know, FBI or what have you, I'm imagining, then you'd probably be able to weed down that 800 and something false positives even further. So, I mean, how could that be of use? Well, you know, if for example you're in the FBI and you've got somebody, I don't know, in custody, having an idea about whether they may be psychopathic or not, might influence the decision to use somebody who's been through a certain interview technique or something like that. It's a possibility. I don't know. I was kind of reading a little bit about this on the FBI site and you can read more about that as well. If you just Google sort of FBI psychopathy, you'll probably, you know, find this or I can, you know, give you the link in the Q&A, but I think it's probably more useful really for observing changing levels of anti-social personality traits if they are changing or not. And depending on your viewpoint, that's either going to be a good or a bad thing. And I don't, I'm not going to put a position forward that says I think it's good or bad. I'm really just saying I think it's interesting and requires more research and a lot more discussion. If you want to read about that anti-social changes in society, then this is a really great book to have a look at as well on Masking the Psychopath, which talks about social crisis psychopathy and there's a section in there where a gentleman in 1830 something was talking about the impact of industrialization causing a moral insanity, brackets, psychopathy. And I wonder whether, you know, we're seeing changes in psychopathy or anti-social traits as well. The more agentic countries like the US and the UK that saw more individualistic, you see higher levels of psychopathy than you do in communion countries like Taiwan for example. So here in, in the US and the UK, you've got that sort of one to five percent depending on the population that you measure. But in Taiwan, you're seeing that as a point one or point one. You know, so you're seeing a lot less in communion countries, but we don't really know why. So from a research perspective, I think it's a fascinating area of research. If you can just put the sort of the more sensational headlines aside and look at that. So it might help us understand a little bit more about this whole concept of cyberbullying, which is, you know, probably not very well understood really, but it's going to have a massive impact on the next generation of people coming up. My little boy, for example, you know, how do, how do we understand the impacts on our young people? And of course, as Jeff Hancock had mentioned in his paper, knowing a little bit more about the inner workings of sort of the psychopathic or anti-social mind probably helps us understand that and might even help us in, in slightly over context. Important to mention a couple of the limitations that we've had. Obviously, it's a self assessment. So you could argue that people have gained that maybe, but you know, the, the research or at least on the, on a broad scale is consistent with other papers. It's not a widely used assessment. So we didn't use PCLRSV. For example, we used a relatively new test by Del Paul, Husset British Columbia called short dark triad. You could argue that there's a selection bias because we've got a, you know, a tweet from Stephen Fry, which bumped our numbers up from 24 participants to just over 2000 overnight. So, you know, you could argue that that's that influenced it. And also the linguistic analysis of Twitter. I spoke to the gentleman who created that linguistic program, James Panabak, or at University of Austin, or University of Texas in Austin, one of the two. And looking at the language that people use in social media and on Twitter is obviously going to be, be different in some ways. So that those are limitations which research would have to overcome in a variety of contexts and looking at social media. Overall, really it's important to keep in mind that the research in social media is really at the, sort of the tip of the iceberg. And we as a, as a group in, in DEFCON, for example, have a real opportunity to partner with people who are studying sort of psychology of social sciences and help add sort of the data mining, but also have an important part to play in terms of discussing or generating discussion about the social implications of privacy, unfair invasion of privacy, particularly those 48% of hiring managers, is that ever acceptable? So that's kind of the residual question is we're kind of showing that we can determine things about personality and evidence suggests that the more we know about people different measures we know we're going to get better accuracy, but we haven't really tackled the question of should we, and that's a question or a thought I'd like to, to leave with the audience. So I appreciate everyone turning up. Thank you very much for your time. We'll be in the Q&A afterwards. Thank you.


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