Hey, Assalamualaikum MCC East Bay community. This is Abdullah Mishra. I'm looking forward to visiting you all inshallah this weekend for the Sira Intensive InshaAllah this weekend We're gonna have a special look at the life of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam not just his life from A to Z in the world But we're looking at the past present and future existence of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam and the role that he plays In each of those dimensions and in our lives. So inshallah join us for the Sira Intensive at MCC inshallah this weekend See you all there. Salaamualaikum


Hello everybody Well, it's almost Hanukkah and it's almost Christmas and it's time for the lighting of the tree last week Did you see the tree out back and do you know all Santa Claus has thought about you all year long and every Did you get my letter? Did you put a stamp on it and mail it? Well, I Yes, I got it all and I want you to know that you are coming to the best Christmas party in the world. You know why? Because we have cookies We have yummy Luscious delicious cookies that will make you fat like Santa Claus and No one in the world is happier to have you here than we are today And let's have a big old cheer a Santa Claus cheer for Colonel Irwin and the US Marine Band hip hip Hip hip Hooray hooray Just want to see if you were listening Okay, no listen I wanted to point one thing out if you'd help me look at these, you know sort of I don't have to hold this microphone I'll bend over a little bit actually. I'll bet I could even make it come up a little if I worked at it I want you to look around the room because our theme this year at the Christmas party is Christmas music or songs, you know, and if you look around you'll see all sorts of different things that represent Christmas songs There's a way in a manger and we have different ones and if you'll everybody turn around behind you and look We have Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. Do you see him? Point him out. Show me where he is. Hey, hey, hey Hey, where's Rudolph Schmoodoff? Hey, what's going on here? Hey, Merry Christmas. I don't believe it believe it Santa Hey, you're doing love the outfit. It's my favorite.  Everybody sit down because Alph has got to get back to the kitchen Alph is making the cookies for us Yeah Yeah Hey, you know there's been a little misunderstandings Let's all let's all be kind of quiet because I want to ask Alph some questions May I ask you a couple questions Alph? You just did Come on, we're on a roll Santa. Yeah. Yeah, how's the weather by the way? It's a sesame seed roll I wanted to ask you look like the guy who would know somebody the weather like outside Somebody told me that you knew all about the weather I know all about the weather, but I think you know more than I do well I know more than I you know think I do are we gonna get some snow? I just wanted to know where you come from. Do they have snow? Yes, we do have snow, but it falls up or it goes from the ground up in the air Yeah, it's crazy. How do you sled and snow like that? Do you sled up the hills or down the hill? It's difficult very difficult and how many times have you ever to slay yourself.  Do you have anything like a Santa Claus that comes to bring presents? Well, you know what? We don't have Christmas, but we have a holiday. That's very similar to Christmas on Melmac It's called twangle. Hey, wait a minute. Yeah, you hear what he said. They don't have Christmas on his planet But they have something called what twangle. Can you say twangle twangle? Together now You know what? That wasn't very good. Let's try that again. Are you ready? One, two, three twangle All right, don't shout. I could hear you. I said Alph I'm gonna sit down All right, and I'll let you tell us a story and then I'll be back in a few minutes And if you're really good, we will put you on the gong show But if you're not good, you are history. Oh, there's a promise.  Have you ever heard the the poem twas the night before Christmas? Yeah, raise your hands if you've heard it Raise your hands if you haven't heard it All right, I'm gonna tell it to you anyway only this was called Twas the night before twangle now listen closely because there's a lot of clever similarities Twas the night before twangle and all around the planet nothing was stirring except my aunt Janet Yeah, she was stirring cat soup for our twangle Eve dinner and Most of that soup was ending up in her Now the twin moons of melmac were shining that night and cuz it was twangle one green and one white One off to the left and one off to the right But there in the middle. I saw a strange sight For out of the sky a red sleigh appeared it landed and out stepped a guy with a beard He asked for directions. He said he was lost He was looking for earth and he got his signals crossed Now my dad said to him I'd you end up here buster He said he made a wrong turn at the Andromeda cluster. It's not a candy bar either We gave him directions and he got in his sleigh We'd offered him cat soup But he said no way So we thanked us for helping and he said he must go Then he asked if we knew him We shook our heads no and then he took off and we both heard him shout Merry Christmas to all we had no idea what that was about Now I had a strange feeling I'd see him again. I didn't know where I didn't know when and Each twangle Eve. I would look to the sky and I'd think of that sleigh and that jolly old guy Now little did I know that I'd soon end up here Helping st. Nicholas Spread Christmas cheer We're here as a team now. We've got a new angle. I Say Merry Christmas and he says happy twangle Yeah Don't applaud if you're not sure Listen Alf. I want you to meet. Thank you for that story and thank you boys and girls. You are a great audience I want you to meet the first lady out. This is mrs. Reagan. This is alf mrs. Reagan Hello, mrs.  Is it me or is there a lot of red up here? There's a lot of red. I see a lot of color red here the background is red and Santa wears red and you look great in red Yeah, I Notice I read that in people magazine and the president likes jelly beans. That's right. That's right Well, I'm a diplomat from another time. Oh you are you are Thank you for your song your rendition. Thank you and And thank everybody for making this party possible And thank the the members of th is For making the party possible Now alf Before you leave before we leave. I have to ask you something. Uh-huh. Who does your hair? Well, I haven't had it done since I got here to be honest with you back on my home planet It was done by Maurice of Melmac While I'm here Willard Scott will give me a comb out Yeah, the senator in the back's got a question Okay, well, I was just wondering it's it's it's you like the color. Oh, yeah, it's natural I Can tell that it is yes, it's very it's it's interesting You have You want to answer you have a couple of questions here? Well just one one What's your name hey alf ever eating the cat say that again, I mean lucky No, no, listen, that's that's a wrap that I'm taking here and I want to clear that up right now, all right Since I've landed here on this planet. I haven't eaten a single cat. They've all been married Question who has a little humor in the White House question. You have a question Who has a question for alf anybody have a question anybody want to ask a alpha question, okay? You'll have to stand over here. How about this little lady here? How about you? How tall are you help in my stocking feet or with heels? I'm three foot two inches tall How about with heels in heels on four feet 11? I thought you met with me. Yeah, they're hard Everybody else a question. I look good, but I can't walk On the TV show you you can't expose to the public But now why are you exposing to the public? Why are you exposing to the public? You're not on television now. Why are you here? You know what? I don't know You know why I came in the gate.  That's humiliating.  Can you believe that when alf came in the dog sniff me? He's here because it's Christmas. That's humiliating.  Why? because you like Cookies The magic C word The big C. Yeah, are there cookies and right and right now and right now It's time to go into the state dining room and have some cookies Something to eat something drink, okay? I'm out of here Boys and girl holidays Let's let's give alf a big round of applause and thank him and let's wish him a happy twangal Happy twangal ready and merry Christmas.


Confusing English words. Difference between lay and lie. Both of these words refer to the action of putting something down on a surface, or an object, person, or animal resting on a surface. However, lay has a direct object, and lie does not. A direct object is the thing that receives the action of the verb. So when you put your own body horizontally on the bed or sofa, you lie down. There's no direct object. But when you put a book on the table, you lay the book down. Book is the direct object. Here's another example. You can say that the cat is lying on the piano. There's no direct object for the verb lie. But if you are putting various photos onto a table, you would be laying the photos on the table. Photos are the direct object. Even native English speakers often mix these up. Many people say, I'm not feeling well. I need to lay down. When the correct sentence would be, I need to lie down. A person or animal lies themselves down, but you lay another object down. Now here's the confusing part. The past tense of lie is lay. It's lie in the present, lay in the past, and the past participle is lane. For the verb lay, it's lay in the present, laid in the past, and the past participle is also laid. So let's look at two sentences in the past. Here's one with the verb lie in the past. Last night I wasn't feeling well, so I lay down for an hour. Remember, that's lay being the past tense of lie. Now here's one with the verb lay in the past. I laid the book down when the phone rang. The past tense of lay is laid. The other confusing part is that the verb lie has two forms and two meanings. We have lie meaning to be resting on a surface, like the cat is lying on the piano. And we have lie meaning to say something false, say something that is not true. For example, he said he got a good grade, but he's lying. He actually failed the test. These two forms of the verb lie have different forms in the past and past participle. For lie meaning something resting on a surface, the past is lay and the past participle is lane. But for lie meaning to say something that isn't true, the past is lied and the past participle is also lied. So in the past we would say, the cat lay on the piano for three hours last night. David lied about his final test grade last semester. If you want to clear up your doubt so that you can use English words more confidently without mistakes, check out my e-book, 600 plus Confusing English Words Explained.


We're ready for the first presentation. Michelle Young is also celebrating her reunion class of 2012. So we're so happy to have her. She's also on faculty and maybe Michelle, you want to tell us about your current projects and a little bit about how you contribute to the academic life here. Sure. I guess to say that GSAP helped launch my career is sort of even an understatement and I've been involved in many different fronts. So I started at GSAP in 2009 actually just took a random class there. I'm wondering if I wanted to go to grad school. The answer was yes. And then I did the New York Paris program. I don't know if anyone here was part of that, but I did that from 09 to 10. And then started the urban planning master's 2010 to 12. So yes, it's my 10 year anniversary and I just realized this morning. And then I've been teaching in the architecture program in the New York Paris program since 2014. So that's also nearing a 10 year reunion. Also on the professional side, I was in the GSAP incubator from 2016 to 17. And if anyone remembers that, it was an incubator space in the new museum. And it's now a grant program. So no physical space, but it was very exciting to be a part of that when we could physically be together. And then I've been on the alumni, the GSAP alumni board since 2019. And then other random stuff I've done for Columbia. We did a podcast during the pandemic. We made a guide for Columbia magazine that was illustrated. And yeah, so that's, that's the Columbia family. It kind of ropes you in and never lets you go, but I'm extremely happy to be part of it and see where it goes. I'm going to talk a little bit about untapped New York, which was actually founded while I was at GSAP. So I was inspired to start it after I took that one class. And the idea behind it was to show New York in a different light. And we're really too on a conceptual side to bridge the gap between the academic discussion of cities, which is very robust, but kind of stays in the schools often or stays on our hard drives and computers. All that research just gets kind of lost after it. And then transform that into a way that the popular, the general public can consume that. So hold on, let me scroll. Oh yeah. Here's my Twitter. If anyone wants to connect. And so today untapped New York after we started it in 2009 is has like three things that we do. It's a web magazine, which is how it started. We do tours of New York. These are often the secrets of places or access into off limits places. And we have a membership program for our most hardcore fans. We call them insiders. And then here we give them truly, truly off limits access to places that are usually not open to the public. And through our press relationships and other architecture urban planning relationships, people will open the doors to that. It also gives members an opportunity to meet the people behind who are shaping New York City. So I want to give a little background and how kind of the early stuff that I covered and untapped, which I'm still very proud about. So I believe there were some G set people involved in this, but in 2009 and an empty lot in Bushwick, a bunch of architects created a mini golf course. And I thought that was the coolest thing ever.  So that was, I think the first article, the second one was one was about fresh kills landfill, which is now the park ongoing project, which will continue into 2030 and beyond. Oh, here it is fresh kills park. So this is what I look like in 2009 before they really started anything. They had capped the landfill and we're doing methane capture. And so it's a very raw space, but with great views all the way to New York on New York City to Manhattan, I mean, and they say you can see fresh kills landfill from space so that and the wall of China. Some of the early things we covered was also Manhattan hench which is this phenomenon when the sun aligns with the Manhattan street grid which is angled, not exactly east west so it happens twice a year. Another spot that I was dying to go to back in 2009 or so was the city hall subway station which is decommissioned. A lot of people call it abandoned it has a curved platform which is why subway cars today which are longer than when the subway launch in 1904 are unable to be platform there. The curve in Union Square for example is less angled and so that still exists but they have those little things that pull out so that you don't fall in. Back to the urban planning head. This was one of our earlier articles that went viral. So I wrote this, somebody's hiding a plane in Bushwick and this was a Google map image. And of course it's just a plane that happened to fly over, but kind of perfectly placed within Bushwick houses. So it looks like someone was hiding a plane. And then another map project this was done by a student at Columbia, a friend of mine in urban planning, Charles Antoine Perot, and he decided to overlay the Manhattan street grid onto, sorry, the Paris street grid onto Manhattan to try to destabilize our notion of what is New York City. So this was also a viral. Another article was proud about early on that I wrote while I was at grad school was about Jane Jacobs house which is in Greenwich Village. And the point is article was the fact that it was the store glassy baby which was selling $40 cups. So the real contrast between a person who wanted to reinvigorate the street life save it. And then kind of what happens kind of accidentally when neighborhoods change, despite best efforts. Okay, so now how's it going. This is a screenshot of what what we were covering recently so we publish about two, three articles a day. We have a database of over 10,000 articles and huge number of photographs. But this Times Square project for pride month is happening right now it's an augmented reality project. We also covered the freight tracks that are might become the new interborrow express line so that's a big initiative from the governor. We looked at what the freight tracks look like now and in in previous years we're doing a talk soon from somebody who's a descendant of a meatpacking district company called Ottoman and company, Ottoman and company. Here we go so here's some closer ups and then we cover things like secrets of neighborhoods. We recently had this piece about an Upper West Side Church on 86 and Amsterdam that might be demolished. And then other popular things include filming locations. So we did Russian doll recently marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and then you get a glimpse of some of our events that we host so we're doing a tour of TWA hotel. Today, people are going in we're bringing people into the Glenwood power plant in Yonkers, which was originally part of the railway Metro what became Metro North and it was a conhead facility and now it's being turned into very magnificent a change facility research facility, and it's designed by Bjarke Ingalls. Well, the redesign will be. So some of the tours I mentioned earlier but again the aim is to show people the secrets and hidden gems of New York. So here's what's a little taste of what's going on I mentioned the Ellis Island hard hat tour. Another popular tours are subway tour remnants of Penn Station. That's a particular favorite of mine because I had been writing about what was left of the original Penn Station by McKinney and white that still exists and we give this tour we've taken thousands of people sometimes begrudgingly. We take people who take the train into Penn Station and complain about it and tell us that they now see the whole station in a different light. We launched this fifth Avenue Gilded Age Mansions tour this year in conjunction or timed with the new series Gilded Age on HBO. And then we don't need to go through this this is from our media kit but I think what's interesting is that almost all of our over 80% of our guests are New Yorkers, and that actually really helped us out in the pandemic when tourism was decimated. We actually had a very core audience of people that are from New York State and their surrounding region. Here's some photos of the Ellis Island tour definitely recommend going on that and if you haven't been the organization there the nonprofit is trying to save these buildings before they fall into this true disrepair. And then I mentioned earlier, our insiders program. So here we are the in the near public library on the catwalk that only employees are usually allowed to go on. So they took us up there. And then some of the events that are coming up or we just did. We screened a video that looked inside the Washington Square Park Arch, and I got to go in there and bring some people in there. About three years ago with Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver. It's fun story there because I interviewed him for a profile and he said, going into the arches on my bucket list and I was amazed that people who work in government have a bucket list I had access to everything so I said that too is on my bucket list we went together. It brought our respective teams. See anything else worth mentioning. And then this was a couple months ago but we went into Highbridge Tower again a partnership with New York City Parks. We also went into the palace theater and Times Square that's that was just lifted. So we did this just before they lifted it but they lifted it. So it's 3060 feet. And so it's a pretty wild redevelopment real estate project in Times Square. And then finally I kind of wanted to share my top 10 moments that I've had in New York doing this business. So here I got to take an Osprey to go to the USS New York for Fleet Week. This was a few years ago as well, and then got to accompany this ship, come into New York Harbor under the Verrazano, and to dock right at the intrepid right next to the intrepid so a really memorable moment. And maybe you have explored the Highline this the last section before it was turned to the Highline I know that was a popular urban exploration spot. The last sort of untouched portion. Here I am on the roof of the flat iron building I went up with the superintendent and we also went into the basement. There's a really incredible steam and power system that's down there. The Center in 2012 worked with both the Port Authority and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The trust reached out to me saying that we they wanted more publicity about TWA to help save it and to hopefully find someone to convert it into something and now of course it's the hotel. Hopefully some of you have been in there. I have remembered five points the graffiti haven in Queens in Long Island City so we went there as it was being demolished. Another tour we hosted for many years was a New Yorker hotel tour which included a trip to the roof, which you can see the iconic New Yorker sign. There was a lot of underground exploration so this is a trolley terminal that was never actually built under the Manhattan Bridge. And for a long time, a kind of secret was that you could just pop open a little electrical panel or manhole right in front of the bridge and go in and so friends of mine who host these kind of illicit parties, coordinated several hundred people to have a party down there, which was, which was amazing. I've been host off since then. Brought my team down to the sub basement of Grand Central. This is where the old rotaries are rumored that it was a target in World War two by the Germans, because it controlled all of the traffic train traffic up and down the east coast. So the idea was that if they could sabotage this they could prevent troops and goods from going over to Europe. So we got to climb up to the spire inside 70 pine. When it was being redeveloped as well that's a skyscraper down to Manhattan, and this is the explorer also very professional urban planner who works for the regional plan Association, Moses Gates. He's going up there. And he has a mission to go through, go to all of the former abandoned, sorry the former observation decks in all of New York City which were used to be open to the public. So his mission is to expose that and to kind of share why many of these public amenities have been closed over the decades, especially after 911 but they started to get closed way before that. The last thing that my husband reminded me of this morning was being able to escort the Tuskegee airmen to Obama's inauguration so another really special moment for me. And then quickly kind of wanted to go through some of the things that I guess a background in urban planning or architecture assistant so the US State Department reached out a couple years ago and said we want to bring a delegation of journalists from Egypt to learn how to do. So that was kind of nuts they came to our office and we talked to them about local journalism about cities. So that was, that was really special. I got to speak at a sustainability conference at the UN. As you can see I'm kind of want or you can't really see it but I will tell you that I was one of only two women on this panel. And with Kate Asher who many of you may know who also teaches at in the real estate program at GSAP, we organize the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bellagio conference on Jane Jacobs. So, I highly recommend anyone just try to attempt to organize a conference there because it's amazing, as you can see. And those houses down by the river and have dinners up at the villa on top and here are some of the people that came to the conference so we had a bunch of GSAP people. Vishan Chakrabarty who was there at the time. So this was in 2012, maybe. So you'll see we actually had Carrie Lam, who has come under a lot of pressure in Hong Kong, but Enrique Norte, the architect. Haley Soholt who's the founding partner of Gale Architects. So a lot of people who have become quite well known, well we're well known then and even more so now. And then I've done some documentary shoots for Smithsonian Channel so here we were in a post office in Chelsea, because there are remnants of enumatic tubes that were used for mail down there and I'm just like that's like my obsession and I learned that from Kate Asher in 2009 and continues to be a real obsession of mine. I was on Stephen Dubner's podcast tell me something I don't know. Also talking about pneumatic tube mail. And then on the side we published a few books so we have Secret Brooklyn which is a guidebook about secret places in Brooklyn we did New York hidden bars and restaurants. I did a book about Broadway, but the history of it. The big news I have is that I just sold a book to Harper Collins about a French resistance spy, who was part of the monuments man but was also a spy during the war from 1940 to 44 in France, and was stationed in the museum where the Nazis were looting all of the stolen Jewish art through. So she was there documenting everything they didn't know that she spoke German. It's a very dramatic story she was held at gunpoint several times was kicked out of the museum and every time found her way back. And then she worked with the monuments men who of course were artists and architects who went on to save and locate the art which she she knew where that where it was so they needed to get her the monuments when we're tasked with getting her information, because she knew exactly where the art was shipped to in the minds of Austria in the castles in Germany. So that is, I'll be working on that for the next few years and stepping away from my company. So that's the exciting stuff that's going on right now I'll hear some photographs so the top right is the museum the Japan it's just next to the Louvre. And the Nazis wanted to use that because so they there wouldn't be any oversight about all the stuff they're stealing and it's estimated that in total about 600,000 pieces of art were stolen in World War two. A large number went through France, specifically, and then Rose herself estimates that a third of the privately owned art in France was stolen during this war. And one of her closest partners was the man holding what looks like maybe a camera in the bottom picture dreams warmer who eventually became the director of the Met. And so he was the one that got her information about where everything was in Germany and Austria. And on the right you can see right bottom that's her housewise from from the Nazis that enabled her to go to work every day. So that's it. That's my quick presentation of what's what's what I've been doing and how Columbia was has been part of that. So, Leslie I don't know if they're going to take any questions. Yeah, exactly. I want to invite everyone to anyone to ask questions that they have any. And as you guys are thinking about it. I just want to remind you that untapped New York is also hosting our tour this afternoon from camp from this campus to the new campus up at Manhattanville. It's a really leisurely walk on a beautiful day. And Michelle's company also we commissioned her company to do tours and podcasts for in the incoming class during the pandemic when they weren't able to do orientation in person, so that they did get a sense of the neighborhood surrounding Columbia. And that's been a huge also just a critical point for us and in terms of gathering the community. So thank you for that Michelle. Yeah, of course. Do we have any questions. You're stepping away from your company for for five years. Well, the book is due in 18 months, allegedly, the book publishing will work super fast so they wanted it in 12 and I said that's not possible so gunning for 18 months. So I can have two summers in France to do this work so I'm leaving at the end of the month for two months my husband is French. So it's sort of how I got. You know, I was always been obsessed with World War two my grandfather survived the atomic bomb and Hiroshima. He was a time when he student in Japan, during that time he was like 16 years old. And, but then when I married a French family I started getting really interested in the World War two history of France. It's very palpable of course when you go to Paris there plaques everywhere. I started obsessively reading books and ended up on the very narrow genre of French. I'm sorry, a female World War two spies, which is apparently a sub genre. And then came across this woman reading a book called Goreng's man in Paris fascinating book. It's about Goreng's art dealer, and who was working in the same museum and read about this woman and for me she literally popped off the page every time she came up, and I was like I need to know more about her, and was shocked that no one had written anything about her but I guess you know if you think about it monuments men. It just doesn't really include women. So I thought it was a great story so I wish I could have five years to work on it but I'll probably be away for two to three years, let's say. Thank you so much for sharing all of this. I just had one quick question. I'm always curious how you decided what is featured for on top of New York where do your ideas come from. Great question. So what we tell our writers contributors and we came up with this early on actually a friend of mine is an advertising executive in New York City pretty well known and she agreed to do a little session with us and it was super helpful. So what we came up with then was that it has to answer the question what in all capitals question mark exclamation question mark explainer, you know, if a topic if something doesn't answer that or make someone feel that. Then we shouldn't cover it. We also say that everything should be positive there's, of course, in the last bunch of years, news has been very intense, but even before that, we realize that people do snarky news much better and our goal here is to celebrate New York and really have positive news out there so if we don't like something we just don't really cover it we have had op eds that are more about urban planning or city development in which we feel that we have an expert that can weigh in on that. But also again not in a negative way but an informative way. But it has to be surprising to, to even the most, the New Yorker that thinks that they're truly a native New Yorker and knows everything we tried to surprise those people, and then also surprise visitors as well. Okay we're going to get started. Kaz Sakamoto is the class of 2013. He graduated from the UP program and teaches on the analytics track at GSAP now in the fall, excuse me, but he's also a doctoral candidate at EPFL in Switzerland now. He's a little bit more about his background, his current research pursuits, and his academic contributions to GSAP. Thank you Kaz. All right, I'm really happy to be here with you all. Are there any urban planners? UP alumni? So I guess I might be alone but hopefully this is of interest to those of you who aren't planners. So today I'll be just giving a brief introduction about who I am, what an urban digital twin is if you haven't heard of digital twins in general, and then some research areas that I'm interested in. And then if you have any questions, I'm more than happy to answer that for you. So a little bit about myself, so I graduated from the UP program in 2013, and I've also been teaching at Columbia since 2014, kind of like Michelle. And actually we have gone on some tours together, so I worked at the New York City Economic Development Corporation and we did a really fun tour of the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center. So that's a property that's managed by the Economic Development Corporation and that's mostly where a lot of the food comes from. So if you're interested in where all of the food comes from in New York City, it happens in the South Bronx. After that I did a few years at Goldman Sachs working as a data scientist, and I've done consulting work for the World Bank, primarily on using algorithms to create a traffic accident database using tweets in Nairobi. And currently I'm also working on a project with them, helping them to identify a vulnerability index in West Africa. And currently I'm a doctoral candidate at the Ecopoly Technique Federal de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland. And I'm in the laboratory on human environment relations in the urban systems and work with a very interdisciplinary team of energy engineers, architects, urban planners, urban sociologists. And we're all trying to figure out how to transition towards a more sustainable urban environment. Some teaching examples that I've taught, so I've been teaching environmental data analysis with Peter Marco Tulio. And this is working with environmental data and getting urban planners really used to working with more different types of scales. So one critical aspect that students wanted was to not just focus on New York City. Obviously we're in New York City, but we try to do a national level, international, and also regional type of planning, as well as New York City based, and really give them hands on tools using data, usually big data, raster analysis, machine learning, even a little bit of computer vision stuff. And then in the middle I've also taught prototyping for urban policy and decision making. So this is really trying to put urban planners and urbanists in the realm of app prototyping. And so if planners were to create urban technology or apps, what kind of tools we would make? Currently there's a lot of urban tech that's happening without planners actually really putting forth ideas. So it's kind of getting urban planning students to think about, okay, how would you successfully create an app, prototype it, and pitch an idea? On top of that I haven't included every class that I've taught, but I've taught GIS for a very long time. And I've also co-taught planning methods. And I was also fortunate enough to do two summer workshops. So I'm from Hawaii, so both summers we were able to go back to Hawaii. One summer was about transit oriented development with a new rail line that is being constructed around Honolulu. And then the second one was using augmented reality app to do a parking study. And so comparing GPSs and tracking where parking spaces are in one neighborhood with a new AR app that will actually survey the street for you and to compare how accurate and how quickly a new survey can be done. And the main issue in Honolulu is that there's a lot of cars. The development of Honolulu happened after World War II and it only became a state a little over 50 years ago. And so the development of Honolulu coincided with a lot of automobile centric planning. And so parking is a big issue. Many of the parking spaces that we found were actually in buildings. And so many of the surface level parking that you see people are competing for these places that they want to park as close to the businesses. But there's actually a lot more parking than you need. And it also affects zoning because right now for every new apartment unit, you have to build one parking space. So for a developer, it actually is quite expensive because a parking space maybe costs 75,000 to 100,000 to construct each. And so for every bedroom that you need, because every material concrete is expensive, you have to bring it to an island. And so if we can reduce the amount of parking required in the zoning, it would actually make it a lot more, I would say, better for everyone. It lowers the cost of apartment because the consumer is going to be paying for that parking spot, whether they might not need it. And if you live in downtown Honolulu, you really shouldn't need a parking spot per bedroom. Okay, so that's a little bit about my background. So here you can see many cities are now creating digital twins. Barcelona, this was like a recent article, Zurich, Singapore, London, even in Lausanne, we're building one as well. And New York, I believe there is one. People are really pushing digital twins to solve complex problems. So what can it do? Maybe solve climate change issues. It's also going to disrupt industries. And so real estate, transportation, maybe a digital twin will help us transform these sectors. And maybe it will also help us design better policies for policymakers and politicians and government officials. But I ask why are people so interested in urban digital twins? It seems like everyone's starting to build one. And so this is kind of what I'm focused in on my PhD study. So you can see many technology firms are pushing urban digital twins through IoT solutions, so the Internet of Things, putting sensors, which coincides with a smart city. Sidewalk Labs in Clayside had their project, which is now defunct, but they were calling the city as an API. So should a city be an API? What does that mean? It's very technocentric focused.  And even NVIDIA recently claimed that they're going to make a digital twin of the whole Earth, which is quite impressive. And maybe even getting into a simulated universe. So if you think about metaverse, meta or what used to be Facebook is now really pushing the boundaries of what our digital world and our virtual worlds are going to be. So technology really driving the need for maybe what a digital twin is going to be. So the digital twin is not unique to the urban planning or architecture field. It is said that the first digital twin was for the Apollo 13 mission. And so they had a simulator and it helped with the landing because they were able to do so many different types of simulations. So I like the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics definition, which is the set of virtual information constructs that mimics the structure, context and behavior of an individual unique or physical asset. So it's a virtual construct. It's mimicking what is the physical asset and it should be dynamically updated. So there's a temporal aspect to it and it should be throughout its life cycle. So maybe you determine like how long that life cycle is and this is a very product focused view as well. And in Megatronics, it has a similar definition of comprehensive physical and functional description of a component product or system, which includes more or less all information, which could be useful through life cycle phases. And so there's a non exhaustive list of areas of use. For example, healthcare, I went to a digital twin conference. You could create a digital twin of a heart. So if a cardiologist is working on a complex case, maybe you want to build a digital twin of someone's heart before you go into surgery, retail, manufacturing. You could create a whole digital twin of supply chain or just a factory, even something as complex as an oil rig. It's something that's being done. Academics are interested in digital twins, logistics, construction. So everyone is interested in what a digital twin can do. So what about urban digital twins? So there's some people who are saying there's no consensus about what an urban digital twin is. And I would argue that there hasn't been a real true urban digital twin made as of yet. But there should be a spatial scalability. And so you should be able to either go down to the building level, a neighborhood, a city, even a region, maybe even a globe. So it has to be spatially scalable. It also has to be integrated and synchronized to the real world. So that means that there has to be sensors and it has to be fed back into the model and so that it's updated in real time. And so that you shouldn't be able to tell the difference between the physical asset and the digital asset. Some people also for an urban digital twin say that it should be interactive and multi-user. And so it should be open access. It should be transparent. And many people should be able to use it. It shouldn't be just a tool for yourself. And obviously the simulation and the modeling is also quite important. Because if you want to test something without having an intervention in the physical space, the digital space can allow you to do such things. And it should be modeled with as best as possible physics. And so it's tied to real world physical laws as well. And so in the research fields, there's a lot of people who are interested in urban digital twins from urban planning, architecture, urban economics, ecology, engineering, sociology, political science, computer science. So we need all of these types of different researchers to be able to construct the urban digital twin because it is very complex and it has to be as real as possible. And cities are probably one of the most complex things. And to understand it, it's going to require many disciplines and researchers. So cities are prime for digital twins because we already have smart cities, which was really pushed maybe like 10 years ago. A smart city is pretty, it's not useful unless you do something with it. So we have now amassed all this data and you can access it. But I think the main issue and the drawback with the smart city was that it actually didn't tie all those layers together. And so when Bloomberg opened up the New York City Open Data Portal, just because putting out data, it doesn't mean that it's interoperable. And so it takes a lot more work for someone to be able to connect trash or waste management data with parks or city blocks or any type of other metadata that you might find in a city. And so the natural progression I would think is to want to do something with all this data that is being collected. And so I think the digital twin is really a way that researchers and policymakers, anyone who's interested in working with cities will be able to now understand what is coming out of this city. And I would say that primarily it's been very siloed. So you would see a lot of modeling happening in like traffic engineering or maybe just the urban ecology part or the climate. And so now we can also see how do we layer all of these things together. And so the research project that I'm working on is called the Blue City Project. It's in partnership with Etihad and Zurich, the city of Lausanne and other industry partners. And so here we can see there's a few components that we have described which might be just the material flow through a city, the natural flow, the mobility flow, flow of goods, waste flow, flow of utilities. I think one thing that we're missing in this diagram is people, but I didn't create this diagram. But you can see that inside it's the platform that really allows people to then connect all of these different layers. And so now it should be in sync as real time as possible. And so if you want to see the interactions between all of these complex things that are happening within the city, we should be able to, I guess, understand this better and the phenomena. So some ongoing research areas. So we work with a lot of sustainability. I personally don't love the word because it's really hard to define. And some people think it's overused and it's this kind of like greenwashing. But it is really when I teach my sustainability assessment course at EPFL, I try to teach people that it's actually we do an exercise with utopias and dystopias. And I say that when you think about a utopia, it's actually the definition of utopia is no place and sustainability is also a journey. And so utopias are actually not a real place. It's something that you envision and sustainability is also like that. There's no you don't reach sustainability. It's something of a journey and we all have to come together to think about what that means because there is a normative dimension. So everyone's different on its context specific. People have different understanding of sustainability. And once there's no one size fits all solution when we talk about sustainability for cities. There's also the systemic dimension. And so many of it is baked into the system. And there's obviously the procedural and all together this creates the sustainable development ecosystem. But within that now moving from environmental economics into ecological economics, we have to think about our planetary boundaries and that are we before within sustainable development, you could have the three pillars and you can offset or have trade offs between the environment development and the social well being. But obviously we live in a finite world and so we can't overstep what our environment or ecology has. And so we always have to now think about what is our ecological footprint and the economy has to fit within that. And so can we decouple some of these things? That's the big question happening in economics. In terms of public participation, you have to wonder who is being engaged in the urban digital twin. And so Arenstein's classic ladder of participation from the lowest rung all the way to the top. And so this is another framework that can be used when thinking about how equitable and who's participating in the creation of an urban digital twin. We're also going to push our urban theory. And so we went from Burgess's concentric zone model of understanding different uses of land based on the distance away from the city center. Now it's being challenged as transportation has changed the way that we move. And now information and networks. You can tell it work. I think during COVID we really found out that our lives and how we live them have ultimately changed them. Maybe how you view your cities or where you even have to locate for work. There's Kevin Lynch's image of the city and how we categorize different parts of the city. And Mike that is inventing futures. So can we even predict what a future is going to be when it's so complex for cities. And so his notion is that we can't predict the future of cities, but we can actually we actually invent them. And so how much maybe free will or agency we have. And as today we're becoming more and more diverse from divorce from function over form. We're going to see that information networks are shaping what cities used to be. And so now that we live in a global world, how do we even define what a city is and a systems science defining the boundary is quite important. So depending on how we define what we want to study as a city is New York City, just the city or an island. I think how we interact with the city and how we model it is also going to be different in the urban digital twin. And lastly, algorithmically infused cities. So there's an emergency emergence of societies whose very fabric is co shaped by the algorithm and human behavior. And this is going to be very complex as we don't even understand how much of the algorithm is dictating our day to day life. And so here are some examples from this article in nature. So the dating recommendations is one process. And so who you're being fed to in terms of who you're going to match for a date is already filtered through an algorithm. The news that we see is already being filtered through an algorithm. And when we start out automating all of these planning decisions through urban digital twin, the how you live in a city is also going to be algorithmically determined. And that has a huge impact on how you live in your city and we might not be able to even turn back what happens. So this is also something I'm interested in is to be able to maybe start to untangle how much of your day to day life is already algorithmically infused when you live in a city. So that's a bit about what I'm thinking about and working on for the next four years. But if you have any questions, happy to answer. Yeah, so, you know, even in New York City, we have different planning processes like the Euler process. And it's oftentimes there's even in a neighborhood board, you don't have a community board, you don't have, you can go, but you actually don't have any say in terms of what happens to your neighborhood. And so you can say that it probably has really just like an informing type of role. So if you want like more power, then you have to go up the ladder of participation.  But just to like, just to, I guess, categorize levels of participation.  But there's different levels of reaching that. And so, you know, I, my interest is also in public participation, and I focused on the digital divide. And so within when planning processes move digitally, you're also going to lose a lot of people that aren't going to be interacting, maybe through websites or apps. They're already not in the room. Yes. It should be. Yeah. I think there are some already models out there. And so if we were to build an urban digital twin, and you do have all the components of buildings, I think that should be open for everyone, right? Because why just for that information. And so urban digital twins, part of it also comes from city information modeling, which is coming out of building them. And so it's kind of like, okay, like if we were to take the idea of bin and then think about it at a city level, that's basically city information modeling. And that's kind of part of the foundations, I would say, of urban digital twins. It doesn't have every function, but I think it has a lot of important factors of the built environment, even the visualization of an urban digital twin. But definitely a lot of the concepts have been feed into urban digital twin. Yeah. And this is all important because if you're going to have new developments or do public works, you're going to need all this information about the city and the built environment. Also, what's underneath. So, you know, these are all things that should be available. And if you do it once, right, the city has a lot of this information, like they should be able to provide that and make it more accessible. And if we really want to model the city, those are all components that I think are very important. So I think it's right now, many of the urban digital twins out there are for mobility and transportation. So it's also, you can see how cities are prioritizing which parts of the urban digital twin they're going to build out first. And so in any digital twin creation and any field, they're all components. So you don't build one gigantic model, but you actually make each small component. And so when civil engineers create a digital twin of a wind turbine, they actually do just the wings or just the motor. And together, then they can fit it together because creating one whole component of that wind turbine is just too much. But if you make it really small, then it'll actually be easier to model. And then eventually they have like different presentations where you can have many wind farms on the sea. And if there's a big wave, what is that going to do to all of these components? So we have to also start thinking more about what are the components that we want to model in the city? And then how do they fit together? And that's where maybe some people argue for social physics. So can we predict some human behaviors? Because the human part is also very critical. But in terms of the ecological or the energy or transportation, like those are all things that we can understand a lot better, I would say. Yes. Research regarding the impact of the recent COVID-19 pandemic on this in general, how the landscapes are changing? I would say there was a lot of research that happened. Is there anything in particular about different types of behavior that you're interested in? I guess, like specifically, is it like I did a study on critical infrastructure on COVID spread? I don't know. I mean, behavior is so big. So is it about like people moving away or spending patterns or anything in particular? Or social behaviors? Social behaviors as well as, yeah, I think social behaviors is probably. I'm sure there's a lot of study that's not specifically my field. But I think you can definitely measure, you know, it depends on how you want to measure it. And there's a lot of, I would say, social network analysis that's happening. But it also depends on what level. So individually, you might notice different things. And then at a larger scale, you might see other patterns. And I'm sure it really depends on cities because in New York City, you really don't have as many options to do things. So New York City is always kind of a unique case. And so I don't know if any findings in New York City are always so generalizable. Global scale, I'm not super sure. Yeah, I mean, when we do research, we have to go through the IRB process. So if it ever involves human subjects, you have to go through a review process. But honestly, like in the computer sciences and the engineering, it's less common. And so I would argue that there is lots of secondary use data that is happening. And so even though you primarily collect data for a specific reason, it doesn't really ban people from using it for other ulterior motives, right? And so I would say that, well, as researchers, I would say we're not doing this for profit or to harm people. But just the creation of this data or models can be used for bad or for malicious reasons. And that is something that we have to grapple with. But honestly, there's not a perfect solution. So in this computational social science realm, you know, there's the ad hoc, like, you know, like people make decisions about how they want to work with ethics in the research or data process. There's a more rural base where we follow these like very old school IRBs, which was created from very legacy like use cases about like the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. But now those are quite outdated. There's a lot more abuses that are happening with digitally derived data that I don't think we've really confronted quite yet. And so some people argue like maybe we just dabble in this gray area. So there's a professor at Princeton, Matthew Salganek, and he thinks that it should be principles based so that as a community, the more transparent we are about what we're doing, then people will be able to say, OK, that is not ethical or not. One example, there was the Facebook emotional contagion study that got a really big backlash. And so they're actually suppressing positive or negative types of news on your Facebook and seeing how it affected your behavior on the app. And there was no consent. So people thought it was unethical to be suppressing like positive news or positive messages or negative messages. And so this is really the realm of what we're now having to think about in terms of private companies, what is ethical in the digital environment as well. Yes. In your process of being to the inputs, the physical side, what is it you want to model? But it seems like a lot of it is true in the next five years, right? Like there's clearly been simulations and done for decades, clearly referencing NASA. Buildings have been doing these sensitive things for an agent-based modeling with your spaces. But when you look at the next five years, what do you see being the meta-trends that carry forward where there's actual value to citizens, value to businesses, value to cities in making these decisions. And then clearly if we look globally, different countries, different cities fall on different spectrums of this. So the same city model with different social inputs will have radically different outcomes. So like, I guess if you've had a map for five years, what do you think is the future of digital twin cities five years from now where it was five years ago? My inclination is that it's not a great predictive tool just because as humans, whenever we are faced with something, we always adapt. And so it's really hard to forecast out five years. I think in any type of forecasting or like time series modeling, the closer you are to the moment of now, it's going to be a lot more accurate. And so yes, maybe if it's like a short term prediction, it's going to be more accurate. But because in a city, every small action is going to create a larger, I guess like a swing in what's going to happen in the predictability. Yeah, so for me, I don't know if it shouldn't be a prediction. I think it could be scenarios because you can say these are the possible outcomes. But I don't think it's really deterministic necessarily. And I think for now, we should focus on monitoring, which is a lot easier. And I think it responds to now. And it's going to be, I think that's the first step before we even go into predicting because I think that can get quite, I would not bet, you know, like my last dollar on what happens five years from now on a model of like a whole city and what's going to happen. The rest of it so alluded to I think three slides earlier or something on an API and open layering. I'm just curious for how is there a working group of consensus group on how to get to this type of open approach? Or is it all still coming from like Microsoft doing what they're doing, what they're doing, what they're doing Apple Google and smaller companies? How are these pieces coming together? I think that's for the researchers to figure out. But yeah, I think we need better understanding of urban systems. And so even before we start to predict like the whole city, I think we need to start saying, okay, what are the combinations of like the environment where like green infrastructure on like public use like usage and real estate prices or whatever. Right. So I think they're all we have to start taking really small things so that we can get a better understanding about how these complex decisions or how these simple decisions are like part of this like complex system. And so I think this is really one way of kind of getting to that knowledge. But right now, many of our research has been very siloed right now. And so whenever you want to go across the field, you have to really like find someone. And so hopefully this will start to open it up and give more complex understandings about what happens in urban systems. Adam Paul Sosnick, MRC 20. I work at ACOM on the pursuits and government relations team. And I run the project segregation by design in which I use historic colorized historic photography and data to demonstrate how the United States used housing and transportation policy to segregate the American city to segregate the largest 180 specifically metropolitan areas. This image. So I'm going to be showing images from various cities, not specifically New York, but because this again, the largest 180 cities. So it's a lot of them. And then you see that housing act of 1949 that guy is going to come up again. How do I do that? Okay, if this one is the point of that slide is to say that the history is long and complicated. That's from the book of that's from the book by Richard Rothstein, the color of law. It's in the recording and we can go back to take a picture that's available online. But so what I want to focus on today is for key events for key federal policies and one real estate practice that created the incentives and funding mechanisms by which the largest 180 cities essentially through automobile based suburbanization segregated the city again. And to some extent it was an automobiles housemanization of the largest 180 cities because of the scale involved. So I'm going to start sequentially with redlining. I'm sure many of you are familiar with that. So redlining was a policy in during the New Deal. Created by the federal government. They created the HLC, which is the homeowners loan corporation for the purpose of shoring up the depression housing market. What they did was they went neighborhood by neighborhood. They went city by city block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood. Ranking or grading the residential security of each neighborhood explicitly based on race. And you can see that in their comments. This is Oakland. That was Brooklyn when I showed there, but this is Oakland. And you can see even in the even in the cells they have for people to type into what they're asking what they're asking them to record. And what's interesting is some this has occasionally been recast as commenting on the quality of the buildings. They do, in fact, in these notes go into talking about the repair of the buildings. And the connection is pretty tenuous because you can see what ends up happening is the more racially integrated neighborhoods get redlined. So that's the red. I should explain the grading system. So red and yellow is third and fourth grade. That's what they say is a neighbor that has an infiltration of undesirable racial elements. And then blue and yellow are third and fourth grade. So the what happens with the places that are red lines, the effect of this is to the point of this is the government is saying that these are risky investments. So it's the government officially telling banks don't invest in red and yellow. So it's saying these areas because of their because of the fact that they're racially integrated that reduces the property values. And the effect of that is it becomes a feedback loop. So the attack spaces get innervated maintenance gets curtailed services get canceled. And then what this also facilitates is a practice known as block busting in which real estate with real estate speculators. This is actually kind of a hard practice to describe because it sounds so cartoonish in some of these more integrated areas, especially in the yellow areas, they would in order to scare whites out. So what this said was that people of color reduce the property value. So in the yellow areas in order to scare whites out is they would they do this practice called block busting in which they would hire African Americans to just be walking on the street in which they would. There's a good list on Wikipedia actually but they would hire mothers and to walk down the street. It's very deplorable and they would dump trash and take pictures of it. But so again, it becomes a feedback loop. It encourages whites to flee where they are in these what the folks that do live in in yellow and red. This is Philadelphia, by the way, but again, it's it's it's relatable to every city applicable. And in downtown Camden, you know, they know they specifically this is downtown Camden here. They know them in the redlining documents that this is the heart of the city that the buildings are of good construction. But again, because it's in the I don't show it up here, but because it's 50% foreign born 50% Negro as they call it, it's redlined. This is the Bronx and you can see nearly all of it was in that third and fourth grade. Buffalo. So this is Buffalo. The redlining map you can see it still has a very strong correlation. So this is from the 2010 census data. They haven't updated this map yet. But you can see that the Hispanic area was once redlined. The white area was in that first and second grade and African American on the east side is incredibly segregated as we saw with the recent shooting and his motivation, etc. So moving on from redlining. So redlining sets the stage in which the inner city integrated neighborhoods are purposefully made to decay again because of that innovation of the tax bases due to artificially lowered property values. So what happens after World War Two when all the drafted men come back? There is the GI Bill. So the GI Bill basically gives them heavily subsidized. So it gives the millions of returning men heavily subsidized mortgages in the suburbs. So outside of the city center. Now, what's critical to note about that is there were many African Americans who served as GIs and in the military during World War Two. But again, these GI Bill gave them suburban mortgages and suburban mortgages are back in the day they had. So this is the real estate practice. So these new suburbs that were being built were being built with restrictive covenants, which is where it written into the lease. This is one of those leases. The picture got kind of screwed up, but written into the lease were racial restrictions. Pretty straightforward. So while the African Americans returning from the war were technically eligible in practice, this wasn't for them. So this created the red lining created a sort of stick by purposefully allowing the inner cities to deteriorate. And then this creates a carrot for white flight. So those two after the war really create a policy based white flight. So this is Levitown, obviously very famous. And there was all sorts of benefits for veterans. So that's what creates white flight. And then these next two, three and four, the 49 Housing Act and the 56 Freeway Bill. What these do is these give the cities who have had their downtown neighborhoods innervated by red lining and white flight. These give them new funding mechanisms to basically remake their downtowns for the purpose of attracting that crowd that has left. Not necessarily the purpose of attracting whites back downtown, not necessarily to live, but for commercial facilities. That's why we end up building giant sports facilities downtown. And that's not the best example. But for instance, so the 49 Housing Act, what that does is it gives cities two thirds federal funding for slum clearance project. And those are loosely defined. And the slum clearance projects, what's defined as a slum is obviously built, or it is specifically built on those grades that were laid out in the red lining map. So this is building on the legacy of red lining. And these ends up, so it's these neighborhoods that end up being targeted for slum clearance with two thirds federal funding. So this was downtown Boston. And this is when, you know, as we're architects here, this is when modernism. The ideologies of modernism and core sort of start getting actualized in the United States. Not to get into that, but these various cities, I focus a lot on Boston just because I have a lot of, I've recently covered it. But cities came up with these sort of whizz bang space age plans to remake their downtowns for the purpose of attracting backs of urban commuters. And what's interesting in the planning documents, as you see, this Boston, in the planning documents, they stop referring to it as the CBD, the Central Business District, and start referring it as actually the Central Parking District, which kind of shows you something. And, you know, for various reasons, these plans end up not living up to the promises of their promoters, whether it be that our municipal, this is an ongoing project I'm speculating out loud here, whether it be that, you know, these municipalities didn't have the capacity to do such large projects, or in some cases some projects were undertaken explicitly in bad faith. So this is the West End in Boston, which is this one here. So it gets totally cleared out over the course of four years. This is Roxbury, I'll get to that in a second. But so this is part of those, entirely funded by the 49 Housing Act. This was a ploy by the city, the Boston government, again, to attract people back downtown. And so this was an Italian and Jewish neighborhood, actually Leonard Nimoy is from here. And there's some great, from Spock, from Sparta, there's some great interviews with him. And, you know, all these people were led, so the government takes this land through eminent domain. And sometimes there are plans, but other times, so I'm not doing a great job explaining this. So they take this land through eminent domain and they told the residents that they would be rebuilding public housing, as much public housing, 10,000 people were displaced here. And they end up building about 300 units of housing in this area. After the BRA explicitly held press conferences saying that these people would be able to relocate back to this neighborhood. So in some cases it's perhaps incompetence that leads to these projects failing, but in other cases it is actually malice. For instance, this one is downtown Roxbury, or not downtown, Nubian Square in Roxbury, which is on the city government, they call it the cultural capital of Black Boston. So this is famously a Black neighborhood in Boston. Through eminent domain they take all, they seize these properties and they build a police station here. And the housing back here, these were sold, so for this, for instance, they had a plan with eminent domain. They were going to build, they took it and then they used it for public purposes. But so sometimes on these slum clearance projects, what they do is they'll do eminent domain and take the properties demolish it, then they'd actually just sell it back to a private developer. So that's, for instance, what happens here in Philadelphia, but I'll get to that in a second. And sometimes the land just becomes, after these urban renewal projects, the land becomes basically worthless, so there's nothing, they just end up building parking lots as that becomes the best use of the land, or the most profitable. And then in addition, you can see they also ripped out a subway line, but that's a long story. And this is Philadelphia. Again, I'm talking about the 49 Housing Act. It created the funding mechanisms and incentives for cities to create these, I've already said this, but these sort of large-scale, houseman-like redesigns based on automobiles. And again, this is Ed Bacon in Philadelphia, but he's not so important because Ed Bacon is there, Robert Moses. It doesn't matter. I'm talking more about trends as incentivized by those two policies. So again, in Philadelphia, much of this never ends up getting built. Much of these end up just becoming parking structures. And again, another example of a project where they used eminent domain to seize this whole block and then sold it back to a private developer and then they didn't have, there was no incentive for them to actually rebuild the housing because they also ripped out the trolley line, so it became hard to get there. And then obviously here in New York, we have our own fair share of harebrained schemes. So this is Robert Moses. I'm sure most folks are familiar with him. He is the one who designed a lot of the highways in New York. In this presentation and in the project, I'm trying to talk a lot about trends as incentivized by these, but there are important actors who do set trends. That was an aside. And then in 56 comes the Highway Act. So remember this provided two-thirds funding for slum clearance, which is loosely defined as basically the government being given permission to demolish formerly redline neighborhoods. And then 56, so two-thirds funding for this, 90% funding for interstates. So let's say you have a main street in your town. If you want to do a road build, if you want to upgrade that main street, if you upgrade it to federal highway standards, the government will come in and give you 90%. So that's why we have such an orgiastic explosion of freeways everywhere, because it actually made sense, incentive sense, why it was money on the table. And you can see this is the central artery being built in Boston. So these two end up getting coupled together as both slum clearance and freeway building projects basically get joined. This is Bronx before and after, and they're able to double-dip into that two-thirds and 90% funding. And it represents the largest investment in infrastructure the United States has ever done. But, and again, where these freeways get routed is through, to some extent, the government had a fiduciary obligation to choose the most, the cheapest routes. What were the cheapest routes? It was the areas that were redlined. So it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that's why I like to talk about all four of these in unison. Because again, this reduced the property values, this caused white flight, and this trapped people of color in the center city, and these two destroyed the center city and made them accessible to the suburbs. So this is the construction of the Crossbones Expressway in the Bronx, which displays 60,000 people, which is the largest, the most people displaced of any infrastructure project in American history. And, you know, the effects are still being felt today. And I'm almost finished. It's not just that these communities were destroyed. They're also, this is like an open wound to some extent. You know, the tens of thousands of people that live along these highways face crisis-level noise every day. Especially what I think is kind of funny in East Tramont is it's a big hill. So it's not like a dull roar of cars. It's like a grinding roar of trucks changing gears to go uphill. And then, you know, coincidence, the entire South Bronx, nearly every single census tract, is in the 99th percentile for asthma. This is the last page. Just as a PS, there's a book that came out. People ask me a lot why I do this as a, you know, white dude. There's a book that came out recently by Heather McGee. It's called The Sum of Us. So it's about what racist policies like this cost everybody. So she uses the example, the central metaphor of the public swimming pool. So similar to the 36, the redlining, during the New Deal, the federal government through the WPA funded the creation of public swimming pools in cities across the country. And this is back when public meant New York Public Library and not whatever Penn Station is now. So they created these public swimming pools in cities across the country, St. Louis, Buffalo, all over the place. Big, both art swimming pools, racially segregated, whites only. In the 50s, when the Supreme Court cases start coming down, they desegregate. These pools are ordered to desegregate many cities, St. Louis, many others specifically in order to avoid integration. They drain the swimming pools and they demolish them. They're gone. And then subsequently after that, you see the rise of backyard swimming pools in single-family homes. So the point of that, the point of her metaphor there is they took what was, in the name of segregation, they took what was previously a public good that we all had access to. They privatized it. And they made it for people who had single-family homes. And one of the reasons I started this project, I used to joke and say I was wondering where the trams went. But I think it's similar to the public pool. This is a map of Philadelphia's transit in the 30s versus 2022. These routes have been replaced with buses, but each of these routes was five minutes or better. And the buses are not the same. And in New York, I was trying to figure out why in God's name, but they demolished the 3rd Avenue L, which is now gone. And this is one of the BX-19, I think it is, is the bus route in the city. So it was about this destruction of, or the reason I was interested in is because it was about, I'm interested in the destruction of public space in the name of racism, which is fascinating. So this is where I'm going to end.  If you want to take a picture of this slide, that QR code also goes to my Patreon. You want to support me on Patreon? No, I've covered 12. And what's fun about the project is, you'll see, I did the Bronx a while ago, and it's before I learned how to do colorization. So it's kind of fun with each city. And the colorization gets better. And the point of the colorization is comparative clarity. Before I was making everything black and white, like even the modern photos, because it's just tough in my mind to compare black and white to color. So I figure I'll meet halfway. I'll desaturate this and then slightly saturate that. But yeah, I've covered about 11 cities. Oh, I meant to show a video. Close to behind there. This is the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway. It's just placed about 60,000. Yeah, I got one for like L.A., too. And Boston. The website, if anyone's interested. The ones I've done so far are, okay, Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Bronx, DC, Houston, Minneapolis, Oakland. I do vote on my Instagram. So the intent is to create a book with basically each of these as like a chapter. It's like an atlas. But just as I started in Instagram as a way to like gamify it for me. So now I can like get a lot of feedback and like get a lot of praise every time I post. Which is great. I have 80,000 followers. I encourage you all to follow me. 80,000 across Twitter and Instagram. AOC follows me. The way I pick, I just do sometimes a vote. Like next I'm just doing Chicago because my analytics tell me that I have a bunch of followers there. You know, there's some that are special like Tulsa and here that I have to break down. I mean, special for historic reasons. I shouldn't say that because they're all special. But the bigger ones are like New York, I broke down. I'm doing five. Well, I'll just stand idle eventually. And then L.A., like I don't even know how I'm going to tackle that. I'm probably going to do next. But the order is just how I want to do it. The highway. It's also true that they built these highways through these red line areas. But there weren't any exits on these highways to these areas. So those areas became completely isolated and even more divestment is you couldn't even get off the highway to like drive through there. To pull that up. Yes. You're absolutely right.  And actually a real problem. The cross Bronx is the cross Bronx. We do stuff at work. So I have a lot of the cross Bronx is also a main trucking route for the Northeast corridor. And that's because we discontinued freight rail on the different issue. But it's one of the main trucking routes. And because there's so much traffic there. Oftentimes truckers will hit their hours.  I don't remember why they bring that up. Oh, the exits. Yeah. Whereas someplace like. The greatest example, but they demolished the whole downtown. Well, Baltimore, especially. And I'll tell you why. Baltimore. Well, why I'm not trying to offer solutions necessarily is. I'm not from any of these places. And it's one thing for me to talk about. The history. That's a little dicey itself, but. I mean, one of the, I think, I think actually coming as an outsider to these cities is kind of an advantage. For me to some extent, because there's all these narratives that pop up around projects. And I'll try to do two things at once. Well, I'm not trying to offer solutions because I don't know what's best for the community. You know, for instance, Buffalo has that they have. Buffalo had a linear park designed by by Frederick Law Olmsted. A linear park, unfortunately, is a great place for a highway. So they put a highway right. Well, it's not a great place for these things. You know, the people in the fifties, so they demolished the Humboldt Parkway. They built a highway over it. They're ongoing plans talking about capping or removal. I obviously, well, I favor removal entirely. I don't think these things are necessary. They induce cars. That's a whole different issue. And that's one of the, never mind.  The people who live there, though, they're in favor of capping. So I don't want to get into that. Not what I'm doing here. I'm trying to talk about history. Because people always ask if I'm talking about gentrification. No. The processes or the history that led up to their being the ability for gentrification to happen. Yeah, but so no. There's an Instagram following. I was curious if you had previous collaborations from cities or. Yeah. Who have in a way uses as an assessment just to in a way drive their projects or. Absolutely. Yeah, go ahead. Well, and that's actually back to your late because that informed sometimes how it picks cities. Like I did Houston because there was this there's this thing going on. There's this. And this is where I am willing to talk about present day because I'm just saying this is bad. So it's easy for me to say no to something that hasn't been done yet. So this is a free way expansion. And. That's going to take out. But so I was I was working with a group there. Stop. Yeah. The group's not a great name, but they're they're awesome. Stop TX 10. Something something. So yeah, I gave them some materials that they presented at. Like community meetings and text dot stuff because the text dot website. Obviously doesn't have a clear map intentionally.  It's madness. And a key part of this project. I'm not saying that these people are racist. I'm saying that all the incentives that led to this. And created a system where it's going to be all these panic. Get placed. So participating in that process is kind of. It's it's it's insanity. They're going to take out this whole thing. And then like there's another city. Buffalo. I was both of them. That was different. And then Portland has an ongoing expansion. What was the question? Sorry. I don't know. It's just to build on top of like projects or development. And stuff like that. Because I know you mentioned you have an Instagram following. I'm sure you could also have a following among other city. Planning departments. Oh, totally. Yeah. I know. So I gave this presentation at the, I work with preservation alliances. Okay. Although I don't necessarily always agree with that. They love brutalism. The style is fine. It's what they built the, what they built those buildings on top of the building is almost pointless to talk about. I'm talking specifically about Boston City Hall. It's like, as you see how dense the neighborhood was. And they, that's it there. It's like, you know, it's, it's madness. Yeah. I work with preservation alliances. And yeah, I have an exhibit. I worked with the mailman school at here. Professor Peter Munich. We have an exhibit up in. Well, and with Michael Bell, who is a professor here. He did a studio about capping the cross Bronx. So I contributed some work to that. Not about the capping part because I didn't get to be removed. Well, no, they just drop a train in there and build on top of it. Your timeline part plays out like it's a 20 years to a degree 10 and 15, 20 years from all the policies to come into place. And then, you know, this is all played out then over 30, 60, you know, continue to play out between these tensions of car centricity and non-car centricity. Yeah. Even there's been a material shift in the last 20 years at a planning policy level, like the city government, state government levels. Do you see this methodology being applicable now? Log maybe 10 years out, see how Buffalo might look different or how California is they make decisions and changes about cars to be more rail. So we can see kind of the reverse happening or like a lot of like urban density investments now happening sometimes from private industry. Just curious, do we see kind of reverse trends starting to play out as well? It's got worse. That's a good question.  Good question. Then we can move on to, but I hope you're going to stay for lunch and maybe, you know, there is obviously a lot of interest in your projects so people can continue chatting with you. I do want to. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's getting worse. Oh, right, material shift. No, rhetorical shift has not been a material shift. In fact, Cal, Democrats, Cal, trans, not dot, Cal, trans, they cut public funding, public transit funding by 18% raised freeway expansion about 30. So no, there's been a rhetorical shift, sure, but absolutely not a material shift.  It's on Moynihan train hall. It's on massive stations for the Second Avenue subway rather than completing it and not the stations are the most expensive part of the subway. And they made them, they're far too large. But where we spend money is silly. Absolutely. Nothing's changed. The trend is going in the wrong direction where the most segregated we've ever been. Yeah. It's not good. Sorry. I don't mean to end on such a plumber. Sure. I'm going to finish during the rest of the cities. Yeah. I'm going to keep doing the cities. Next is Chicago. Oh, I'm applying for a PhD. Yeah.


My name is Staff Sergeant Montoya, I'm the Alpha Company 234 Armored Master Gunner and today we're going to be talking about Gunnery Crew Table 6. We're giving a presentation to the Polish training cohort on how the United States Army performs gunnery qualification from tables one through six. This is important because the interoperability and understanding of different capabilities and limitations is critically important now that Poland is preparing to field their first Abrams tanks. At every level Master Gunners are responsible for coordinating both to their superiors and to subordinate units to ensure that the commander's intent is met in training. The Master Gunner plans and executes gunnery training, advises the commander on gunnery training courses of action and passes on knowledge to improve the lethality and capabilities of the unit as a whole. I hope they come away with this with a better understanding of their new platform's capabilities and limitations and of how we conduct our training so that in the future we'll get improved interoperability with our NATO allies.


Hello subscribers! Today is July 25th, the day that everybody's been waiting for. I'm going to pick two random winners, guys. And the way that's going to happen is I have all your names in these cups. I hope you can see there. There's 32, 33 entries, all in all. And again, I have all your names written in each of these pieces of paper. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to have my son come in here. He's actually going to get involved. And he's going to be the one that's going to actually pick the names. Two names, guys. So it's going to be awesome. It's going to be fun, guys. And I might actually contact you before you actually watch the video, guys. And that's going to be awesome. I'll email you right away after I upload this video and start planning it out and seeing what date and time is good for both of us. And we'll just go ahead and do that. And again, don't worry. Don't worry if you didn't win. I will be posting tutorial videos anyways after I hit 100 subscribers. So this is a little sort of sneak peek for those two lucky winners, guys. So and it's going to be about 30 minutes, 45 minutes or so. And we're going to do it through Skype. With that being said, go ahead and get yourself a Skype. It's free. It'll be good to communicate through there. We can share screens. I can show you exactly how to set up your thinkorswim. Get the thinkorswim platform as well, guys. Very easy to set up, free through TD Ameritrade. It'll just make things a lot better. And of course, we can try it with whatever you're already using, but I have tried it on Ninja Trader and it doesn't seem to sync up the way thinkorswim. It should be all the same, guys. But anyways, we'll get there. We'll cross that bridge when we get there, guys. So without further ado, I'm going to have my son come in here and we'll just do it. All right. Okay. Enjoy. Say hi to everybody. Hi, everybody. Adric everybody. He's three years old. He is my son and he's going to help us pick two winners. Huh? Alrighty. Alrighty, folks. So what I want you to do is without looking in there, pick one, one out of the many names in there and then we'll go from there. Okay. Alrighty. Go ahead and stick your hand in there and pick one, pick one. Perfect. Let's see who it is. And drum roll, please. Greg H. Greg H, everybody. There you have it. Greg H. And of course, I'm not going to write your last name in there. I have your emails and whatnot and I promise you there weren't two gregs in the mix. So Greg H, congratulations. I'll email you after I upload this video and you might know before you actually watch this video. Let's do it again, Bubs. Go ahead and reach in there and pick a name. Pick a piece of paper. Okay. You got it? Alright. So see who the second winner is. It is Jeff G. Jeff G, everybody. Jeff G. Congratulations, Jeff G and Greg H. You guys are lucky winners. Thank you so much for submitting your name, submitting an email, letting me know that you're interested in this. And again, don't worry. Don't be discouraged. If you didn't win this time around, I will be posting tutorial videos after I hit 100 subscribers. And for some reason, I don't have 100 subscribers within the next month or two. I'll do it again. I'll do it again. I had great success. It was awesome, guys. And so that's it, guys. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for supporting my channel. I greatly appreciate it. And we'll be on here tomorrow. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Bye, guys. Thank you so much for watching.


So President Solis, it is our pleasure to have you here at ITU and congratulations on being the first ITU patron for youth and ICTs. Thank you, I'm honoured, I'm very happy and I hope I keep up to this big commitment because it's a high responsibility to be awarded with this extraordinary occasion. And a great honour for ITU that you have accepted and I'd like to start President Solis by asking you why do you believe is ICTs so important for youth today? Well because it's the future and because it's already a reality that needs to be used as an opportunity for the improvement of the lives of millions of people. I'm always amazed when I see the world in general how many people are not connected to the digital ecosystems and it is our duty I think to bring the opportunities of more people to get engaged and particularly young people to use this information technologies to live better. This is the whole issue, living better, living more plentiful lives, having the opportunity to fulfil the dreams of individuals which can be so well served by these technologies. But obviously the challenge has to bring us to the realization that this is an effort that needs, requires public policies that it cannot be achieved simply by extending markets. There's a role for the state, there's a role for governments and clearly there's a role for the cooperation between the private sector and the public sector achieving therefore more potency in the programs we enact to generalize the use of digital technologies. But in my estimation, you know, the Inama historian history has taught us that technological change conditions in many ways the possibilities of society, of society function and with digital technologies we have the opportunity to democratize the economy to democratize politics to democratize social organizations, territorial development, etc. So in my view having the technology available it is only natural that governments and the private sector together with the rest of society will do the outmost effort in order to provide these technologies to be available for the majority of people. This is going to take time, it's not going to happen overnight, but we do require to bring about this opportunity to many people and this includes particularly an effort from the public sector to help the concretion of this dream by education, by fomenting education which I find critical to this regard. And with regard to the role of government, what concretely do you think that governments can do to better empower young people, to become entrepreneurs and to drive ICT start-up cultures? Well as I was mentioning, one fundamental ambitus for government action is education, good quality public education and good quality public education today entails access to the broadband for example, having internet become a normal part of the pedagogical model. In Costa Rica we are trying to do this with a special fund we have from telecommunications companies that private companies that are working in the country and what we want to do and this is already an ongoing effort is to make the broadband available to all public schools and high schools which would allow immediately to have access to a universe of possibilities in terms of educational developments. That's one thing. Secondly, I would find essential to provide funding for these start-ups. In my estimation this is probably the most necessary resource especially because young people are generally unexperienced and therefore they have very limited access to credit. So having them given the opportunity to access these credit mechanisms and provide these mechanisms with facilities including special interest rates and others could allow for an easier way to do it and then I would pay special attention to the populations with disabilities or with special needs because they are doubly or triply excluded as young people and women because we are not prepared for them and we're not readily and the tools are not readily available for this. You know I was once told and I fully agree with this that there are no people with disabilities but only people with special needs. Disabilities they are because of society's lack of the capacity lacking the capacity to take care of those special needs. So I do find that these three essential factors would be essential. Education, finance and access, accessibility to the majority of the young population. And as the UN system and the member states fight to you now really prioritise youth and specifically youth and ICTs do you believe that that can bring a positive contribution to tackling the global issue of youth unemployment? Oh definitely, most definitely. But it would be very important to somehow link the availability of digital resources to the more traditional parts of the economy using therefore telecommunications, innovation and communications as a springboard or even as a bridge that would allow these more traditional parts of the economy to link up with the more dynamic parts of the economy related to the global world. As I mentioned earlier there's a huge gap between the populations that are accessible or have access to technologies and those who do not. And I would find that making it possible to link up these two parts of societies would allow us to reduce the gap and at the same time include more people in the benefits of development. So yes I think it is possible to lessen the amount of people who are unemployed, young people who are unemployed as we expand these technologies. President Solis thank you very much for joining us here today and especially congratulations on being the first patron for ITU for youth and ICTs. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.


In this video, I'm going to show you how to create a more complex report or more complex Crest tab using some of the Boolean connectors. So again, we are looking at Spring 2018 report. So that's our base. I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to go ahead and go directly into Composer. You can build a report using Boolean connectors in that main screen. Personally, I don't like it. Now, when I talk about Boolean connectors, we're talking about and, or, and, not. I'm going to create a more complex search using Boolean connectors. In the Composer, I'm going to build some categories.  So I'm going to start with gender again, and I'm going to look at age. I want lifestyle. And I want demographics. It's going to be personal information as opposed to head of household, et cetera. If you look at the ages, they give you some individual ages. They also give you some ranges. The ranges will change. There are some narrow ranges. There are some broader ranges. I've selected 18 to 24 and 25 to 34. Now I want to find out men between the ages of 18 and 24 and men between the ages of 25 and 34. What kind of, or what brands of energy drink they consume. So what I'm going to do, I select my ranges and I click on add. Now what I can, I can build a report by using this and option. But what I am going to do is just say, do bulk join. So I want this and. What this does is this automatically joins all of these searches into and. So when you're looking at men between the ages of 18 and 24, men, 25 to 34, female, women, 18, 24, women, 25 to 34. And then I want to add these to my row. Now I'm going to go back to energy drinks and I'm going to put these in columns. And then I'm going to go ahead and run the report chart type, cross tab view. I actually don't want to see this row. So I can actually delete these after the fact, because I really just want the men 18 and 24. Now I can delete these to edit name. If I want to, same thing as how I can, I can edit these. So again, when we read these, let's start with five hour energy. It's actually going to monster. This looks like a pretty good one of all those that drink monster, that drink monster the most 12.8% of them are men between the ages of 18 and 24 of all the men between the ages of 18 and 24 11.6% of them drink monster. Now if we see here, it says 217, that's the index. You could actually say they are 117% more likely to drink it. You could also say that men between the ages of 18 and 24 are twice as likely than the average to drink monster. If we look down here under the 25 to 34, it says 329, it means they are three times likely than the average. And we would read this the same way of all those that drink monster, 28.6% of them are men between the ages of 25 and 34 of all those, all men between the ages of 25 and 34, 17.5% of them drink monster. And again, we look at the little arrows. This is an up arrow. In a previous report, when I looked just at men and women, women in general were not drinking as many energy drinks as men, but you'll see the arrow here. It's saying this is really kind of an upward trend. You'll see the numbers are significantly different. Are the percentages of all those that drink monster, 8.9% of them are women between the ages of 18 and 24. Of all those women between the ages of 18 and 24, 8.4% of them drink monster. Now the index is still 157, so they are 57% more likely. It is smaller than twice as likely or three times as likely, but they are still more likely to. If you look at the other numbers, the sample and the weighted, so the number of people, so the sample was only 81, but they do estimate with the weighted number that 1.1 million women between the ages of 18 and 24 drink monster. Now if you look at that compared to the men, this is, there were 118 men between the ages of 18 and 24 who took this survey and just, let's see, 1.65 million men between the ages of 18 and 24 are projected to drink monster. Again, if you see numbers with asterisks, like over here with red bull, that means the data is shaky. That means they have a smaller sample, the projected number is smaller, and so as they say down here, use those numbers with caution. If I want to save this when I am done with this report, if this is the finished report and this is what I want to look at, I can go ahead and export this. If you want to re-import it so you can run it again, you save it as an SPC. I'm going to save this as an SPC file.