Not men from Mars, but soldiers of the United States Army. Fighting a field of flames in suits of aluminized paper. Another amazing result of Army quartermaster research and development. Picture. An official report produced for the armed forces and the American people. Now to show you part of the big picture, here is Sergeant Stuart Queen. This is a special exhibit area just outside the office of the Army quartermaster general in Washington, D.C. Around us are just a few of the recent results of the quartermaster corps research and engineering program. A program designed to meet the problems posed by modern warfare. And which is continuously affecting the way all of us live. This molded sole footwear, for example. The sole is molded on during manufacture and will last for the life of the shoe. No more repair bills. Contour packaging. A new technique which seals a stack of clothing in a semi-vacuum. Letting air pressure compress it into a fraction of the storage space required for an unpackaged item. Food for the space age. A chicken dinner or a fruit dessert. Which tomorrow's spaceman will eat through his space helmet. Squeezing it out like toothpaste. Behind me here is a model of the nation's largest solar oven. Original built by the quartermaster research and engineering center in Natick, Massachusetts. Enables the quartermaster corps to test clothing and equipment under effects of extremely high temperatures. It does this by concentrating the sun's energy onto the box-shaped test chamber in the center. Concentrated energy which in just 55 seconds can burn a hole like this through half an inch of hard steel. Large or small, products of quartermaster research are designed to provide the soldier with the right food. Clothing supplies and equipment wherever he may be sent. On this shelf are steaks, bread and vegetables which could follow a soldier halfway around the world, wrapped in nothing but cellophane or plastic. Such food is preserved by the application of atomic science to the age-old problem of food preservation. In airtight packages, the food is passed under radiation equipment which harmlessly sterilizes it. A process which may soon revolutionize food storage for military and civilians alike. From irradiated foods to equipment designed to handle every kind of material on every kind of terrain in any climate on Earth. And still, we have seen only a minute portion of the quartermaster corps's gigantic task. It's a job which ranges through the whole catalog of supply of research and development. A responsibility which includes even the design of uniforms, of insignia, and our American flag. There is in short no organization quite like the quartermaster corps of the United States Army. An organization you're now going to see in action from Europe to Alaska. It is sometimes said of the Army quartermaster corps that it is older than the republic which it serves. A reference to the fact that our first quartermaster general was appointed by George Washington in the year 1775. A time when the entire colonnete army numbered only a few hundred ragged, hungry, and all but destitute troops. Decade after decade, the history and development of this corps has paralleled and reflected the history and development of the United States. Its methods, operations, and achievements keeping pace with our advancing science and technology. The problems faced by the quartermaster corps at the outbreak of the war with Spain when our army expanded from 25,000 men to more than 200,000 were only a minor sample of what was to confront it 20 years later with the outbreak of World War I. This war posed challenges far beyond anything previously experienced. An army of four million men, half of them ultimately shipped to Europe, had to be supplied and maintained at a time when the nation in 1917 lacked almost everything needed for such a tremendous task. The quartermaster corps supplied our World War I army with four billion pounds of food and a total of more than three million tons of supplies. More than a billion dollars was spent on clothing alone. It was the greatest sustained supply effort in history up to that time. Yet there were larger challenges to come. It was not until United States forces hit the beaches of Normandy in World War II that quartermaster operations reached their historic peak. Equipping and supporting America's World War II army of over eight million men fighting in all parts of the world under widely different temperatures and conditions of climate was a task of formidable proportions. But the quartermaster corps came through, supplying some 70,000 different items to our troops all over the world. The prodigies of supply performed during World War II resulted in an American army which was the best equipped and maintained and on the highest level of morale of any army in the world. Only a few years later came Korea and the task of supplying on short notice a modern army on a distant Asian peninsula. Korea also saw the advent of a remarkable garment, illustrative of quartermaster achievements in scientific research. The nylon vest, a modern form of body armor capable of protecting the soldier from most artillery fragments and many types of small arms fire reducing the battlefield casualties of a modern war. The Korean conflict also saw the steadily increasing use of aircraft for the delivery of supplies and equipment to troops in the field. Aerial delivery, which had already been employed by the quartermaster corps in World War II became in Korea an almost routine supply operation. Such conflicts also served to remind us that the quartermaster's concern and responsibility for the individual fighting man extends to final care and honors after death. America's current and former fighting men are entitled to burial in the national cemeteries administered by the quartermaster general. Today the men who accomplish these historic missions are products of the quartermaster training command. Its headquarters are here at Fort Lee, Virginia, but like other operating elements of the quartermaster system the training command is a decentralized operation. When they assume their responsibilities, quartermaster men and women must have acquired a variety of skills and knowledge nearly as broad in scope as the army itself. Here at Fort Lee both officers and enlisted men of the corps are taught the technical skills required for an ever increasing number of specialized tasks. The training command also determines training doctrine that makes recommendations on the organization and equipment of all quartermaster units used by the army in the field. Ultimately the training and recommendations which originate here affect every American soldier, the food he eats, the clothes he wears, the equipment, supplies and petroleum he uses. During recent years the army quartermaster corps has been responsible for the utilization of over $2 billion in public funds each year. It is far and away one of the largest supply operations in the world. One which makes use of the most modern scientific business methods to cope with its colossal problems of purchasing, supply and distribution. The pace of today's missiles is matched in speed by our need to know the facts of our defense situation at any given moment. The facts of our supply situation must be reported with the speed and timeliness of a radio newscast. Extensive data processing machinery and army quartermaster centers greatly facilitates this task. Thanks to the quartermaster supply management system the operating inventories of quartermaster stocks throughout the world can be held to a minimum. Wasteful excesses can be avoided and supplies distributed according to the actual needs of the armed forces. Supply depots under command of the quartermaster general are located to serve not only the soldiers, airmen, sailors and marines stationed in the United States, but also the major ports through which supplies move to our forces overseas. 52 million square feet of covered storage space and another 53 million square feet of open storage space are administered by these quartermaster managed depots. Disposal of obsolete or other unusable army property is also a quartermaster job. Every year millions of dollars are recovered through the sale of such property. This assures that only modern weapons and supplies will be carried in the army supply system. The Philadelphia depot in Pennsylvania has the special function of developing technical manufacturing skills, providing pilot models and production testing of new items. As a result of these tests specifications are developed for quality production by private industry upon which the army depends for its clothing and equipment. The millions of items handled by the quartermaster have numerous sizes, shapes and purposes. Like these hand tools many of them are used by the Navy, Air Force and Marines as well as Army personnel around the world. At the opposite extreme from a pair of pliers or a screwdriver are some really heavy items. Materials handling machines such as this new forklift truck. Quartermaster designed it can do its job on such difficult terrains as deep soft sand or drifting snow and can wade in the surf in support of beach operations. Whether at home or in such once far away places as Gießen, Germany, the American soldier has assured a steady dependable supply of the things he needs. The result of a highly integrated supply system which makes quartermaster stocks available at warehouses and depots which literally circle the globe. One thing needed by any modern army, regularly and in staggering amounts, is petroleum. The gasoline and oil without which the machinery of war and defense could not function. To the Army quartermaster belongs the tremendous task of operating the Army's entire overseas petroleum distribution system. It must also develop and supply the equipment for handling these petroleum products. The years since World War II have seen enormous advances in the operation of pipeline fields, enabling oil or gasoline to be moved from storage tank or dock side to places where they are needed speedily and efficiently. Another major responsibility of the quartermaster corps is food. Master menus for example are planned by food specialists for use by Army and Air Force installations around the world. The program employs both military and civilian food and nutrition experts. The quartermaster general of the Army through the military subsistence supply agency buys, inspects and manages the wholesale distribution of food, not only for the Army but for the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps as well. Over $700 million is spent each year to satisfy the food needs of America's armed services. Qualified military and civilian food specialists make periodic visits to military installations to check on the operating efficiency of kitchens, mess halls and other facilities. Wherever possible, quartermaster planned meals go considerably beyond minimum requirements of nutrition. It costs no more to serve a nourishing meal in a manner calculated to stimulate the appetite. And the additional effort pays big dividends in morale. The American soldier, wherever he goes in the world, takes with him a large part of the American standard of living. Behind this remarkable achievement lies the work of the largest food procurement and distribution system in the world, plus continuing efforts to develop such technical means as this mobile field bakery for providing fresh bread even within sound of an enemy's guns. Though far from home, both the soldier and his dependents have access to most of their favorite food products through commissaries set up by the quartermaster. The remarkable strides in food preservation and supply of the past few decades have served as an incentive to the quartermaster corps to develop still more effective devices for the future. Scientists working under the Army's direction are looking forward to the day when fresh foods, even meat, can be stored for weeks and even months without refrigeration. Techniques are being developed for preserving foods by irradiation, which destroys the bacteria and microorganisms which cause foods to spoil or decay. Successful development of this technique may begin a worldwide revolution in the handling of man's food supplies. The quartermaster also buys and manages the distribution of the clothing and textile material for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. Another example of the Defense Department's continuing effort to provide single overall management for important goods and services within our armed forces. The Army's quartermaster general performs this important inter-service function through what is known as the Military Clothing and Textile Supply Agency. It assures that the military utilizes the most economical and effective means of buying and supplying clothing and textiles and prevents duplicate or overlapping supply efforts among the country's four armed services. For as long as Army's have been in existence, pride in his uniform has been essential to the esprit décor of a soldier. The United States depends on her private industry for the production of military uniforms. It is one of the responsibilities of the Army quartermaster, however, to determine the style and quality of the uniform and to make certain that uniform items made by manufacturers meet proper standards of quality. Quartermaster personnel also exercise supervision over the distribution of uniforms at Army posts throughout the world. Under the new Defense Department Unified Supply System, the wholesale distribution of all military clothing and textile material will ultimately be based entirely on overall transportation and supply economies without regard to traditional supply practices of the various services. In addition to the regular clothing issue points, the quartermaster corps also supervises many clothing sales stores throughout the world. Laundry and dry cleaning services are another important element in the health and well-being of a soldier to say nothing of his or his family's morale. In some parts of the world, these services which most Americans take for granted are not easily come by. The quartermaster corps assures their presence wherever possible and provides the technical know-how to keep them running. Great many of the advances which improve the soldier's lot in life begin here in the quartermaster at Natick, Massachusetts where quartermaster research and development activities are coordinated. Modern warfare is a global affair and unpredictable. The Army must be prepared to equip its troops for instant service in every climate known on Earth and perhaps some which are outside it. With aircraft and missiles steadily reducing the effective diameter of the globe we live on, areas of the world which once defied man's very existence must now be considered possible fields of battle. Thus a large part of quartermaster research is devoted to developing survival equipment for such once remote regions as the polar ice caps. Arctic chambers at Natick can duplicate the most extreme conditions which the soldier may encounter. Clothing and equipment can be tested with safety and with the laboratory controls necessary to provide reliable knowledge. At the other climatic extreme, the tropics, the combat soldier will encounter a wholly different set of conditions. Those conditions are known. How the individual fighting man can be expected to react to them and what sort of equipment and clothing he needs to help him are among the questions which Natick scientists undertake to answer. Modern laboratory techniques enable the scientists to determine bodily reactions to heat and humidity under various conditions of work and activity. Ultimately, their findings will be translated into new types of clothing, items of food and other forms of supply best calculated to maintain the soldier of the tropics in maximum health and comfort. Volunteers for research projects at Natick are called upon to engage in a variety of somewhat peculiar activities. Some of it is fun and some of it isn't, but all of it has a serious purpose. In the last analysis, the only way to test an item of equipment is to use it. Sometimes this means giving a pair of shoes a year's worth of wear in a few short weeks. Sometimes a simple difference in the fibers used in manufacturing a combat uniform can mean the difference between safety and death or serious injury. One of the most spectacular results of recent quartermaster research and development activities are these aluminized paper fire fighting suits. Simple and inexpensive in construction, they afford a high degree of protection against burns from flash fires. Greatly increased the efficiency of men fighting such common menaces as brush or forest fires. The nylon armored vest, which saw widespread use during the Korean conflict, was still another example of quartermaster research and development. An exact knowledge of its capacities to protect the soldier was obtained through extensive laboratory tests before the first nylon vest was issued to a soldier in the field. Results of its use on the battlefield more than confirmed the expectations of quartermaster scientists. Items of everyday use, such as rubber and leather, often behave in unexpected ways when subjected to extremes of heat or cold. What happens, for instance, to a frozen boot? What kind of material can best withstand wear and tear under extreme arctic conditions? The results of these tests at Natick may someday influence the whole military supply policy for troops in arctic regions. No series of tests is complete, however, until results of experiments in the field have confirmed those obtained in the laboratory. To really learn the value of a boot or a pair of shoes, you have to ask the man who's worn them. From arctic snow to Caribbean beaches, the quartermaster research and development program maintains a constant study of equipment, clothing, and supplies. A program assuring maximum survival power to the American soldier anytime, anywhere. In the atomic era, tests of equipment and clothing must encompass not only natural hazards, but human ones as well. Protecting the fighting man from the ill effects of atomic fallout is currently one of the quartermaster corps major research programs. Behind every item of equipment and supply, which becomes standard issue, lie months or years of research in the lab. Research which is always supported by tests in the field. The long series of tests which are conducted before any item of equipment is finally standardized, assures the soldier of reliable equipment in the field. Coordinated research also assures the most efficient development of standardized items at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayer. A large portion of quartermaster research is in the hands of skilled chemists, men who search unceasingly for improved versions of such indispensable items as insecticides. The age of plastics is less than a score of years old. Yet these man-made materials have already achieved a minor industrial revolution. It is safe to say that the future will see even more spectacular applications of human ingenuity of this form of production and supply. Delivery of supplies, weapons and equipment by parachute, which had already undergone great development between World War II and Korea, has assumed an even larger significance in the atomic era. Modern concepts of war envision small self-supporting units capable of hitting hard and rapidly redeploying. Developing and providing equipment which enables our army to deliver men, supplies and equipment from an aircraft in flight is today an increasingly important quartermaster responsibility. The army of the future, with its emphasis on mobility and flexibility, will create increasingly difficult problems. As a result of the extensive planning and research now being carried on, the quartermaster corps will meet this challenge in the future, as it has met it in the past, by providing the American Fighting Man with the finest supplies, equipment and services of any military force in the world. Today the big picture has shown you some of the operations of your army's quartermaster corps. It is an organization devoted to providing the American soldier with clothing, food and equipment, designed to keep him in the best possible health, vigor and morale. Wherever he is, whatever he must do. Now this is Sergeant Stuart Queen, your host for the Big Picture. The Big Picture is an official report for the armed forces and the American people. Produced by the Army Pictorial Center. Presented by the Department of the Army in cooperation with this station.


Well, happy vlogmas. Today is Tuesday and I didn't go to work today because, remember how I was telling you yesterday that it was like sleeting really bad, where it's like a mixture of ice and snow? Well, that happened for quite a few hours last night, and then there was this like dusting of snow that happened and the temperature dropped like 30, 25, 30 degrees. So I wanted to go outside and show you what my driveway looks like, so let's go. Okay, so here it's all like down there and underneath it's all ice, and then also the road is the same way. I can't really tell because the camera can't like focus on anything. But yeah, it's not that bad right here, but down there it's super, super thick. So yeah, it's been an interesting day. So I did a little test run this morning about 5 a.m. I normally don't leave my house until about 6.30, 6.40 somewhere in there. Anyway, I got up and hadn't showered yet and I was like, okay, I'm just gonna like go drive and like see what happens. So a drive that normally takes me five minutes to get to, you know, like the main road that I have to travel on for quite a while took me 45 minutes and it normally takes me like less than five. So, and then by the time I got onto the interstate that I use, which by the way is a single lane interstate without a shoulder and it doesn't have like a partition in the middle either, was super, super slick. So then I looked at the like min dot thing and it said that like all the bridges were covered in ice, which basically there's a bridge like every few miles. And yeah, and there was already like, I mean it was only 5 a.m. and there was already like two or three accidents being reported. So, and this is a road that's, I mean it's fairly well traveled, but like it's in the middle of nothing. So I mean it's basically like all farms and stuff like on interstate 95, which is what I take to work every day. E-mailed HR, let him know that I was gonna just like wait to see if it cleared up and then email my boss and let her know. I knew she was gonna be out of the office till about lunchtime, but I just texted her and they know how far away I live. So I think I post, yeah, I posted on Instagram earlier and people are saying like, oh, you can always get another job. I'm like, why would I get another job? Like literally this was a conversation that happened in my interview with like the owner and my direct supervisor where I'm like, hey, if it's bad weather conditions like I ain't coming in because I already drive like the, I think I drive a total of 120 to 130 miles every single day like round trip. So that in turn takes me about an hour and 15 minutes when conditions are fine. So yeah, I don't really have like traffic that I sit in. The only issue is it's a single lane highway. So if someone's not going like the speed limit, say if they're gonna go like 10 miles under the speed limit, then that really like bogs me down. But obviously, you're gonna be going a lot slower because of the ice and the sleet and the ickiness. And it's just super slippery. I just didn't feel comfortable. So I'm not going. But anyway, I said I'd be back tomorrow. Anyway, that's what's been happening here. And I took another little joy ride and no real conditions had changed because the temperature hadn't really spiked up at all. Kind of stayed the same. It was like a high of 20. So, you know, nothing melted off and it's supposed to be like 20 degrees for basically the rest of the week. So whatever. So after I showered and got kind of got ready for the day, I hadn't like ever done my makeup or anything, but I like took a shower and whatever. But then I just kind of hung out. I took a nap with the dog. It was fantastic. It's now like dinner time. So I am gonna do some things. I think I'm gonna pick up a little bit around here and I need to do some editing. So yeah, I mean, I really do much today. I was like, you know, obviously I was planning on going to work. So yeah, but I need to get some edits done and get this, not this video, but yesterday's video uploaded for you guys. And let me take my jacket off and then I'll show you what's going on with Doyle because he didn't, well, he did go in yesterday's vlog, but the vlog that actually uploaded today, he wasn't in, if that makes sense. And PS, sorry about last night. I uploaded my vlog and it seems like about half of you had some real difficulty watching it. So in the morning when I saw all the comments and everything, I deleted that video and then I re-uploaded it and I think that helped. So nothing was wrong with my video file. I think it was kind of just on YouTube's end to be honest. So at least we got it handled, right guys? So it seems like everybody can watch now. Oh, the dog's in here. All right, we're ready to find him. What's going on, Doyle? I think he's part ostrich. He hides his face like that. Oh man, Doyle. What are you doing, buddy? Let's see if we can find him. Oh man, you're like double burrowed in there. What's going, oh hi. Oh my goodness. What's, what's going on in here, huh? Are you having fun in your bed? Yeah? Goodness. Goodness, little doggo. Goodness. Oh, little pooper dog. You're so funny. So that's what Doyle's been doing. Yep, yep. What are you doing? Are you going to hide your face under the pillow now? Okay. Okay. Okay.   So yeah. But I think I'm going to clean up a couple of things and work on some video editing because it just needs to happen. And yeah, I don't really have, you know, plans for tonight. I need to go to the post office tomorrow. I was going to go today, but then the roads are just nasty. But yeah, so that's, that's going to happen. Yay. Oh, and also, I was thinking about this. Would you guys like a little giveaway in this vlog? The reason I'm asking is because if you watched yesterday's vlog, I got an Aaron Condren PR package. And I, to back up, if you haven't watched yesterday's vlog, which you should, you should watch all the vlogs. I am a part of their like affiliate team or whatever now. So those links that are down below, which are affiliate links, the like refer a friend one, which is the, you know, you sign up and you get 10 dollars towards your first purchase of Aaron Condren. And then I in turn get 10 dollars off of my next purchase when you're ordering ships. That's always been in place, but I don't like earn actual like money from that. I just earn like credits to use towards their website. They just came out with this new program and it's through a company called share a sale. So I already had a profile since I have been on YouTube for a really long time, but I had never signed up with any specific brands or anything. So I figured, hey, I would try to sign up for it and I got accepted. I don't really know how they like go off of it or whatever. So anyway, the Aaron Condren PR team reached out to me and said like, hey, you had a certain amount in sales because I get a very small amount of a commission if you use the link that's down below. And it just says, I think in my video description, it just says for the Aaron Condren website, click here and that's an affiliate link. So if you use that to check out, then I get a really small percentage of whatever the sale is. So thank you because that really helps support my channel and helps support me, but they sent me these things, but I already have all of them. So I kind of thought that I'd just share the love with you guys. So this is what you'd be getting.  And then this is one of those take note classic lined hardbound notebooks. I think this is corn flour. It's like the blue one. And then the dual tip markers, which these are really, really nice. Also like the clip in sticky notes, this is the floral design one. And then also this is the designer sticker book, classic collection edition three. I have not seen the new one, but this is not the newest one. I had a bunch of questions if this was the brand new one and it's not, but I did order that and it should be here, I think on Saturday. But anyway, if you want to win all of this stuff, why don't we do like, we're gonna do it on Facebook because it's just easier to do everything on Facebook. But let's do it on Facebook and let's do like a secret post. So I'll put up a random image and it'll say secret post on it. And then just put in the comments of the Facebook post that says secret post, your favorite, like your favorite video that I've ever made. So, but you have to put the link to it in the comments. And then I will end up picking a winner. I don't know when, but when I actually edit this video and get it up, I'll put all the details on Facebook. So my Facebook link is down below. Come and find me. And yeah, I'll just give it away. You have to be over 18 to enter. You also have to have a US mailing address. And then I'll end up just picking a winner at random. So yeah, so I'm glad that I can kind of share the share the love with you guys. But yeah, the last thing I need is more stuff I already have. I mean, I guess I do need it sometimes, but you know, that's okay. And it's not that I don't like this stuff. I already like it because I've already, you know, purchased it myself. So, you know. So yeah, but the air and condom links will be down below if you guys are interested in purchasing. And again, those links, you know, it helps me out if you want to check out with them. You definitely don't have to. But I'm just, I like to be really transparent about things like that. Or like, if I ever put anything that's like Amazon, that also is like an affiliate link too. So because I've been part of their program for a little while as well. But anyway, I'm going to get started editing and get my life together. And then I need to find like an image or something that says like secret post or something. I don't know. It'll say it'll be something interesting. You guys, you will know what it is. But anyone else going to my Facebook page will have like no idea what it is and what they're doing. So all right, I will see you guys in just a moment. Well, hi. I am sitting at my computer and I have now edited three videos. Uploaded one, my vlog from yesterday, called Adulting Hardness Vlogmas Day 4. I'm getting an alert on my computer that I've got to start deleting some files. So I got to do that. That's what happens when Vlogmas happens, because I've got way too much video footage for my computer to handle. So I need to go in like purge. And the issue is I like delete my video files, but then your computer like keeps them for 30 days, which I don't understand why. I mean, I get it. But then I have to go into like my deleted file and actually like hard delete them. So I just need to go in and do that right quick. And yeah, so I've got one more video that's on my computer to edit. And I don't think I'm going to do that today because that video doesn't really need to go up anytime soon. So yeah. But I'm excited that I actually got like a whole bunch of work done. So yippie-skippy. But I need to clean up my computer now. So I'm going to go real quick and I'll check in with you guys in a moment. Okay, another update from the computer because this is like the computer vlog I swear. I am uploading my plan with me that I filmed on Saturday, no Sunday. And I've got an hour remaining. So yeah. But basically just sat at the dining table and done computer work. So yeah. But I still haven't started working on the last video that's in my computer. But I'll just I'll work on that another day. It's not a really big deal. It's not like a time sensitive situation. But I'm kind of going over like in my head all of the things that I need to do before Christmas, like video-wise of like all these ideas I had. So I think I need to edit some of those videos like in my brain and be like, Emily, you don't have enough time to do all that stuff. This is when I wish I did YouTube for a living because I could get so much done and I could have so much fun content. But I can't. YouTube does not pay my bills, unfortunately. But yeah. So if YouTube actually paid like my lights and my mortgage, like all of that, that'd be like super helpful because I could have so much more content on the channel. But anyway, that's not my life right now. So if and when that ever comes to fruition, that would be like fantabulous. And I would love it. But not where I am today. So think I need to just edit down some of my video ideas. So, but I am going to have a rapping video out. I think I'm going to film that on Sunday because I need natural lighting and it's dark when I wake up in the morning and it's dark when I come home in the morning. Actually, it's it's dark when I like leave the office. Yeah. But I think I'm going to film that on Sunday and then I'll have that out for you guys basically as soon as I can because I know that a lot of you are really interested in the rapping video of like how I rap stuff. I did a video last year. Basically, I'm going to show the same idea, I guess. But I'll kind of go through I think I'm going to go through like the methodology to my rapping style as well. Like why I buy certain rapping papers or certain like I've been collecting like bags. I don't I don't know why I don't need bags. But I feel like I want them. So I buy them. Is that right? I don't know. I feel like super adulty when I'd say those things. Well, I can show you a couple of them right here. So like I found these. Are those cute? Has a little bit of color in it. Not afraid. But I thought those were super cute. They're from a company called Paper Images. And I think I got these at CraftsDirect. I got two of them. There's two different sizes. So I thought that was cute. I got this one at TJ Maxx. And I got a bigger version of it as well. Can't really see it. They like provide the tissue paper with that one. And then so those are like very holiday. Okay. But then I found this at Target. I'm like that's really cute. And it's like got the foil stars. But you could use it any time. I found it actually in the like regular section. And then I got these at Hobby Lobby. These are just some tissue paper that is like the musical notes. And then I don't know where I got this. Maybe at Target. It's got like gold foil. This you could use anytime. But like the majority of my wrapping paper, not all of it, but the majority of it, you could use any time. So I have select couple roles that I wouldn't use for like a birthday or an anniversary or like a wedding present or something. But I like versatile stuff. So I'm going to kind of go into that in the video and just like show all of my supplies of what I have to work with. And they're kind of all interchangeable, which is nice. So then you don't have to like be so committed and like married to a certain style or a certain pattern. And you can kind of like think about the person and be like, okay, that person really likes like solid colors, like I can go with like a solid and a solid bow or whatever. Or they really like music, like have like a musical note one that that's more holiday because it does have like the word Christmas and stuff on there. So yeah, but I don't know. I mean, I think about the person as well as like the scape of like under my tree too. So yeah. But anyways, I think I'm going to call it quits for tonight. It's about 830, 840 somewhere in there. I don't even know what time it is. 847. I was incorrect. And I've got 51 minutes left with the plan with me to load and it will be published for you guys. Obviously when this is up, that'll be up for a while. And let's go see the doodle and let's see if he moved. I don't know if he did. He's such a funny dog. Such a funny dog. Let's see if he moved. Ooh, I look like I'm like neon red here. Oh, he's still in the same room guys.  Hi buddy. What are you doing? Oh my goodness.  Huh?    Or are you a Doyle?  Good thing I got my sensor, my sensor hand up there. Doyle. Okay. Gotta get you from the waist up buddy. We don't want to get demonetized. Oh Doyle.   But you're hollow. You're hollow on the inside. But anyways, Doyle and I are gonna go and thank you guys so much for watching. I really appreciate it. I got lots of more fun videos coming up very soon down the pipeline, so stay tuned. You can give the video a thumbs up or a paw up or whatever if you liked it. And feel free to subscribe if you haven't already. I don't have a regular posting schedule, but I'll be vlogging for Vlogmas, so I will be around. I hope you guys are having a great day and I will talk to you very, very soon. And Doyle needs more body rub, so I'll see you later. Bye.


up until now we've been looking at free convection in rather open spaces where the fluid is unconstrained but what we're gonna do in this lecture is we're going to take a look at free convection within enclosed spaces. So for these applications the fluid is confined and consequently it is in enclosed space and it is restricted in terms of where it can go. So when we're looking at free convection in enclosed spaces essentially what we're looking at is two surfaces. They could be vertical or they could be horizontal where there's a temperature differential between those two surfaces and there is a fluid between the two surfaces and and that fluid due to natural convection can heat up and it can be put into motion and so that's what we'll be looking at when we look at free convection in enclosed spaces. So what we're going to do we're going to begin by looking at three different geometries two horizontal and one vertical. So let me sketch those out and then we'll discuss them. So what we have here are three different geometries two of them horizontal and one vertical and these are the plates that are either heated or cooled and I've indicated the temperatures blue would be a cooler surface red would be hotter and there is a fluid in the space between these two plates being them horizontal or vertical. So let's begin and take a look at what is happening over here in the case of bottom heating. Now what is going to happen with bottom heating is the fluid adjacent to the wall is going to heat up and when it heats up it will become less dense and consequently becomes buoyant and it moves upwards and so it'll move up like this and when it gets up near the upper wall it starts to cool and when it begins to cool it becomes more dense and consequently it then starts to descend and what we then find and that's not a very good error let me redo that what we then find is we get these cells developing and we refer to those as being convective cells that exist within the enclosed space and so that's what happens with bottom heating and there there's a certain temperature differential before that begins to take place below it it won't take place we'll be talking about that in the next segment. Now looking at vertical space so this might be something like the cavity between windows or in the cavity of a wall of a house where you have studs and then drywall and plywood on the outside and what is happening again the fluid on the right hand side surface here is going to heat up and it's going to move but we usually with the cavity we're going to have some sort of confinement at the top and the bottom and consequently the fluid can't hit the top it's going to have to start to come around and when it comes around it comes against this wall which is now at a lower temperature and it becomes more dense and then it descends down to the bottom but it can't hit the bottom it's got a turn again and when it starts to turn it starts to come back up and that is the convective cell that develops within a vertical cavity and then finally let's look at the last one here over on the right hand side and here we have the case where the heated plate is on the top and the cool plate is on the bottom and this one nothing exciting happens it's just straight conduction and that's because this is what we refer to as being stably stratified and and so we go just from hot down to cool and that follows straight conduction going through that so the fluid does not go into motion when you have a stably stratified system like the one on the right so with that those are the three different geometries that we're going to be looking at in this lecture and when we're dealing with this we have a Grashof number and the Grashof number with the characteristic length is l and l in all of those cases hopefully I did that and I didn't put it here let me put it there l sometimes you'll see delta depending on the the textbook sometimes they'll use a a delta there but that can get confusing because that's what we said was the boundary layer thickness so we're going to use l here l is the separation between the two plates and expressing that as a Grashof number and then the temperature difference is going to be the hot surface minus the cooler surface the length scale is l and then we divide that by our kinematic viscosity which is squared new salt number that is going to be evaluated again using l as the characteristic length scale and then through this we have through Fourier's law the double prime would be watts per square meter and then it would just be h times t1 minus t2 so what we're going to be doing in this lecture is we're going to be finding ways just like we've been doing with all the others to estimate h and we'll do that using Grashof number, Rayleigh number, new salt number, things like that so that is reconvection and closed spaces what we'll be doing in the next segment is we'll begin with the horizontal where we either have bottom heating or top heating and we'll take a look at that flow field


Dyna'r dŷnod bach o'r raioclwyddoedd, dyna'n gwylwgraid hynna i'w bryddiant. Felly dyna'n dŷnod gyda'r dŷnod mae'n ymddunias i gyfach, mae'r gwaith ffliwydson o'u bwysigau a'r絵m ddynu'n arferthi gwasanaethau. Dwi'n meddwl y cyffredin haf hynny, gallau yn ymddangos gyfaf erbyn ein cyfrnod, mae'n ddysgrifennu lle i'r llweithio, neu mae'n bod nhw'n byw'r hyn i'r raioclwyddu yn gweithio. we could not use for free in the UK circles or post codes until April 1st this year. So, we're rather proud of this. You could put in a post code now and find out what the crime rates are by you, where the bus stops are with the recently, perhaps even perhaps we might even find out what the bus timetable are but you know what when government franchises out services like transport what does it fail to keep the data. Ac mae hynny'n amgylch yn y byw gwiriaeth ym Mennangion yn gyfrannu'r ymwynhau gymuned, sy'n rhaglen ymyn mollheadd a ddysgu'r llοd yn gweithio ac'r amgylch yn inchud i wych o gyfaint y cyfrannu. Mae'r ymwybod ymwybod ymwybod sy'n cyfrannu. Wnaeth ymwysg yma. Mae'r cyfrannu yn ymwybod ymwysg sydd wediþ ymwybod hefyd, cegybeth oherwydd ei cyfrannuwn a'r ywch chi'n cyfrannu â blis. is the way to success just seems nuts. We have these local monopolies. The big news last week was the release of the Treasury Coins database, which was literally unusable at the point of release within a day and a half bunch of activists at the Guardian newspaper at least put a navigation system around it so you could browse the government the money was spending by various departments and aggregate that up. We've been working on these various standards which are open, which are W3C standards that I'd love to talk to you more about, but I know this isn't a geek fest, but it's powerful. LinkData as an open standard allows us to go across data sets using key items of data as the binding points for data sets. I can use data from our newly liberated Ordnance Survey which defines the administrative boundaries and pull the information together that relates to these administrative geographies. We've got some very cool technology to do this. I can point people to do that and we're trying to do this at the local level. Crucially, the data revolution can't just apply at the national level. We've got to go down into regional authorities, to local authorities, to the police authorities. There's lots that needs to happen. We've got a whole set of tests against this. We've got to shift the culture to be a presumption to publish using open standards. There are challenges. We'll talk about those. We will talk about some of the privacy. This has all been non-public, non-personal data to date, but there will be a push.


it's very exciting to host this last talk for the day here in Curie and the main stage. I welcome Gillian York today for this and she will speak about privatized enforcement, commercial content moderation and Gillian is the co-founder of the online censorship.org which is a platform around online censorship of course and also and mainly the director of International Freedom of Expression for the EFF. Otherwise she's a writer, activist, speaker and if you want to hear about more fun topics from her, search for something about spy animals. So Gillian come on stage please. Okay now I'm tired. Hello! So I can't see you very well which is great because now I can't get nervous but it's so lovely that you're here at 9 p.m. which means that either you're my friends or you're really interested in this topic and either way I hope that I will give you a good story. So I'm going to start actually with an interesting story. This face might be familiar to you and if you worked at Facebook it would have to be familiar to you but I'll explain that in a moment. Does anyone know who this is? If so just shout it out. No? Okay so this is Hassan Nasrallah from Hezbollah and Hezbollah as you know is an organization based in Lebanon, a militant organization, some might call it a terrorist organization at least the US government does and of course the flag superimposed over his face is something that probably he doesn't believe in but is a flag that's familiar to all of you, the pride flag and the reason that I have this photo here is an interesting story. A friend of mine who's a journalist in the UAE, he posted this as a sort of ironic commentary on how leftists particularly in his circle of friends can often have sort of a cognitive dissonance in their support for certain groups such as Hezbollah but also their support for queer rights. Now whether you agree with that statement or not isn't the point. The point is that because of this posting he got this taken down from Facebook and he was suspended for a short period of time because of it. Now I understand as you probably do that a lot of these companies don't want to have support for extremism on their platforms but in this particular case he wasn't showing support what he was actually just showing was sort of a like I said an ironic comment and even maybe a slightly denigrating comment a negative comment in other words he was engaging in some sort of counter speech but nevertheless Facebook for whatever reason we'll get into that in a minute took the post down. I just want to say there's a bit of an echo is there any way to turn that down? I'm hearing myself that's much better thank you. So Facebook like many other platforms makes their own set of rules in this particular instance we've got Facebook's rules about what they call dangerous individuals and organizations. Now this encompasses both terrorist extremist organizations such as those that the United States or the EU might put on a list. It's also meant of course to cover white supremacist groups, right-wing groups, Nazi organizations as well as things like street gangs and other groups that might be engaged in violence. So I think you can see this but because there's translation I'll just read a portion of it. In an effort to prevent and disrupt real-world harm we do not allow any organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence from having a presence on Facebook. This includes organizations or individuals involved in the following and then it lists several activities and then they also remove content that expresses support or praise for groups, leaders or individuals involved in these tactivities and then incidentally the next sentence actually speaks specifically to terrorism. And this is actually a different slide so first we've got the outward-facing community standards that you've probably seen that you're all familiar with and all of the platforms have this YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, many others and then this is just an example of what that looks like for the actual person doing the content moderation and I'll talk a little bit more about that process later as well. So this was a slide that was leaked to the Guardian in the Facebook files that they published a couple of years ago. This shows what the actual human being who's meant to make each of these individual decisions. This shows what they look at and so in this case it was talking about symbols or leaders and when there's no context around it, so no commentary that it makes explicit whether praising or condemning a certain individual and it has the remark that that piece of content should be deleted. So in the case of the image that I showed you a couple of slides back, the picture of Nasrallah with the pride flag over it, because that was no context it would be deleted. Now I wouldn't say that that's no context when I looked at it knowing you know some things about Lebanon, about culture there, I understood exactly what my friend was trying to say with his picture, but the moderator who's somebody based in India or the Philippines or Dublin or Texas, they don't necessarily have the local knowledge and the local context to make that kind of judgment and so they see that, they don't necessarily know what it means and of course they have to follow the instructions, just follow their orders and delete. And then of course in this case we've got this sort of condemning commentary, this is just to show a little bit of contrast, when something is posted and you're actually like clearly condemning the organization at hand, then the instruction to the content moderator is different, they're told to ignore it. So you see what this is like now and I'll talk a lot about some of the examples later on in this about how people are actually affected by it, but before I do that I just want to give a little bit of a history. So in the early days of social media platforms, I would say 10, 15 years ago, for those of you playing along, terrorism per se was not banned on most of these platforms. Now again, we're talking post-911, so when I first started looking at this it was 2008, 2009, and I never found the word terrorism in any of the terms of service or the community standards. And of course back at that time as well, very few politicians actually expressed any kind of concern about the existence of al-Qaeda even on social media. So forget Hezbollah, forget these groups that are more controversial that maybe have support and also condemnation, but al-Qaeda, which I think most of the world agrees shouldn't exist, these companies and politicians weren't particularly concerned about it. And actually in 2008, fun fact, Google CEO Eric Schmidt actually defended the right of Google and YouTube to host nonviolent al-Qaeda propaganda and he defended that as free speech. Specifically, he got a letter from Senator Joseph Lieberman in the U.S. who's actually been one of the drivers behind increased pressure on companies in the United States to take down this type of content. And Lieberman found a bunch of content on YouTube that was from al-Qaeda, some of it was violent content that showed actual graphic violence, other bits of it were just speeches and sermons and things like that. And he received that letter. YouTube's team looked at it and what he actually wrote back and publicly said, and this is still up online, was that while we respect and understand Senator Lieberman's views, YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone's right to express unpopular points of view, including al-Qaeda. Doesn't say that, but you know. We believe that YouTube's a richer and more relevant platform because it hosts a diverse range of views. And of course, users are always free to express their disagreement with a particular video by leaving comments or their own response video. That debate is healthy. So, again, we can have that conversation maybe after my talk over some drinks, but I think it's really fascinating looking at today versus 10 years ago that you actually have the CEO of a major social media company suggesting that it's healthy to debate with terrorists on his platform. And around that same couple years later, really, 2012, you might remember this quote from Tony Wang, who apparently had no authorization to say this whatsoever, but he was Twitter's general manager at the time, and he said that Twitter remains neutral as to the content posted on their platform because the high-level people there like to say that they're the free speech wing of the free speech party. So, this was 2012. This was a very different time than today, but up until that point, Twitter had actually never taken something down at the request of a foreign government. That changed pretty rapidly after that point, and they also started to take down other types of content as well, but back then, they were still kind of making the argument that terrorism was free speech. Now, to today, every major social media platform now explicitly bans either terrorist or extremist expression. Some of them frame it differently like Facebook does. They call it dangerous individuals or groups, but they're nevertheless, you know, referencing terrorism at some point on their blog or in other parts of the terms of service or guidelines. And of course, also today, we have the EU, Germany and France, the UK, now Australia and a couple others are getting into this, implementing or considering implementing penalties when companies fail to remove this type of content. And companies have faced pressure from the US government to remove extremist speech, too. Now, real quick, I'm guessing everyone is following along and is familiar with CDA 230, but just in case, the way that content is governed in the US on social media platforms is a law called CDA 230 or Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which basically says that a company is free from liability for the content that their users post, but it also gives them protection from liability if they choose to censor or filter or whatever you want to call it, and they can't be sued for it. And so, on the one hand, this means that if you post something illegal and the company is not aware of it, they don't do anything, they can't be sued for it. But on the other hand, this means that if the Twitter CEO woke up tomorrow and decided that he didn't like cats, he could ban cats from the platform and the law would be perfectly okay with that. Now, of course, on the other hand, you might be familiar with the First Amendment in the US, which says that the government can't restrict your speech. But because of this fact that there's this loophole for companies, what the US government has done in a number of circumstances is actually just kind of called the companies up quietly on the phone and talked them into taking certain things down. One of my favorite examples of this is actually from 2012, and maybe one of the first times where I knew that this happened, even though the company still won't admit it. There was a video called the Innocence of Muslims. I don't know if people remember this, and I can't actually see you, so if you're going, oh, yeah, I wouldn't know. But this video was made by an Egyptian Christian living in the US who was kind of mocking Islam, and the video was actually really terrible. It was low budget. It was offensive on every level. And the US government actually asked YouTube to take it down entirely. And YouTube, of course, being at that time, 2012, they said, no, we're not going to take this video down. Then, apparently, the executive branch, I want to say the White House, but the executive branch of the US government called up YouTube again and said, okay, you're not going to take down the video, but what if you took it down in Egypt and Libya? And they did. So YouTube actually took it down on their behalf because they were afraid that this was going to incite violence, incite terrorism. This was around the time of Benghazi, so they were being very careful, of course. But basically what you have is the US government asking a company in the US to take something down for the people in another country because they can't handle it. And this is the sort of thing that we're seeing happen all the time now, particularly when it comes to extremism, the US government or the EU government making decisions for the entire rest of the world about what's best for them. So my favorite question, who's a terrorist? I promised I wouldn't say it, but I'm going to say it anyway. Everyone's familiar with the quote, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Again, I have no interest in getting into a debate about which groups are okay, which groups are not. But it's never the less interesting because when a company makes these decisions, they're making these decisions for people in another country. Just like the US is, we all know that these lists can be political and the US has in some cases put a group onto the list and then after political or media pressure, taken it off the list. This happened a few years ago with MEK, a group that was agitating against the Iranian government from Iraq. But fundamentally, we know that all of these decisions are political when governments make them and so they're no less political when companies make them. And in fact, they can be both political and completely absent of any intellectual understanding of what a group actually does or is. So first, let's just define terrorism. It's the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians in the pursuit of political aims. So two points here. First, terrorism can come from the state. Even if we think that the state has a monopoly on violence, a state can still be a terrorist actor. Now, that's not true in the US government's eyes these days and it's not true in the company's eyes either, but it's fundamentally, definitionally true. Second, when we talk about the unlawful use of violence, the unlawful use of intimidation, the way that governments and companies typically frame this is when it comes to groups that are agitating against the state. So even though Facebook does have this more expansive definition that encompasses groups that are, say, fighting with each other on the street, they nevertheless put much more effort into fighting groups that are opposing a state actor. So we know that there's no agreed upon international standard for defining what constitutes terrorism or extremism. Thank you. We know that the US, the EU, and other governmental entities use lists to designate foreign and domestic terrorist actors. There's a bit of a difference in these lists, of course. The EU doesn't list certain groups that the US does, say, are terrorists. Maybe vice versa as well. I haven't checked the EU list lately. But nevertheless, governments are always making these kinds of decisions all the time. And then finally, I would say that these lists are limiting, can be politically motivated, and always disproportionately feature Muslim groups that are engaged in violence over, say, white supremacist or Nazi groups that are engaged in violence. So what does that look like? Well, here's an example. Over the past few years, we've seen Twitter put out these reports, these very proud chest-beating reports, about they're so happy that they've managed to take down all of these terrorist accounts. This started a few years ago after some pressure from the US government. And so they would say, oh, we've taken down 450,000 accounts in this past six-month period, or whatever period. This particular number comes from April 2018, where, I can't remember the source, I accidentally cut it off, but it says that Twitter had suspended 1.2 million terrorist accounts, basically between 2015 and 2018. And then on the other hand, we have this interview from January of this year, where Jack Dorsey basically argued against taking down white supremacists, particularly prominent American white supremacists from Twitter, because of that same argument that Eric Schmidt made about 10 years ago, healthy debate. So again, we've got this really unequal sort of set of decision-making when it comes to different types of groups, regardless of whether or not they're engaged in active violence. So what does this look like on social media? Wow. Everyone's familiar with the process of flagging, I assume, but I'm going to walk you through it just in case someone isn't.  Maybe it's a naked body, which is usually against the rules, or maybe it's hate speech, or harassment, or in this case, maybe it's terrorism. Basically, you're incentivized by these companies to snitch on whatever you see. Now, of course, in some cases this is really important. I don't want to diminish it. When it comes to harassment, these tools have made a huge difference for a lot of people. But on the other hand, when you're being sort of incentivized by companies to snitch on these other types of content, ultimately that can result in sort of an imbalance in how certain things are judged. A more prominent group or individual might get more reports than somebody who's sort of operating under the radar. And this is true for all of these different categories, but when it comes to terrorism, it certainly seems to be one of the issues. Here's just another example. This is from YouTube. Here are the different categories that you can report on YouTube.  So it doesn't have anything about recruitment. It doesn't have anything about graphic violence specifically, but rather promotes terrorism. And this, of course, is meant to then send a report to a human content moderator. Typically, I'll get into automation in a moment. But this historically, at least, has sent a report to a human content moderator who's then forced to adjudicate that piece of content and make a quick decision as to what's acceptable and what's not. This is a still image from the cleaners. I don't know if anyone's seen the film. Please do, though. It's really good. I got to consult on it, but it's by two German documentary filmmakers. And it came out last year. And it focuses specifically on human content moderators who are working in the Philippines, often under difficult conditions. And it shows a lot of different interviews with them, and they talk about the sort of horrible things that they have to look at day in and day out, the quick decisions that they have to make. And it also demonstrates how sometimes they bring their own moral judgment into those decisions. So the content is flagged by me or by you. It goes to the human content moderator. They make a quick decision as to both what category it falls under and whether or not it should stay up or go down, ignore or delete. And then that decision is made. And then, of course, on top of that, not only is your content taken down, but typically you're also given some sort of punishment, something like a ban for 12 hours, 24 hours, up to 30 days on some of these platforms, or permanently if you violate certain rules. But in addition to that human content moderation, today an increasing amount of that moderation is conducted through automated flagging. So this is a process in which platforms use their own proprietary tools to automatically detect potentially violating content to then be reviewed by a human moderator. So just to be clear, it's not that the algorithm is taking down the content, although I'm sure we're not far away from that. It's typically that an automated tool is identifying the content, categorizing the content, and then putting it into a queue that a human can then look at and double check the decision. This often takes place before the content's ever seen by users. So let's say you upload something that has a terrorist flag in the background. Maybe you're just at a protest. Maybe there's some people at that protest who support a group that's on a terrorist list. You take a picture of it. You upload that image. More likely than not, because it's an image that's easily identifiable by software, it never actually gets shown to other users. The automated tool identifies the picture before it goes anywhere else. And then it's put into that queue for the human moderator to review, take down, and potentially punish you for. Here's an example of that from YouTube's transparency report. So it shows the removed videos that are first flagged through automated flagging with and without views. So I don't know how well you can see this on the screen. Looks pretty good. The red is about 75% of these that were removed before any other user viewed them. And then the blue one is videos that were removed through automated flagging after they were viewed. This is, I believe, from the most recent transparency reports and just shows specifically the automated flagging across different categories. So when an algorithm or when an automated tool makes mistakes, it can be difficult to understand why that happens. We don't know exactly how these tools work, and we don't know what biases humans are bringing into the process of programming them in the first place. So when we go back to that example of Hassan Nasrallah, we know that human content moderators are given a data set of human faces that are banned from the platform. So they see all of these different terrorist leaders from the leaders of Hezbollah to leaders of Hamas, Al Qaeda, et cetera, et cetera. They see all of those images and they have to sort of check between those. An automated tool can do the same thing much faster. But a lot of the mistakes that are being made aren't simple ones like that. Whether we agree with that rule or not, it's still a simple decision because it's based on one image that's on a list or a person who's on a list, as much as that whole blacklist idea sounds creepy. How's that better? But when we're looking at things like videos, it can be a much more difficult decision. And so now that we know that YouTube is using automated tools to make decisions, is that echo still happening? Testing? Try that one. Okay. Sounds better for my ears too. All right. So when we're talking about videos, that sounds so much better for me. Okay. When we're talking about videos, this can be much more difficult. Should I just know, Mike? When we're talking about videos, this can be much more difficult because a video is not so simple. It's not something that you can just put on a list for a human or an automated tool to review. It's something that's in motion. That's dynamic. And so even when it comes to graphic violence, part of the problem that I'm about to talk about is that graphic violence serves a lot of different purposes in video and in documentary imagery. So I'm going to get there in just a second. I'll just finish this slide first. And so again, unless they're specifically designed to be interpretable, machine learning algorithms cannot easily be understood by humans. And platforms use machine learning algorithms that are proprietary and shielded from any external review. So right now we have this thing that's a hashing database that the GIFCT, I'm never going to get that acronym right, but the folks who are working to counter, sorry, counter violent extremism. It's a group of academics and companies that are working together. The tools that they're using to identify images and then put them into a database, that database is being shared between different companies and yet there's been zero external review from any type of NGO working on speech or other digital rights issues. It's not transparent in any way. So just to go over a couple of quick stats on automation before I move on to the next section. YouTube removed 33 million videos in 2018. Of those that were flagged for potential violation of terms of service, 73% were removed through automated processes before the videos were even available for viewing. Facebook removed roughly 15 million pieces of content that were deemed terrorist propaganda between a period of about one year, 99.5% of which was removed with the assistance of automated processes, and then Twitter removed 166,000 accounts for terrorist content in the second half of 2018, or 1.2 million in that three year period. So the basic premise of what I want to get to here is that these blunt measures have an impact on a lot of people. Yes, they certainly reduce the amount of extremist content and the amount of terrorism, or at least certain kinds of extremist content from being seen by individuals. And we could definitely argue that in some ways that's a net good, that recruitment might go down, that the horrible things that we have to look at are maybe no longer there. But at the same time these measures have a terrible effect on a lot of marginalized users. So here's one example. There's a group on the US government's list of designated terrorist organizations. Now I haven't talked much about how that list plays with companies, and that's because we actually don't know, but we do know that at least when it comes to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, which are all US based companies, that they all rely at least somewhat on the US government's definition of who's a terrorism. Now to be fair, it's just as arbitrary as any other definition. They could have also made up their own or relied on the EU's list, which maybe is a little bit more accurate or robust, but nevertheless it's still an arbitrary and political decision. And so there is one group on the US government's list that's a Cheshire separatist group. But in this particular case, Facebook blocked a different Cheshire group, which is just a political opposition party, a nonviolent group in particular, and they took this group's content down for terrorist activity because it was a difficult decision to make in a split second, again, whether by a human content moderator or an automated tool. Facebook's spokesperson said that the deletion was made in error and pointed out that they get millions of reports each week and that sometimes the company gets things wrong. But we don't know how much it gets wrong because they refuse to publish numbers on that, despite the fact that we've been demanding it for almost eight years and more specifically recently for two years with a very clear ask to the company. The reason for not disclosing that information is that it's not useful. In another example, we had a young woman in the UK who was, she was involved with the YPG and supporting the YPG in Turkey and Kurdistan. And as you probably know, the YPG is loosely connected to a group that is on the US government's terrorist list. Now in this particular example, I should have put the picture, but I didn't because I didn't have the rights to do so. But there was this image that she had posted on Facebook of a mural, which had no violent content in it. It was just a mural supporting an organization. But her content was taken down and she claimed that she was suspended for violating community standards. But in her particular case, she believed that Facebook had actually acted with the government of Turkey to silence political movement. Now this is an interesting and possibly very true accusation because what we do know is that these countries, Turkey and a number of other governments, make hundreds of thousands of demands let's say thousands of demands, I don't want to over stretch it, but thousands of demands every year, tens of thousands would be fair, of different types of content that they want the companies to take down. And so they do this in different ways. Most governments will send a letter, often from a ministry, other governments will use a judicial order to demand that a company takes content down. But there are a couple of governments that actually just send these huge long lists that these companies are then sort of forced to deal with. Turkey's one of those countries and the United Arab Emirates is another one. And what some of these companies or sorry, countries seem to do is they'll give these really long lists and a lot of the content is, you know, extremist content, violent content, but then they'll like slip in a journalist here or there and they'll slip in other legitimate content that they just don't want on the platforms anymore. And so when we see things like this happen, I tend to side with the activist over the company in that particular case. And then here's another example. So Syrian Archive is a group that has been archiving, collecting content, material, videos from YouTube that document things that are happening on the ground in Syria, a lot of which could be used for verification for future cases, future tribunals. And so this is a quote from Hadi Khattib, who's part of Syrian Archive. He said that they were collecting, archiving and geolocating evidence, doing all sorts of verification for a particular case. And then one day noticed that all the videos that they'd been going through all of a sudden were gone. So I actually worked with Syrian Archive on a paper that we published about a month ago and I'll explain that a little bit more at the end. But we documented a few of these examples in that paper. And this was to try to demonstrate to the companies as well as to the governments that are working on anti-terrorism legislation at the moment and regulations that the different ways that these decisions can impact individuals who are trying to collect information for good. Now, just to give a little bit of a history here, about 10 years ago, this was a really different decision as I as I showed at the beginning. YouTube would usually keep content up, even sometimes if it contained graphic violence. And then after the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and then the uprising in Syria that has now turned to civil war, YouTube started to make different decisions. They were starting to take content down. And particularly around 2014, when the video of James Foley, the American journalist who was beheaded in Syria, went online, they really kind of changed their tack and started to take more content down. But before that, they had actually stated publicly, and I couldn't find it, which is really sad, but I have the archive somewhere, they'd stated publicly that they felt that there was a public value to keeping videos of people being beheaded online. So they've really gone back and forth in their policies over the years with no real input from the people who this actually affects, but really from political and media pressure in terms of how they make these decisions. And so in this particular case, the case of Syrian archive, it's not so much a case of mistaken identity or a case of an image that was not really that violent or not violent at all, but rather videos that are documenting something really important are history that are being taken down without really a second look. And I'm going to tell one quick story as well that I probably shouldn't, but I'm doing some interviews for a piece that I'm writing, and I was able to interview a former content moderator who'd worked at YouTube. And that person told me that the amount of content that they'd seen like that, coming from Syria, but also from Libya and other places, that they were told just to delete and not do anything with. They said that they still think about it on a daily basis because they're the only person who's ever seen those videos apart from the people who uploaded them. And so their opinion about this was that these things should have been at least archived, at least kept for the sake of history, if not reported to a future government or whatever, but instead, the company is not wanting to have to deal with it, just disappear them into the dustbin of history. And so I guess I want to leave you with the point that content moderation doesn't affect all groups equally, and it has the potential to further disenfranchise marginalized communities that have benefited greatly from these tools. I don't want to say that social media is a net good or a net bad, but rather that different people use these tools in different ways. And so while for me, it might just be something that I'm using to connect with my friends and family or maybe using for local political activism but that I could easily give up. For other people, these these platforms, the centralization of them in particular, their sort of unblockability at the government level makes them really valuable. And so it's really hard for me to just dismiss them as tools like that. And of course, that human and automated moderators make mistakes and at unknown rates. So we should be demanding from companies that they publish more detail about what they're taking down and why and how. I know the hows may be the controversial question. I had a conversation about this last night, so I'm less sure. But at least the why and the who and the what. And then finally, that governments are increasingly looking to companies to identify and silence alleged extremists without any semblance of due process. I got the five minute warning, so I'm just going to slip through this end. But Germany is one of those governments. So when Germany published the next DG legislation, kind of pushing on companies to rapidly take down content, they're really, they're part of the problem now because they're forcing companies to sort of privatize these decisions that should be made by experts or at least with expert oversight. And instead, what we have is these outsourced you know, Arvato and Bertelsmann and in the US it's a different company entirely. But we have these sort of outsourcing companies that are making these rapid decisions with no qualifications to do so. And then, of course, there's the Christchurch call, which came after a horrible attack that killed almost 60 people in or 61 people in Christchurch, New Zealand. Now this was an attack on two mosques and as a result that government of New Zealand acted really quickly. In the few days after the attack, they banned automatic assault rifles, which I'm all for that. The government also blocked some websites and the platforms tried really quickly to take down the video. Now, in this case, it was a pretty clear decision and easy one in some ways because it was a first person shooter video that was intended for the terrorist to gain more exposure. Maybe I don't have a problem taking that particular video down. Maybe that's an easy decision for these companies to make. But we shouldn't assume that all of these decisions are easy and they're not going to be. So finally, I would just kind of close this by saying that all too often, these initiatives that companies make, they're trying to be transparent, they're, or at least they say they are, they're trying to be clearer about how they adjudicate content, but all too often those grand measures that they make around transparency kind of exempt terrorist and extremist content, push them to the side. So they'll say, yes, Twitter, for example, will say that they're transparent about how they take down certain things and why Jack Dorsey will go in the media and talk publicly about the decision to take down Alex Jones, the American propagandist and conspiracy theorist. But then they can just throw 150,000 to 1.2 million people under the bus, call them all terrorists, and they don't matter because they're in some faraway country. So lastly, what can we do? So first, I think what I just said that measures intended to create transparency and due process, and by that I mean appeals, they have to apply to all users, not just the simple cases, but every single user, regardless of the reason that their content was taken down. Then I think we also have to ensure that governments, instead of looking at censorship as a quick and easy band-aid solution, if they want to really curb extremism, then they need to be looking at the economy, they need to be looking at economic solutions, educational solutions, and human rights solutions, not looking to the internet to solve these problems because tech isn't going to save us. And then finally, we need more research. I'm really proud of the paper that I did. I keep pointing over there because one of my co-authors is sitting there. Really proud of the work that we've done around this, but we need a lot more research to understand how marginalized users, how counter-speech, and how other types of expression is impacted by these blunt efforts. So that's me, and I just wanna give special thanks to the folks from Syrian Archive, my colleague Dia, who's not here unfortunately, and my colleagues from EFF, some of whom I think are here. So thank you, and I'm happy to take questions if you have them, but if you wanna go drink whiskey with me, that's also fantastic. I don't wanna be the one to stand between you and whiskey. Thank you so much, Julian. So we have five minutes for questions, and I already see a light blinking, so this means we have questions. You can of course put your questions to the signal angel in the chat, and also come here if you are here to the front of house to pose your question, because in the front, we don't have a question microphone anymore. Yeah. I'm gonna sit on the front of the stage so I can actually see you if you ask a question. So I think we see now the signal angel. One here. So can't see you, but it's okay. Hi, awesome. Where are you? Thank you for the talk.   How do we know that this censorship is actually working? How can you measure if all these measures are actually effective or is just a big amount of time wasted? I don't think we can.  So it's really hard for me to say we should never censor, even though that's been my position for a really long time. And I would still say that companies should never be involved in this without experts. That said, I actually don't think that we can measure it and I do still firmly believe that censorship is never and should never be the end game. It's not an actual solution. It's something that we do when we can't find or don't have the will to find real solutions to a problem. And so I don't, thank you. And so I mean, I think we're all okay with censoring and I use the term censoring to talk about stuff I think should be censored, right?  And we know that we're also working to find other solutions to curb abuse. So that's one case where I think we're all okay with it. When it comes to this stuff, I actually sometimes think it's really counterproductive even when it is actual terrorism, actual extremism. You can look at their quotes from Somalian police chiefs. This was my favorite example in like 2012. I didn't include it in the talk, but when Al Shabaab was first coming up and really becoming really problematic for the Somali government and the Somali police force, the captain, one of the police chiefs there and one in Kenya were both saying that it was actually really important to them that they were able to follow this terrorist group on Twitter because that's how they understood where they were and what they were doing, what their whereabouts were, which sounds absurd, but if Twitter then erases that content then they have less of an insight, particularly in a situation like that where they don't necessarily have other surveillance capacities. Not that I'm for surveillance, just saying. So yeah, to answer the question, I don't think that we can answer that and so I think that we should be really, if we're gonna be okay with any form of censorship, we need to be incredibly judicious about how it's used. So if we wanna say it's fine to take down all ISIS content, I'm not gonna be the one to stand in your way. But when it comes to other groups that are not ISIS, that are not universally trying to kill all women basically, I think that it's a different story. I mean, I think that we need to just be really careful. So I see another light, we have one more question and then we can wrap it up. It seems to me like there are two very distinct types of cases, either very current communication that can be a call to action that might be dangerous or historic information that, like you say, should be kept for posterity. And in that second case, I wonder why would somebody use something like Facebook or YouTube as an archive? Surely there are better platforms to do so and the censorship, sorry, okay. And the censorship would most likely be more relevant in the first case where there is a call to action. Yeah, so let me clarify, they're not using YouTube as an archive. Basically, I hope I'm not gonna get this wrong, I can't see you, but if I do get it wrong, just come up and steal the mic out of my hand. So it's people in Syria who are taking videos and documenting violence that are posting them to YouTube and then the group that I talked about that's archiving them is pulling them from YouTube. So they're finding them on YouTube. And that's how you can find evidence of war crimes, or evidence of whatever. And so I can't really answer the question of why a Syrian would choose YouTube. My guess is, because it's really easy to upload a video there and it's centralized and it's searchable. Same goes for Facebook, same goes for Twitter. You know, I mean, I think, I'm not denigrating Syrians, I'm just saying if you've got shitty internet and maybe not the best quality phone, which you probably don't because you've been to war for a few years, that's just the simplest way to upload the content. Maybe we can open media.ccd. Maybe we should create an archive. But don't create an archive just for human rights content because people have tried that and it's a bad idea. It's a target for governments. It's easy to take down them. So thanks a lot, Jillian. Sorry to the walk for this lighting situation now. Thank you. Oh, it's great. I can't see who's here.


Carbon nanofibers, CNF, have become increasingly popular due to their unique physical and chemical properties. They can be used in a variety of applications, such as electrical devices, electrodes for batteries and supercapacitors, and sensors. Their electrical properties depend heavily on the percolation threshold, which is determined by the aspect ratio, fractal characteristics, and percolation backbone structure of the CNFs. Additionally, the thermal and mechanical properties of CNF composites are also discussed. Preparation methods include catalytic chemical vapor deposition growth and electrospinning, while preparation methods include melt mixing and solution processing. Finally, CNF composites are used as sensors and electrodes for batteries and supercapacitors. This article was authored by Li Chaofeng, Ning Xia, and Jing Zhong.