we have a quorum so yeah why don't we start to start the roll call okay uh mike i am here great leslie here great uh joe bar here great uh jill here great natasha here marvin is absent uh jim here great and then i have jill connelly i don't he wasn't going to be able to join us i believe okay and then uh clear flare ricka i see her muted oh sorry you're muted here sorry sorry i wasn't looking at your face i'm so sorry i was that's all right the other part and i'm like she's here i see her thank you all right sorry for the confusion so uh absent is just marvin and joe connelly so um jim i'll turn it over to you yes and i think uh marvin will be re joining us at the next meeting he's never he's never left the work he's just not been able to attend our last few meetings so correct um so uh we are meeting on june uh june january uh thursday january 30th 2024 i wish it was june it would be much nicer um so uh and this is uh meeting of the artist our linkedin artificial turf study committee and we have a quorum so uh first item would be uh approval of the minutes i hope everyone's had a chance to look at them and i'm struggling with my computer right now to um to pull up the minutes um atash do you want to say anything about them while people maybe give them a quick look if i could just jump in once again i just want to note how complete and thorough and well written those minutes are so thank you very much for that and uh the other part of it is i think it's very important to read some of the attachments that people have sent in the public comments because some of those documents are really quite helpful and with that i will recommend we approve the minutes that's presented yes sorry i'm still there it is okay learned about a lesson i i should have like i always do i should have downloaded this before the agenda before the meeting but um i did review the minutes so is there a motion i moved so we've got a motion from like we thank you jill okay okay all those uh in favor we'll go right down the list so mike yes okay leslie stained abstained uh joe bar yep uh jill yes okay natasha yes um marvin is not present and jim yes okay motion uh the meeting minutes are approved natasha does a great job at this and i'm so glad she is the the committee secretary i try jack of all trades but please i welcome any feedback and any so well you know i think the most helpful thing about the minutes is you know we do have people who attend the meetings and listen but um and follow what we're doing attentively but to be honest probably a lot of people who are interested in what we're doing don't have the opportunity due to scheduling or other reasons and so if they have nothing else but the minutes i mean we know we have recordings too but if they had nothing but the minutes i think they'd get a very um accurate picture of our conversations and our progress so um that's the hallmark of good minutes so thank you well i i do think that these the you know once this report goes to town meeting that the the process of the committee may be you know subject to a fair amount of scrutiny so i think having thorough minutes and we welcome it and we welcome it joe we all agree but i think it's important you know natasha's doing a great job and i think it's particularly important i like on the capital planning committee than i'm on i'm not sure if too many people actually go back and look at our minutes um and i was recording secretary for four years so i took i tried to take thorough minutes but yeah so i know how hard it is but i think this will probably get a little more scrutiny so for sure for sure as well our recordings and you know i mean i i um and i do think we will probably get more interest in our meetings as we get further down the path the next two or three weeks in terms of um of um you know progress made and as we start to sort of come to terms with some actual recommendations potentially uh so uh correspondence received is natash any want to give us the quick rundown on that sure so we have um four pieces of correspondence that we've received um we've got one email from susan chapnick it was in regards to the human health and environmental concerns particularly the investigation of pfast a second email from susan chapnick um bringing the attention to a natural grass playing field study case study at our spring field um the third from susan chapnick was um attention to the cost table from the meeting materials from uh january 23rd and i believe she was looking for some clarification um and the fourth email was from clarissa row of town meeting member as well as architect uh sorry landscape architect um just with um her her thoughts and concerns about artificial tariff um so those are the meeting minutes there were some supporting materials that were in the attachments as well all that's been provided uh so at this point um happy to discuss i would be happy to address um the human health and environmental concerns and the investigation of of pfast um so our group is definitely looking at not just pfast but a lot of other chemical materials we've just chosen not sorry chemicals and and compounds we've just chosen not to necessarily discuss that here at this point only because all of that's going to come out into our conversation and our discussion with the report so um all of the updates to date have tried to be very brief but it is not to say that we're not discussing um these important topics so i i just did want to provide clarification with that um and i think that's all i really have to say right now yeah i'll make a few comments in addition to that and just following on that comment you know yes for those who are wondering we're going to be addressing pfast the safety group we have not been looking at that because that's not doesn't really fit into our picture or our piece but i'm guessing health and environmental are definitely taking a look at pfast and or anyone worried we're going to have a pfast free report uh don't don't worry we will address that issue um the other comment i had is just um i want to just clarify two things when people submit comment and we welcome it and i read all of it and it's generally very helpful even if i don't agree with it it's generally very helpful and more often than not i agree with it um but two things uh first if someone's going to submit um something to um to make a certain point um i just would hope that they would do the research necessary to make sure that the point they're trying to prove is actually true um so if someone says you know such as such town does not have any artificial turf fields that's fine i just would hope that they would make sure that that's an accurate statement and that what they're providing us accurately reflects that that town has no artificial turf fields in some cases we receive things where on a simple google search it quickly became clear that the town did have artificial turf fields you know so people are free to submit whatever they want but you know if there's a question about its accuracy it's not helpful to the to the committee members in addition i personally do not do not care if people submit um publications from from industry sometimes industry has some very helpful view points as long as when someone does so they alert us that it is an industry back group or an industry supported group just so we have that context something was submitted i did some google searches related to one of the items and i realized there was an industry backed group um and so it's not that i discounted what i read but i read it with more context knowing that it was not a you know a neutral unbiased observer making these observations about about artificial turf so um those are my only cautionary notes submit whatever you want we'll read it we'll do our due diligence it's just as more helpful if people provide things in the proper context to us anyone want to add anything else i don't lord okay um with that keep moving working group updates we always nine attache you do the you know you help me with the agenda and you do this ordering so you know maybe one week you can mix it up but i'm perfectly fine with health going first sure happy to um so jill and i were able to meet over the weekend and we have started as i've mentioned before we we've started our our sort of report our written report and um we've started to plug in a lot of our resources so uh a lot of the research material uh jill and able jill and i were able to sort of sit down and decipher through and get them into buckets in terms of um some of the conclusions that we're coming from we're coming to not even necessarily conclusions but our research um plugging in where those research where those resources um also line up so we've been working um pretty pretty well on that we feel like we've got a good um a good sort of base going there we have talked more and more about um some of our speakers i've reached out to a few different um folks and i i still have not you know been able to reach who i who we would like to um and we are waiting to hear back from marvin but we should hear back from him this week so i'm really hopeful that we will have a presenter to to bring forth um you know within the next week or so and i jill and i also spoke about sort of uh you know what jill i'm i'm drawing a little bit of a blank i'm going to uh punt to you a little bit if that's okay so i think the thing disclosure i had um hope it this week so my brain's a little bit funky go ahead i'm sorry the things we still are looking at balancing our understanding more about usability and access to playing and contrasting that with what is true PFAS and other chemical exposure um and i was just looking through the 20 nanograms per liter is the drinking water levels per mass ddp which actually is like a pretty low number some of the other states are much higher but we don't have groundwater drinking in arlington or maybe you know there's a few people to do but most people have municipal water so i guess my question is if you're being exposed through maybe swimming in the res or walking on a field like what what kind of exposure is that and i think that goes back to what we're really looking for for a speaker um if you know if we're not talking about drinking or consuming off of products that contain PFAS what is the exposure that we're talking about and how you know what are the levels that are i don't think safe is the right word but acceptable and we are having a hard time finding um i i think i couldn't find anyone at chan school of public health that has that kind of expertise and it looks like we're trying to look a little bit at the use public health i also had a sorry well yeah i mean i think our group we end up talking a little bit of pfs in our group not that it's necessarily in our in our bucket but just because you know there was a comment made about people so we we talked about pfs a little bit in our group and i i do think it's jill your point is really important as we unpack this because there's a lot of information on pfs and and also pfs is not one thing it's it's you know hundreds of things and there are six things that you know then a focal point on pfs but there's you know my understanding is there's hundreds of things in the p pfs pfo pfos you know realm um and there's a lot of information about what has pfs and what doesn't but you know the understanding i have through work on this committee and prior prior work and other positions is that the most the greatest concern about pfs is drinking water that's not to say other concerns aren't as you know aren't important it's just the focus has always been the primary focus has always been on drinking water supply contamination and the drinking water supply um that is in my opinion and i i'm open to disagreement if there is that is not an issue in earlington we get our water from the mwr a which gets its water from the quabbin which is by all indications by the annual testing they do practically pristine when it comes to pfs um so that's not to say that pfs can't run off into brooks and rivers and you know contaminate things for fish and wildlife and and and other areas you know the res uh which would be a concern but you know the greatest concern is drinking water and that's just not unless someone's drinking from a well in earlington and maybe there's a few people who have private wells um that's not an issue and um so you know sort of is separating out the pfs issues and the various pfs and the pfs concerns can take a lot of work and i don't envy the work of the health and environmental groups in doing that but i don't know i hope i haven't said anything controversial i don't think i have but i think i think it adds to like what are the comparable communities and last time we were talking about malden being densely populated on mwra water whereas like a marthe's vineyard really probably does have different concerns so i can imagine marthe's vineyard probably has a significant amount of of well water that is used for drinking um so so i think really if we can get a person to understand what are the sources other than drinking water and teflon pans that allow this chemical to infiltrate the body and what are we talking about for levels because if you look at some of the data that was sent to us and those various testing sites the levels were levels that would be problematic in drinking water um but we're not talking about drinking water and i think and the environmental group i think is going to have different issues but as far as the health group goes that's the real question to me is is how is this entering our body and i got to thinking today we may want to look at something like age and and who has priority if we are to have turf surfaces and maybe it is the littlest kids that aren't playing on the field because they may be the most likely to like take with them some of the materials and and ingest them but i think when we're talking about older kids there's probably little in the way of ingesting so what can they get through falling on the field or just simply playing in the area can i pause the discussion for a second natash i've gotten a text from a few people say they can't get into the meeting not not members but members of the public really they say the meeting's locked or it's saying the meeting's locked okay this is a technical difficulty um i'm trying to go into the settings here i don't exactly know everything i'm doing i there are people from the public that have gotten in so yeah i will try and work on this piece i don't know what this do they have the right uh connection to you are yeah they should uh uh because we've been using the same yeah there yeah there's no password that you need to use it should just come right in the town no we did switch uh from one zoom account to another but it's been several it's been a few weeks since we've done that so yeah this person said click down link on our committee web page and getting a message getting getting message unable to join meeting host is locked a meeting okay let me see how i can get into the settings here sorry i didn't mean to break the it's okay i um mic i know you want to get in on this discussion just very briefly i think what you're saying about water supply is true that we get our water from the mwra and i think to that extent it's irrelevant for this committee's work uh about drinking water because we're focusing on playing fields so i'm not sure why even the issue of drinking water is is being considered here yeah and you know and that's an important really important point mic because when you you know i've been reading a lot about martha's vineyard and then tuck it and port smith new hampshire um the drinking water concern was a huge issue in those communities because they aren't mwra communities they are getting you know especially in antucket and martha's vineyard they already had p-fast issues related to their airports and you know the firefighter foam and and they already had things leaching in and so you know they only have limited water supply and if it gets contaminated they're they're in trouble same with port smith where they're so it's not to say that i'm not trying to diminish the issues that those communities were facing it's just not our issue here we have may have other issues with p-fast but the drinking you know things running off and getting into our drinking water supply isn't going to be one of them and we can thank the mwra for that i guess for doing a good job of keeping i just was curious to know why that even came up because we're not looking at drinking water issues in this committee as far as i know yeah well yeah well joe maybe can explain it was it was in the the information that was sent out in the packet and what you know what i was looking at is first like okay these fields are are leaching p-fasts but then what i realized is all those communities that were looking at it drinking water was a concern for them and all of the regulations we don't have there's not regulations of like how much would be in the environment it's how much p-fasts can be in your drinking water yes so that really seems to be the only regulation jim um i'm sorry to interrupt joe i'm so sorry i i did touch something on the settings here so anything that may have been locked before has been unlocked i don't know how that happened but hopefully that will these folks can get in so if you're getting messages jim ask them to to try again you don't mind okay okay now i'm getting two people i'm so sorry to interrupt just that's all right and it said the town calendar entry is is the way to go i will check in with um those folks as well okay okay good i see some of the folks yep good not sure what one of the thought of drinking water it pays you i recognize it's not an issue for harlington but we do have neighboring communities that have their own water systems and given the topography i don't think we're probably having much impact on them but you know both cambridge and uh winchester have you know their own well i think winchester is a hybrid but you know some of their own water supply and have surface reservoirs um yeah that are within the within those communities so again it's not an issue and it i don't probably not really a issue for those communities either like i said given the topography but it is something to think about that we're not not everybody in eastern massachusetts is on mwa water it's a good point show really good point and i think that's what jill was saying just maybe i'll try to bridge mike's comment and jill's comment i think the reason why we sometimes do bring up drinking water is it is the even though it's not relevant in this case is because it is the most quantifiable thing the federal government and the state government has done sort of say danger levels whereas in other p fast contamination issues it's a little vaguer is so you know was this what you were getting at show maybe it maybe i'm not but like yeah it's not as clear that if you like bathe in p fast what that's doing to you you know i mean what i usually read is like taking a shower if there's p fast in the water in your shower like that's not necessarily good but it's not necessarily going to affect you or at least we don't know how much it affects you whereas with drinking water you drink a glass of water that's above the standards put out there we we've been told that that's bad so i don't know i don't want to beat a dead horse but that's am i kind of where you were on this show okay yeah and i think joe brings up a good point is that if we're going to end up with site specific conversations there are i would imagine that you know fresh pond being the backup reservoir we would have to look at something like thorn dyke and is there any yeah is there any contamination whereas other places i think are probably much farther away um so we certainly don't want to dismiss our neighboring communities yeah for sure okay thank you health you're busy and when marvin comes back he's going to be back with a full head of steam i have a feeling so um i don't want to break the flow but you imagine guest speakers you know we had sort of said the sixth of the thirteenth would be potential times for guest speakers that doesn't mean some other date if someone's really available on some other date or future tuesday we couldn't find a way to fit them in um and it seems like right now even though we're talking to a bunch of people i don't know how realistic next tuesday is so i mean maybe the thirteenth is more realistic at this point you know giving people at least two weeks notice um and we can talk about scheduling in our next meeting at the end of this one but um i guess i'll move to the safety update now um so um so i think you know our group met uh today we usually meet meet uh on tuesday tuesday at noon and joe uh lesley and i had a good conversation sort of talking through one of things joe's been taking a deep dive on and it's sort of related to our work and sort of important our work not necessarily in our charge but if something joe had wanted to kind of take a deep dive on was you know the maintenance and cost issues you know what's the cost of installation what's the cost of maintenance and what's the comparison between the two and although it's not directly part of our charge it it's relevant to our charge and i'm glad joe's kind of doing the deep dive and i had shared with him the 2016 tory analysis i granted it's 2016 it's you know oh nearly eight years old now and um but joe sort of used that as a guide and then compared it to some of the numbers from recent installations or cost estimates we've gone so joe's keeping very busy with some of some of this stuff and um and uh it's very helpful i think as he's looking at that but lesley what else are we kind of i don't want to do all that talk what else have we been talking about when i let you do a say a few words or more than a few words yeah uh well just looking at you know the the organic maintenance as well and what the costs are relative to that um because even though it's kind of apples to oranges you know we're we're not doing the organic turf maintenance now even if we were to go to organic turf maintenance i mean we can see what those costs are and what the um impacts of those are but that's really a natural turf to natural turf comparison that's really comparing what we do today with our fields uh to what we could potentially do um to natural turf fields but it really doesn't impact usage you know even if you move to an organic turf management plan you still can't get on the fields if it's been we can't get on our natural grass fields if it's been raining and in the early spring with the with the amount of snow that we have so you know we can look at what those costs are and what the what it would take to to get to that but it's kind of irrelevant to what it would take to do artificial turf maintenance that kind of stands alone and we've been talking about trying to find somebody we have a few good leads um of someone who has worked in both uh grass turf um installation and maintenance as well as artificial turf installation maintenance someone who's done both is knowledgeable about both um and can also speak to the pros and the cons of both and can speak to how you know they've worked with various communities on um you know doing kind of better maintenance of grass fields while also you know uh you know what the drawbacks or benefits of that are versus installation of artificial and maintenance of artificial turf and we actually have a few candidates we've identified through some some media and public sources that we're going to try to see if we can maybe get you know one of these folks to come and speak to as someone who you know presumably doesn't come to this with bias is they work with both um and have helped communities with both but may be able to be a good resource to us in sort of an unbiased ways explaining why some communities go one way and some communities go the other and the costs and and you know can also speak to you know injury what they see in terms of injuries with either you know or both um so we've actually have I don't want to say their names yet because you know we may not be able to get them but we've identified at least one and maybe potentially two or three people who might fit the fit the bill there and I think would be good and not just to address the safety part but also could address some issues that the other uh working groups might might have so yeah there's so my point yeah yeah well I when I spoke to Dan Martin at MIT I mean they have both turf and grass and he said they spend about eight or ten thousand dollars a year on maintenance for turf and about 150 000 a year on maintenance for grass now they have about two to three times as much probably grass as they do turf but I mean I'm happy to reach back out to him and sort of solidify those numbers if that's helpful but I mean they they obviously have both and and maintain both so that's you know that's a sort of real life example of what they what they tend to spend which is probably more than we would be able to spend yeah it's more but I mean as a person and I mean Joe's I think Joe's data is not necessarily inconsistent with that I mean the numbers may be different but that there's yes that it probably is consistent with what Joe the numbers he's gathering from various sources including you know our own numbers for what we're spending today here you know again we have the experience of having both types of fields yeah I think Joe's the information from MIT could be very helpful in terms of just comparing what they've shown what they've been doing I think that'd be helpful for us in terms of cost you know and I'll remind folks who are listening you know we know the costs are not they're not the main event here right but it's still I think town meeting when we make a final report would still appreciate you know an analysis of part of the equation it's part of the equation you know for some people it may be a lesser part of the equation for some people it may be a greater part so we think we should include it and to the extent Joe and other either of our Joes have been able to put some time into this I think it's worth including provided you know we get we get it right and I think we will with the two Joes working on it so um Leslie I have a question for you if we were to move towards organically maintained turf fields that are not mud pits like some of the fields we have now would a component of that be less hours of play to make that work like do they have to be used for only a certain amount of time a day I think that's a question we need an expert to answer you know I mean I think we could we could shake the bushes ourselves but yeah I mean based on our based on the experience I mean actual turf is whether it's wet or you can put the little kids like going back to the conversation that we had a while ago um about you know ages little kids going out on a grass field aren't going to cause the type of wear that you're going to get from the older athletes and kids at the high school level or you know that are more serious and any field any grass field is going to be damaged if it gets enough use when it's vulnerable when it's wet um which is not the case with I mean that's why you know we we talk a lot about when in the spring teams can actually go out onto the fields and it's so dependent on the New England weather and what type of um weather we have so seasonally the actual sports teams season starts in mid-march but we can't let our athletes out onto the field generally in mid-march because they're too vulnerable um whether the whether the field is maintained as it is today or it's maintained organically it's still grass and there's it's still uh subject to damage if it's used when wet it doesn't artificial turf doesn't have the same limitations that grass fields have I mean that's that's just the nature of the field yeah and MIT said that it's more about that like how much do you say they can get in the spring and in the late fall versus like necessarily I think Joe Conley said this last week as well sort of more use yes like day to day it's more about starting earlier and maybe going a little bit later and you can also I guess if you do it right you can plow you can plow a turf field in a way that you can't with a natural turf field although again if you don't do it right you can just rip the field up you can rip the field up but I have seen I have seen um fields in use in New Hampshire in February March with snow mounds piled up on either side um you can get snow off of an artificial turf field without damaging the field um and it's playable and they're not damaged as long as you've as you say plow it right that is the issue around here are those shoulder seasons you know the the march and into september to november when you're trying to be outside and and on the fields but the grass fields are very fragile especially in the spring they're fragile and doing damage at that time can cause years of um trying to trying to fix them and and I think anyone's you know anyone that's gone to our fields can see the wear at the goal mouths or if you're if you've gone and looked at lacrosse games the the face off circles you can see where the wear happens and that's just as a result of natural play and and natural patterns and we've tried to rotate fields so that those wear patterns happen differently um you know but we don't always have the capacity to do that because our we don't have you know 100 100 not 100 percent of our rectangular fields cannot be rotated into a different configuration we're very we're limited we're limited um in in our space and the way that our fields are configured or can be configured I mean when we look at poet's corner and and the way it's crowned and and and the sloping sides you have to consider that you can't just do any type of um field game there because it's going to end up going on to the access road you know balls are going to go on to the access roads so you know our fields are are not you know if you were going to pick the locations for fields some of our locations are not where you would necessarily pick there are results of our fields having been landfills that we turned into parks and and fields um yeah so that's just the condition of where we're at and I think that that was one of the reasons that I thought maldon was an intriguing example because it's very you know they have a very similar demographic and a similar problem and what they were you know trying to what they are doing with one of their fields um went through a lot of the decision making that that we're looking at now Leslie can I just ask that quick question that maldon case are they taking a an existing artificial turf field and making it it's so it's a grass that they're converting or just a space a space okay perfect thank you yeah I think it was a park playing field but it was it was grass and there were some contamination issues yep and they're going to artificial turf yes yes well on one field at least one yeah on this one field they're in the process of which used to be a process of you know very similar process decision making process there's a study on that um we can go on and on I think Leslie and I um we have like we have we have very good meetings um but I think we'll turn it over and environmental thank you um yeah so the environmental group has made some progress I'm glad to report that we are at this point narrowing our bullet points and areas that we are going to focus on to I think four maybe five particular topics that are of concern to to the environment my environmental issues and I'll point out that they I could relay them to you at this point but I think it's more important for me to say that we also are looking at several speakers and I did want to address the speaker issue yeah that um one question is are we going to have one speaker from each subgroup or more are we going to have a question and answer session primarily with a very brief introduction from the speaker or what's the format of that going to be and how much time are we going to take so those are a couple of questions about speakers I guess I'd say you get the speaker we'll figure it out uh you know I mean some of my speakers want to know things ahead of time and I get that but I guess you know we can be very flexible you know I mean I envision that they would do a short presentation um followed by Q&A from from the group but their presentation could also be in the in the scheme of like Mike maybe you you know having a little bit of a back and forth with them to get some information out and then opening up to a larger group I well my my thinking or what we talked about is that um in particular for university people that we've been in touch with professors and so forth it's it's a hard time in the semester for them to prepare anything and given the experience we had in the town meeting where people felt frustrated that they couldn't get a full answer to some of their questions uh we thought it might make sense for us to do like a three to five minute introduction to who this person is and what their expertise is and then just let the committee ask specific questions about that area of expertise and I don't know if we're going to take half an hour for Q&A or whatever it may be but you know that might be an easier way to get informed experts into into the process I don't know if Joe or Claire any other issues or comments they want to make on that so go right ahead nothing on the speakers I think um you know we you and I had talked Mike about um how how it's been a little bit difficult to find um you know um speakers and letting them know what the specifics are I like I really do like Joe's idea of maybe bringing in the MIT the gentleman they spoke with at MIT potentially about field maintenance and you know how they how they manage it how they manage it over there I think um you know we did we did have an opportunity to talk about speakers and and how we how we might want to bring one in um we also had an opportunity to talk a little bit about bullet points about some stuff that we want to do include in the reports and I think you know where I can be useful here is to look at some of our our um uh plans our existing plans or hazard mitigation hazard mitigation plan or private action plan things like that um and how they relate back to you know this environmental group and you know sort of what at least in the formation of those plans the community was really um focused on you know things like heat island effects things like um impermeable surface and I don't know you know very recently what one of the things I heard and Mike and I spoke about this a little bit on the phone was that um there we're we're starting to see um uh at least one government organization is calling you know artificial turf fields now impermeable surface which has a full slew of storm water impact um runoff impact um and how that will be classified in the you know in the future moving forward um I think you know we were also talked a little bit about um you know uh the the climate work at this office and other uh areas other groups in town have done um looking at carbon sequestration in green fields um you know we have been given the limited limited space the limited open space we have in Arlington um one impact may be of you know potentially replacing um one of those green fields with with an artificial surface um and also again the runoff considerations you know um kids don't always play just on fields all the time they also play in the Millbrook they play um in all many other green spaces in town that could be impacted you know by by runoff by you know um some of these other issues um that we've been talking about but so I think you know um where I'm going to turn my focus is um you know and into the as I can be useful into our published plans and to you know some of the um goals that that have come out of those um and and um looking at how we might rectify or reconcile excuse me um you know um the the turf conversation with the with the organic field conversation there are issues with organic fields too I mean oval fertilization we have over uh you know over nutrient I guess and some of our um and some of our water bodies which have led to algal blooms and you know it's all very very complex you know and and I think there's a lot of a lot of things to talk about on on either side but this is really the direction that we're going in looking um I think mostly at runoff of the infill runoff of PFAS and other chemicals um how this relates back to you know some of our published plans and then of course you know in the broader um context of just climate in general so yeah and I would just add I'd just add that in terms of um the various topics I think that the runoff is an issue primarily for our water bodies and wetlands that are you know protected under the State Wetland Protection Act as well as our own bylaw in Arlington so that's one area obviously that we're going to be looking at and the other issue is um the one of infill and there is runoff and migration of the infill and what's the impact of that you know then the whole issue of climate change and we've got uh PFAS that are not only in water but in the blades of grass themselves in other areas and what's the impact of that on players but that's that's a health and safety issue rather than an environmental issue but it does have environmental uh a fact given the the if there are water bodies or wetlands nearby so those are some some of the concerns and then of course it's the recycling issue as far as I've concerned there is zero recycling going on of artificial turf in this country and these rolled up uh rolls of turf just sort of sit there and that can't be good for anybody yeah I mean you know these issues it's funny on that one you know you on a lot of these things it's sort of you get differing opinions but on that point Mike there seems to be no no debate that they've not yet found I mean I know there's some chatter that there's some some path to recycling but I mean realistically I don't think any of these things can be recycled and I haven't seen anything to tell me otherwise right and that's uh you know part of the problem is the various chemicals and part of it is the infills that leak out and all of that so there's there's a lot of issues and what as I mentioned we're going to try to nail down just four or five specific topics in the environmental group can look at as part of our report and when we finalize those I'd be glad to circulate them to this committee for their you know for any input so that you know it there's you can you can go on for years looking at this stuff and there's always new stuff coming out as I mentioned before one of the things that we don't see is any impact studies on the newer stuff whether it's you know wood or cork rock fell yeah rock fell or any of those things there's not there's just not a lot of detail that I found telling us anything about that yeah I guess one question which I suppose is better than although negative material on a crumb rubber which you know doesn't seem to have very very positive things going for it yeah I mean I think that you know some of that is if there's not an issue there's not a study in some cases because there's nothing to study because there is no there is no negativity around it it seems like most of the studying is is the push for you know what harm are we doing and when it comes to how are we doing things well well you're not going to bother to study something that you're that you if you've solved the problem yeah the problem is that you don't know if there's a problem until you study it right I will say I did see it I don't want to engage with the chat but I will simply say this I saw a comment in the chat that said that the carpet can be recycled I would love to see if you have something that says that I would love to see it I love to see reports on that that'd be really good yeah I'm not questioning it it's more I haven't seen anything to that effect so if someone has evidence that the carpet part can be recycled I'm all ears and eyes I guess one question just in general for speakers a couple of recommendations I've gotten has been for uh sort of landscape architecture consultants who do field design um and they probably know a lot and probably get a lot of the same questions from communities that we're trying to answer but I just wanted to make sure that or see if there was any concerns about having sort of those types of consultants be one of our speaking one of our speakers I think if they can speak to both you know the natural the the grass turf and the artificial I don't see a problem with that I don't know if others do okay just wanted to double check I am cognizant of the fact that I think Joe you have to leave it six uh yeah I do okay so there's one other comment or just one I think it mentions they did meet with um someone from mass municipal association who had a recommendation for someone from western and samson I think has done work for the town in the past um as a you know who I think to Natasha's point has sort of worked on a variety of fields so is it like uh oh yeah one or the other but more like just a proponent of you know getting themselves more work but anyway um but they'll do whatever you want um and then also she did mention the person from I'm forgetting my name um Josie um mentioned that there is a they think that both the state and the federal government may be issuing new well the federal government I think we knew was was looking at issuing regulations really at the PFAS which could impact that but there's also talk of state legislation that potentially would you know regulate this more which you know not not artificial turf specifically but it could result in impacts on the ability to use artificial turf so she just wanted to make sure we were aware of that and she was going to let me know if there was any further developments in that I had a question for the environmental group and I don't know if you've come across anything but if we're if if you're converting a a field playing surface itself to turf are you able to include more trees um and foliage nearby as sort of like a like a trade-off because you know you're not requiring sunlight and you're not requiring as much water um so so is there the possibility that the overall landscape can be positive in a way and and have you come across anything I haven't seen anything about that but it's it's an interesting idea but I don't know how much uh encroachment you want to have from roots uh into the or the area near the artificial turf um but it's an interesting idea for sure I haven't heard about it yeah I mean I probably would that could be a question that someone like a landscape landscape architect would help us think through or answer it's good design it would be good design to do it that way for sure um I'm just going to keep things moving I think it's been a really good discussion uh to unfortunately I have so many screens open on my laptop I missed I think our next point is Natasha what is our next item is about format template sorry I'm I'm recording structure and template yes thank you so so I know um I sort of promised something by this meeting and I know Mike had sent um an idea to me that the environmental group was kicking around I guess I'm going to be a little more laissez-faire on this one and start off by saying I care a little less about the format more about the content having said that you know if there's a format that works for a particular sub you know subgroup working group to put out their information on I'm I'm at this at this stage at least very willing to kind of go with it having said that you know to the extent we're looking for some kind of rough structure for each of these sections I would say you know something like brief introduction you know this is these are the issues we're looking at but this is the you know with us is you know this is you know the issues that the environmental subgroup looked at or the health group looked at or the safety group looked at um and then you know maybe break it down so if you say you're going home you know I'm just throwing this out here but safety group you know we said you know injuries um you know heat Joe said to something good and I can't remember it but he had like injuries then he broke down certain injuries uh heat issues he broke that down and then the last was sort of playing surface um on athlete you know the difference between turf and art of artificial turf in terms of the actual playing surface and the effect on the athletes that may not be exactly how we're doing it but you know let's go with that for now and then you'd have you know your first heading would be after some introductory words about this is what we looked into we feel these are the major issues within this topic area you know issue one um sports injuries you know issue two uh you know and then lay it all out there and as part of laying it out there discuss the issue discuss the sources you look to I mean you can explicitly discuss the sources or you can simply discuss and footnote the sources I'll leave that up to however you want to get the information out there and then sort of walk I think walk the reader methodically through each of the areas you looked at and each of the sort of was you know uh you know findings you you developed from what you looked at and then at the end at the end well before you get to sort of your subgroups findings recommendations I would advise that the group should also and you can have a separate heading for this or you can incorporate it folding it into each of the discussions but some discussion about mitigation so if you recognize that there is a inherent problem with artificial turf on that particular you know so for example I think I'm not giving away much by saying you know we have recognized that there is a heat issue on the player you know on the user on artificial turf I think we would definitely though be derelict if we didn't get into that we believe that the many of those issues could be mitigated through you know limiting the hours of use during certain summer days summer weeks the hours of use certain you know protocols for people who do use the field you know things like that and you could either lump all of your mitigation into one heading subheading within your area or you can just effortlessly fold into each discussion whatever whatever works best for you and I think that's kind of roughly the format you were suggesting Mike maybe maybe I'm maybe I'm maybe I'm off but I kind of I think you that's true and I think that one area that I think we all have is here's what we don't know or what we didn't study or what we couldn't find about that needs further investigation yeah I mean we we are not going to answer every question about artificial turf or regular turf so if there's an area where it's like well we could only get so you know we could only and I think obvious among the edits we would have liked more studies about you know different non-crumb rubber infills you know I would have liked more studies about you know Brockville or coconut husks or whatever you know and their effects on you know heat or this or that you know we have some industry data on that I mean that's helpful but it's still industry data so you know if there's an area where you just came up short because we couldn't find you know then then I think Mike's right just put it out there and saying you know we got as far as we could on on this subject or that and this was where we you know there's a gap yeah I think that's important for people to realize when they're reading our report that there's a lot more out there than we had time or ability to actually deal with and I think they will appreciate that yeah yes so you know the bullet I mean so this may matter not as much doing bullets which I think what you were saying would be due by a week from Friday I mean the bullets you can sort of have and match the rough you know sort of almost being an outline format but I don't really want an outline I want some substance behind I mean the idea of the bullets is you're going to start to show some substance behind but you know one sentence can do you know something that may be a full paragraph later on can be one sentence now you know roughly you know sort of a thesis sentence for each of you know each of the kind of points you're going to be making I'm guessing that's what folks are doing I mean in some ways I think some groups maybe the health group already would like to jump into the narrative part and I feel bad but maybe the bullet points is us you know holding you back a little bit but I do feel like it's helpful just to give the larger committee a sense of just where you're going with this and if we you know people are concerned for any reason about where the bullets are maybe it's a better point to have that discussion now than before you've written a whole section and we tell you okay that's not where we wanted you to go with this so um so are people generally sort of I mean I'm I'm trying not to be too prescriptive here about how how you do this uh I mean it'd be nice if we had you know things sort of flowing in a general kind of format like that but I just don't want to be like well you know you have to have you know the Harvard outline here and it's going to have you know a b roman numeral one roman numeral you know like ultimately there's going to be a lot of a lot of formatting work done by Natasha and myself you know at the end of this project so right now it's the ideas are the most important thing so a week from this coming Friday a week from the second I guess it is um yeah so is that something you want us to send to you and Natasha or just to the whole committee so you start with an attempt yeah go ahead I was just gonna say um Friday for the deadline that's perfectly fine but it would have to be first thing in the morning because I have to get this packet out and I have to get it posted by 12 noon because it's it's beyond me and the people who post it really only work until 12 noon but we have to have it posted by 5 p.m. on Friday to be in compliance with open meeting law so it does put us in a little bit of a a bind so if we could get it by Friday morning um and then that way it can be incorporated into if you can get it to meet earlier than that that would be great because I try to have everything all teed up but I do have to have it over um I would say what these bullet points for our next meetings what you're saying basically no not next week no no no just you know shortly after our next meeting okay because I thought you wanted them you know by this Friday no no next Friday oh okay yeah yeah don't no no I don't think I can get mine done quickly I was just asked um so that leads to a I think we've discussed you know subject matter experts which I think the next time on the agenda I think we've already sort of discussed that in terms of scheduling I guess maybe I'll fold this in a new business there's there's an option we have one option is to not have a meeting next Tuesday because it's sort of crunch time for our first deliverable and just if if working groups want to meet during that slot we know that they have it open they can or just people can plow away and working you know individually on whatever tasks they're doing related to the bullet points we can meet uh next Tuesday as well especially if you know I I would most disinclined to cancel meeting if we have a guest speaker who was like yes that's the date I can do it and that's the only date I can do it then we would I would say we should have the meeting but given that people are still working on nailing things down and probably it may not come together by next Tuesday again I'll open up to the group but Natasha and I were thinking it might just be a better use of our time to really get into the work part and then really have a full full meeting the following Tuesday where we unpack the first deliverable so you know we're not talking about we're talking about potentially for discussion canceling next Tuesday's meeting and then having the deliverable that Friday and then having a really really you know potentially long meeting the following Tuesday or just meeting both Tuesdays and still still sticking with the original plan uh-huh I think Joe had to jump off but I think he's I think he's on he might be on his cell phone just kind of listening in so I guess I'm listening on my phone so yeah sorry Joe um just wanted to acknowledge that so I think we just need to make a decision at this point do we want to meet next week or do we want to leave this as an opportunity for the subgroups to meet and sort of finalize our next big thing is is sort of deadline so I'm not sure you know do we have more that we want to discuss as a group here or is the next discussion point really talking about what what we've outlined in our in our sections I would feel I'll just speak for myself I would feel fine if we did not meet as a larger group next week and that we focused on our reporting but I will do whatever I'm available more to the extent of people are really angry for a meeting have a say one of their working group meetings event right well I think it's like that would be doing a doing a working group meeting instead by a few more the most effective use of our time yeah and I think that once those outlines or bullet points or whatever you call them or have been submitted then we're going to have a I would assume a full meeting to discuss each of them yeah and then I mean just so everyone knows with the tight time I was only two weeks from one deliverable to the next so um you know I guess the tension is that if we have a bunch of guest speakers on the 13th we're probably not having a real opportunity to discuss our work on that date which is fine we can add an I mean if we have to we can add another meeting date in there somewhere it's just I don't I'm hesitant to like I mean we all want guest speakers and we'd like to have them but I'm hesitant to sort of block off meetings if some some reason they don't come and then that time could have been better used on the actual work so Jim do you think that maybe we should leave the the opportunity on the table and make a decision a little bit later on in the week if anyone has any guest speakers that they want to bring for next week we can certainly that's a great idea why don't we say if you've nailed down a speaker and the date that they can really do it is next Tuesday let us know by Thursday evening and we'll keep the date open we'll have the meeting but if we're not seeing any speakers nailed down by next to you know for next Tuesday by Thursday night then our default will be that we will take down the meeting and working groups will use that time or any time early next week to really get the first deliverable ready right okay sounds like a plan any other any other new business and I do want to thank Susan Stamps for posting the charge in the chat I think we we all know it very well but it's always good to get another reminder of what our charge is I think we've been really trying to hit all those points in our work but as you actually start to put pen to paper it's uh it's good to just keep it in mind and as always as always if there's additional uh you know concerns or or things that you'd like the group to consider please feel free to send an email to boh at town dot arlington and we can get those incorporated into our our meeting uh packets and thanks to another well yeah yeah there's nothing else I'll entertain a motion your second Leslie made the motion Mike are you seconding perfect um well then Natasha we'll do we'll do the quick roll then okay Mike yep okay uh Leslie yep uh Joe bar you're here yep okay uh Jill yep okay Natasha yes Marvin is absent Jim yes all right thanks everyone I know a lot of work is happening here and behind the scenes right now as you're doing pulling together these bullets and I just want to thank you all but we're it's a lot of work in a short time but this group's really stepping up so thank you thank you have a good night good night everyone


That's strong armor. I don't know Dude What the heck man Dude I forgot to put her underwear back on but dude she had armor on over it I didn't know she was gonna go underwear mode Was there anything yeah chat let a girl have some secrets Okay, so we're gonna make a new we're gonna make a new character because Apparently people said you can't even take other people out of your party, right? Like I can't take wake and Bonnie and Nick's characters out of my party.   Let's break the skull and pull the brain out. Oh Rick I roll a four. What does that mean?  It's your pet. Well, then what happens with dexterity.  Why would you then want this as a pet?  Well now we have now we have us can I make him drop his weapon people were saying clerics He'd do that before command to drop Okay, I'm I understand that yeah, I'm gonna roll. So here's what I do. I go divine sense And I cast it on her Right and then now she can command to drop 55% chance now you see that now he drops his weapon and when he drops his weapon then I can loot it and Then I go I for inventory. No, no, I look tad for group inventory So now I'll put this on I have the everburn blade now and he has no weapon. Yeah, I already I already got the sword chat Yeah, what I miss I'm just kidding chat already seen this part hit the helm button Wait guys you guys need to grow up Ridiculous, man ridiculous. I can't believe you spent all that time looking at your own naked character And then tried to distract us with shadow heart in her undies Not Let's go here Sly con they've been a 61 months man Zoru was right yellow as a toad twice as ugly The things dangerous yo leave it for the only not all yeah, and if it escapes, how will you oh A guest Paladin deception your quarry looks dangerous, but I may not worse. Let me get safety Okay, so long as I don't roll He's right No one's safe if that thing goes loose not even us enough lower the trap Why are you guys question marking me? You've got one chance join me or die Bitch Yeah, I know I'm run Okay, um, I don't know. Let's do let's do Fireball Egg this magic missile Sick so for me Say no where are these guys good guys or bad guys? They're good guys, but they're racist. Oh, okay Is this first time playing kind of I started playing a little bit on a group group campaign. I missed What do I push them over? Something has been long wait what the close of day Wait, what? Wait, what did I do? Do wait what I didn't want to do that. I don't want to be an oath breaker The tadpole hasn't yet scrambled all your senses auspicious But the longer we wait the more it consumes My people possess the cure for this infection. I must find a crash. Oh breaker nim weird Dude, what what did I do? I only told the tieflings to kill their prisoner and then double-crossed them and murdered them How is that wrong? What should I reload so what is the difference between an oath breaker and a non oath breaker one goes live on time?  I was late because I broke my OBS today I always go live at noon CST if I'm if something doesn't happen one updates the schedule. Okay, OBS Can you gain your oath back? It's a hidden paladin subclass I mean, obviously it's not hitting that hard if I've found it in like the first five minutes of playing the game You can buy the oath back. What is this freaking paying your tides? Okay, so here's my question. What do I gain from being an oath breaker? Do I become stronger because I feel like being a vengeance paladin is cooler. You get necromancy Well, I don't want necromancy. You can no no longer use channel oath charges Wait a second.  Let's play it out. Oh chat. I think it's time for bitch Wait the sky self-female Elm this game is awesome been waiting for you. I Felt the moment of your liberation The shedding of your bond you called to me. I Am here to show you the way the way to what?  It was not my intention My actions had unexpected content lapsing judgment To know the reason for your fall is perhaps To know the shape of things to come. Tell me more about these powers. This will obey your summons The dead They sense the cracks in your armor the year to be used to be My lip Shut up Well must be sacrificed and you're so Replaged it is wise to first consider what is game and what is lost in the bargain Should you wish to do so? Speak with me again. I don't want this You may refuse But this alone will not restore what was lost Without light to guide you or darkness to consume You will remain any time to think about it. It is a decision-worthy of consideration When you feel ready to make it I will be waiting for you Open the bloody gates. Nobody gets in several orders That pack of goblins will be honest any second What's going on Yeah chat, I want to play it out. I'll just play it out at this point Unless something really bad happens that I don't want to happen. I'm gonna play it out Like if something really bad happens, I'll probably Like right now I'm fine. Oh my gosh. He's dead. This is a big battle Okay, my turn with gale has seven help these guys all have seven health So here I'm gonna try an array of frost up here Actually hold on chromatic orb. Oh wait poison lightning. Oh, okay check their weakness No weaknesses Kind of a ray of frost Okay, we're gonna go ranged Her range attack two to seven. Can I can I do this that is the range the same the whole time Okay, here we're gonna go. We're gonna go ranged two to seven right here Miss okay, that's horrible action surge Use her action surge Three it's really good man. I've always get three super fun. I'm gonna dash in here. Oh my gosh Okay, turn there Shadowheart is gonna go and we are going to I'm gonna fireball here. Yes. That's really good. Oh Wait, what wait, how come I auto-attacked him? Did he move? Okay, um, she'll do away Nice and turn kill a trash shooting from here. Okay, that's Ben. Oh This is the goblin boss. Okay. Um, he has 21 health I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go for the lacerate Nine plus four.  Oh my gosh Dude, okay, that's sketch. Okay shadowheart. Did she have a heal available? 50% on that 40% on that Let's go for this Three damage one magic missile to wait. I'm dead Wait magic missile is good Let's fireball him Okay. Oh, I can help up it down character here Wait, what what did he do?  Wait, what? study the creature's behavior They're going to are they the bad ones, dude? Are you gonna use a fight stick or a bat for your pattern when training? Also Uh, I want to use the the hitbox Your own on her territory the snack box Looking around her territory extends from one end of the grove to another Do I kick it? All right, I'm gonna kick it means you claimed the squirrel's territory I thought it was just gonna like I don't think I was gonna like What the heck? I think I was gonna kick him that hard. I thought it was gonna be like a get out of here situation Not like I'm gonna destroy your entire existence The time has come remove the outsiders Who's that guy? Wait, I did a quest save arabella I wanted to see what would happen if I take it because I saw that the hand was red The hand icon was red when I went over it. That's why I saved red before Is that strong armor? I don't know Dude, why is she not wearing clothes?  I didn't do that. I did not do that. I did not No Someone's waiting for me. Oh Dude, I forgot to put her underwear back on but dude. She had armor on over it I didn't know she was gonna go underwear mode. I didn't even think about it I didn't even think about it, dude She has armor on. Oh my gosh Let a girl have some secrets. Was there anything yet? Yeah chat let a girl have some secrets. Okay Use your shared connection and probe her thoughts She believes you all have a real chance with my nose in the camera job She's anxious to find this person in boulder's gate Whoever since has a strong hold over her and can give her something she desperately wants Journey's not over it. We should get some rest. Oh my gosh, dude How are you feeling the same these parasites are proving suspiciously benign I just saw s man on the twitch homepage great thumbnail. Oh god How does the one second it was on the screen make the thumbnail? Maybe I could leave you tied up while I hunted for a cure. Really?  Well Anyway, get some rest Try not to dream about tying me up. Oh frick Thank you for the family friendly content his fans stare Okay, anyways guys, I need to go get like a water or something. I'll bring back His fan point of view in the bathroom


Welcome to WTDC 17 here in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I'm very pleased to be in the studio today with Mr. Afama Saga, Riko Tupai, who is the Minister for the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of Samoa. Minister, thank you very much for joining us in the studio today. Pleasure to be here today. Now, I'd like to start off- Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you very much indeed. I'd like to start off by asking you a little bit about the overall impact of ICTs on Samoa's socioeconomic development in terms of the fact that this year's theme is ICTs for SDGs. Technology and information, digital transformation is very fast, changing in the world at the moment, and it's impacting us as well in our development. In, I've only been a Minister now for just over a year, six months, and we have done quite a bit of work and we're working at the moment to try and lock our whole digital transformation together and bring everything together for us in terms of... Internet is really impacting on us and we're trying to bring in some submarine cables, connectivity in terms of broadband. We're fast-moving in terms of our mobile broadband. Unfortunately, with the fixed broadband, we're still trying to connect our country, but international connection has been worked out at the moment. And by the end of this year, we have one submarine cable coming in. That comes via Fiji. By the end of 2018, we have another one coming via Tahiti. So we expect the growth economically and socially to be very high and increasing rapidly and dramatic reduction in costs for us through the connectivity in terms of these submarine cables. What about ICTs helping you in terms of obviously, well, it must be one of your major concerns in terms of climate change, rising sea levels, in terms of, let's say, those kind of issues, which of course you must be particularly of concern to you. Yes, the government is taking priority in terms of natural disasters and preparations, identifying and working out for the country in terms of what times and what vulnerable times for us will be in terms of tide, in terms of cyclones. So ICT is very helpful and impacting very positively on this side of our climate change preparations. Climate change impacts our lives everywhere and all the time, including livelihood. So we're hoping that the impact of internet in terms of agriculture, preparation of crops and harvesting, that's ICT and that's how much we rely on ICT in all areas of our development, especially in climate change. Would you say the major challenges or obstacles facing you in terms of using ICTs for sustainable development? Mostly, number one at the moment and priority for us is the cost. Cost is very high at the moment and very expensive in terms of connectivity. Connect to internet, to access information in terms of education, in terms of health. It's very expensive for us. And second challenge for us is in terms of isolated areas, we would like to bridge the digital divide in terms of not only infrastructure, but in terms of knowledge as well. We're trying to connect as many schools as possible at the moment domestically before the submarine cable arrives so that when the two ends are connected of the domestic connection as well as the submarine international connection, then we have information going efficiently and all over the country and everybody can easily access. And in terms of cooperation with ITU, how has your country benefited in cooperating with ITU? ITU has really assisted us in a lot of ways and if I may speak as well in terms of not just our country but the whole Pacific, all Pacific islands, we all regarded as small islands developing states and ITU, we have very much depended on ITU in a lot of things from, especially with capacity building in all areas and it's really preparing our ICT personnel and government services to be able to facilitate digital transformation and our digital economy transition. I see ITU has been really helpful in all areas for us and not only that but also assisting us in terms of infrastructure. We've had several, a number of islands in the Pacific where ITU has supplied satellite to try and cater and try and curb the problem of connectivity and internet connection in some of the isolated areas and Samoa is one of those islands and we're very happy to be recipients of a lot of ITU aid. Now this is a major event in ITU's calendar. This is basically the one that's certainly focusing on development and I wanted to ask you what do you hope will develop from this conference? What do you hope will be some of the concrete actions that come from this conference? Well, for small islands developing states we hope that the big brothers are listening in and be able to deploy infrastructure aid and capacity building, you know, not necessarily come directly to us but if they can continue to put their efforts in supporting ITU so ITU can help develop the small and developing states, I will be very good for us and that's what we would like. We've heard a couple of big nations increasing their support for ITU and that's for us is very pleasant in terms of an appreciative and appreciated in terms of the support that ITU is getting because we know for a fact that whatever ITU support that they get from the big countries it will help us a lot and continuing assistance from ITU is what we're looking forward to at the end of this conference. Well, please allow me to wish you the very best of the future and thank you very much for being with us in the studio today. Great and thank you very much for the opportunity. Thank you.


Election is still the beginning. It's just one of those things that is happening now for people to tick the box and claim to be liberal democracy.


This study examined the impact of global scholarly publications on corporate social responsibility and renewable energy, on green brand development within the United Nations sustainable development goals. It collected and processed over 2,000 articles from the Scopus database, then analyzed them using bibliometric techniques such as mapping and visualization. The results revealed that the most productive authors and institutions are located in Europe and North America, while the most productive journals are based in the US and UK. Additionally, the study found that collaboration between authors from different disciplines is increasing, suggesting that interdisciplinary approaches may be beneficial for advancing knowledge in this area. Finally, the study concluded that its findings can serve as a guide for future research in this area. This article was authored by Yanus, Tatiana Pimenenko and Alexei Lulyov.


ussion and then two years later opt in I mean oh no absolutely it would create a lot of certainty for applicants that might be understood but I'm just saying if we're balancing the needs of municipal governments to function it seems like there are reasonable mechanisms already in place to allow them to slow the discussion down have it at the right pace it was automatically and I don't know I've been nothing about other state laws but right now under title 17 if you have a vote on something and you don't like the way it goes you have a 30 day appeal period for a re-vote so they can petition for a re-vote it's 5% right now of the voters although that can be changed that's not in detail and that second vote however it goes is in place for 12 months so you can't even have a re-vote for 12 months so there's an automatic you know depending on who shows up to the polls and how it's stuck with that until 12 months but you could do it in a way that it was a different question sure and we're going to ban we want to have an ordinance on hours of retail you could word it so that it was a different vote so that it wasn't a re-vote of the same vote there's a set of ignorance is it possible to have a vote to opt out for a given period of time it's not clear it's not it just says to vote we wanted to opt out today and come back in 2022 to have that maybe it's just as a panel vote there's not a lot of great detail that leads me into the next thing I wanted to touch upon which was this control commission sort of makeup the reason VLCT was really in love with the idea of using the liquor control model is because it's already there and it's tested and for the most part not perfect it works because city councils, select boards they're used to the system and the way I see it it's a closed circle system and the liquor control board and the rules that they promulgate have strong consideration for municipalities and it loops fully back to the local community and under what's proposed at least right now there's only one sentence saying that a town can have a liquor or a cannabis control commission there's two sentences and that's it I would warn that that's probably not the best approach to do this because if you were to give that sort of leverage and control to any community you're basically saying whatever you want and we're normally all about local control but under these sorts of things real tie-in to the state models and state regulations is really important and it works really well under the liquor control model so if you go to title 7 you'll see pages upon pages about the duties of the local control commissioners you'll see language about how the rules are punished by the Board of Liquor and Lottery apply to the municipalities it's a closed loop system it's all tied in and I think that is the model to go after and it creates ease of administration it creates certainty and it creates a line between state regulations and local regulations where they marry pretty well and that in and of itself would create a lot of ease for everyone so you're saying to kind of follow the model as it relates to municipalities but not necessarily to have the Board be the liquor and lottery Board? yeah, yeah, yeah, no we were just saying well we don't want to reinvent the wheel it works, not perfect, but it works and it's just one less thing that a select board or a city council would have to worry about one less permit but if it's not, even if it's something separate if the legislature could model it as closely to how to close that circle it would make everything much easier one last thing going back to that issue of the closed link I don't know how things are going to wind up with the liquor control or the cannabis control board similar to what happened with the medical marijuana having a local it doesn't have to be BLCT it could be a planner, it could be anybody but someone who really understands when you're promulgating rules that are going to have impacts about how things are situated in a downtown or whatever it would be really helpful to have someone who understands that not just from a law enforcement perspective or ACCD it's a perspective but someone who really understands how do ordinances work what about zoning, what about processes of voting just to have a local voice and that would be really helpful it worked with the marijuana symptom relief commission it worked with liquor and lottery you need that voice otherwise they're grasping at straws trying to fill the gaps that's it thank you so much by the way we have a strong pollinator door coming out of the house oh good alright


Hey, it's Anfa and you're watching Anfa Vlog! Today I'm gonna master an EDM single, not my own track, but something pretty about someone else and sent to me for mastering. I'm no mastering engineer, however I've done some mastering in my life mostly for my own albums, which there was a bunch of them, so I guess I know something about mastering, but mostly this video is there to show you how to master a single using Ardor under Linux using only open source plugins. So, let's get started. Here is my Ardor session. I'm gonna import the source material and this is it. It's in a 44.1 kHz sampling rate. I'm going to upsample it to 48 kHz because this is what my jack is running and this is what I'm using for everything. The sample rate conversion doesn't matter as long as you're using high quality one because otherwise we could have some audible artifacts or even inaudible artifacts, but if I was, for example, to boost the high frequencies a lot in mastering, there could be problems bringing these artifacts up. So the thing is we imported this as two separate mono tracks. I want one track per file as new tracks. Yeah, let's do it one more time and then I'm gonna remove the unnecessary tracks. Alrighty, let's close this dialogue then I can remove these unnecessary tracks. Yup, and what we have is this necks. I haven't heard this track so I'm gonna be listening to it now for the first time along with you. Let's do it. Three, two, one, go. When I first got this track it was a bit too loud and I had to send it back and I asked for a quieter version because it was peaking. To be able to master this track I need to have two things for sure, like first it cannot be clipping and I see that this might be a problem already and second it needs to have dynamic range to work with. I need to return this track and ask for a quieter version and this is what I'm going to do. See you in a while. And it doesn't look like it's peaking right now however it also, I'm not sure, there could be a limiter still that might have been put on the mix bus before exporting this mix. I can't tell for sure the peaks are a little bit too consistent to my eye but well this is what I have and let's try doing something useful with it. So what I'm gonna do is first drop the EQ and play it and take a look. We have some very low bass probably around 25 Hertz. Yep very deep bass. Maybe instead of using a high-pass filter I would normally use a high-pass filter to make sure that no frequencies, no low frequencies like damage or headroom. I might try it, I'll try this use a steep of a high-pass filter as I can get and as flat in the passband so the frequency spectrum where I don't want any filtering as possible. All right that looks good. What I'm gonna do also is analyze this the whole track so I'm selecting a range with the range tool, range bolt and then right clicking spectral analysis and that should give me a nice plot of the frequency of the whole track. So we can see there are some harmonic peaks of chords often used probably but I don't see anything really standing out. It's more or less an even function. This is more or less similar to what a pink noise signal would probably give us. Yeah if I turn on a proportional spectrum which is just using the pink noise slope as a reference you can see it's pretty much flat. There's nothing very deeply happening here. We have kind of a peak around 10-12 kHz and there's a dip around 16-20 but this is pretty natural because we don't really need much information and as you remember we upsampled this from 44.1 kHz so there isn't going to be any high frequency content above 20 kHz probably. I don't see any problems. I could sweep the Q and see if I can hear any and then we can use the measurement to see if it confirms that there might be a problem. I don't see anything wrong with the EQ balance for this mix right now. Let's listen and try. I'm using the headphones because the monitors will only go so low with the bass and also they are more affected with room acoustics when it comes to bass frequencies so listening on headphones especially to the sub bass like below 80 Hz it's just easier. The bass is usually more balanced however you need to know your hardware you need to know equipment. I know how music sounds on these headphones and how much bass I should hear for a balanced mix and actually you can master and mix well them tracks with anything decent when you learn it so you need to listen to a lot of music and consciously analyze how much bass is there, how much highs is there, how does the mid sound and then you can learn how a good mix or a good master will sound on that hardware and then you can reproduce it and when you're mastering or mixing your own stuff. I'm going to first reduce the gain because the loudness now it's going to clip. I'm going to make my mantraing louder. I can do the same for your side. I'm trying to get out a little bit more color out of this so I just added a tiny amount of bass maybe just to mitigate what my hypers could do to just cut off the bass. I don't want to lose too much bass so I'm just adding it back a little bit of that in the higher frequencies range here and also trying to see if there isn't too much too little of the 1k region here the like the mids and I just think that adding just a tiny bit of that might be a good thing and also I added just a little bit of the highs where we have this dip because I think it's a little bit like makes the thing a bit tiny bit brighter but doesn't doesn't hurt. It's not as bright as it would hurt. Okay I'm gonna bring up the level but maybe not as much. Okay so now mastering EPs or albums is much more interesting because you balance tracks between each other. With mastering singles I should probably do some reference tracks. I've added a master limiter. I'm going to make it oversample four times. This is to catch the inter-sample peaks so the limiter is up sampling the signal to a four times higher sampling rate internally analyzing this and then it's down sampling it again after the processing to just make sure that the peaks between samples are not jumping off. They still could so yeah I don't really see anything I don't hear any problems that need to be addressed in this track. Cut the start just to give it a bit less time to roll in. Yeah it's been it's been cut short could be longer. Due to a problem with noise from my microphone and the way I record audio which isn't perfect you can't really hear that tail however I'm gonna paste a clip from the raw audio file so we can hear it. I could try to copy this and add some reverb to make the tail longer however this is already this part is already super quiet if we listen to this okay yeah we can hear it could be better okay I'm gonna duplicate this control little click and I'm gonna try let's see if I can just control right click and now we have region gain I'm gonna make this 12 decibels lower and now okay this is a little bit better and the fade out is a little bit less abrupt let's listen again to make sure it's not broken okay yeah I like it better we managed to mask out the hard cut tail there were there was a a scratch fading out and there was some delay delays bouncing around and they were cut I'm gonna save this I could try to experiment with some master bus compression or maybe saturation I don't want to take the place of a mixing engineer that that works on this you could try you could try doing something something with a compressor and see if we can get anything more exciting out of that all right so I've added just a little bit of compression to maybe a little bit more glue together the main melodic instruments and the drums I'm gonna see what can I do with a little bit of saturation however the cuffs actually I'm going to use a compressor for that because the cuff situator has a problem when you use when you don't use 100 wet processing it introduces some phasing issues and scoops your mids it's not cool so to use a compressor as a saturator um well this compressor has mixed control so we can use it as a parallel compressor but also first thing we can compress the signal so hard and make the attack and release so quick it's gonna basically distort the signal of course in such an amount it sounds just horrible we could actually use our saturating compressor I want to rename this oh I can't why I want to put it before our um more glue compressor I'm actually putting this before the limiter well this is bad however I'm gonna cut it out and paste it on my mix track I'm also gonna change to non-strict IO so we don't have these okay so we are first working on IEQ then we are this saturating the track a bit and then we are compressing all of it I wouldn't do any much more things with this track I don't feel any even what I did is super minimal and actually like I don't hear a huge difference I probably would need to A, B compare before and after a lot to to make sure and actually what if it actually makes a difference I don't want to go overboard with this because well it has to be subtle like if you if you do something so ridiculously obvious in mastering that everybody knows what you did well you're doing it wrong probably unless this is exactly what the music needs and you just had to do it well okay what I'm going to do now is drop in a EBU R128 meter which is a plugin that analyzes the level in loudness units or LU or LUFS and I know that YouTube is currently normalizing to around negative 14 LUFS and well basically a lot of people expect mastering engineers to make things louder and well there usually is a need to make things a bit louder just to manage the peaks to get the maximum of the usable available bandwidth of the distribution medium and this is as true for vinyl as it is for tape and digital files or streaming however sometimes people for mastering deliver mixes they're already too loud and I master things conservatively when it comes to levels I don't like super saturated sound of the modern releases and I if you've listened to my album suppressed or any other albums you probably heard that it has pretty dynamic for EDM and this is what I like and this is what I do with mastering for other people so I'm using this meter to make sure that my levels I can also run the whole thing and let's do host transport integration to host transport can do uh gonna reset and just play the whole thing and let's see uh here the audio didn't record well because I was talking while the music was playing and it's inaudible I was thinking about making subtitles but it sucks so I'm gonna record explanation so I was telling that I'm gonna play whole the whole track through from start to finish with the integrated loudness measurement on on the LUFS meter to tell what is the integrated loudness value and that will tell me how YouTube or other stream platforms will measure this track because they are using the same or analogous methods to determine the overall loudness and for example if YouTube loudness is negative 14 LUFS and it's gonna measure that the track is at negative negative 12 LUFS so it's 2 LU which is roughly two decibels louder it is going to turn it down by two decibels every time it's played back so it will match the rest of the material on YouTube if it is quieter it's not going to be turned up so it is important to make things not too quiet to unless it really makes sense for the material if it's a ballad it can be quiet it's not a problem on the other hand making it too loud will make it just squashed and it's gonna be turned down anyway so there's no point in making it super loud this is why I prefer to make my music dynamic dynamic is the new loud and I stand for that I think it is okay so it looks like this track is actually only one or two decibels lower than I would master it um and this is like this is what I hear and this is also what I see like there's not a lot of transients that actually need limiting or something so I'm going to limit this by three decibels and this is actually doing input gain to a static zero decibel limit so however ebu r128 also recommends like the recommendation is about is for broadcasting and recommends negative 23 lufs integrated level so for a whole program but that's for television and radio uh for music usually we go with like negative 13 14 15 it also depends on the music but you know EDM around negative 14 13 to my ears is good it's not squashed but it's properly loud that you can listen to it on a mobile device and it's not going to be too quiet because that's also a problem like we have these mobile devices have limited power and they are also limited by law how loud can these devices play so we need to consider this when mastering music because are people going to be able to make it as loud as they want on the go in a crowded city in a metro station well it is a consideration and I've been taking many considerations when mastering suppressed like that it's like I think I did the best mastering job for that album so far and I did really lots of research for that one so I'm going to attenuate it by one and a half dp afterwards actually maybe not one a half and now yeah I can get more precise with shift and this probably should give us around negative one decibel true peak and we can do it by rendering the track I'm also going to make the release a little bit shorter let's listen now you see we are not actually touching the limiter yet nothing is happening I wonder what will change when I disable my compression and saturation because that probably that could actually affect it let's see okay we get a lot some peaks okay so I could maybe maybe just back off my saturation to maybe 75 percent so we are letting more through and still the level is nothing really is changing let's see all right so this is getting louder than I would like to go however this is what the numbers say and what your ears tell you is more important usually I don't hear any pumping however I'm going to back off this by half a decibel and that will probably be it I have already controlled the start and ending I could also make sure that there is a clean fade in and the clean fade out yep that's it well for a single track you can export your whole session let's save it so let's just do export to audio files and now the go to format is probably a 16 bit 44.1 kHz wave which is near the CT but you can also do 48 kHz it doesn't hurt however I got the original file in 44.1 so I think I'm gonna do 44.1 because there isn't actually any information that we need to retain and the processing that that is going to happen back and forth it's not really any problem when you have a sufficient noise floor and with 24 bits on the inputs it's basically non-existent so I'm going to use 16 bit I'm going to use shaped noise dither shaped noise dither will make the dithering noise have more high frequency content and low frequency content and the high frequency content it has the same energy but it is less audible however this is really just a non audible difference it's just what I like to do to make sure this is the best thing possible um so I'm gonna yeah I'm gonna use wave 16 bit shape noise for my own purposes I would export flags probably but some people have trouble reading flags so I'm gonna send a wave not now I'm going to normalize the file and this is actually and this is basically a CD audio master I'm gonna call this revision one okay and that's it we're done let's bring more light so here is the export analysis and as you can see we are f***ed because our true peak is about zero decibels we didn't hit the spec we wanted so what we can do now is attenuate our whole track by 1.1 decibel to basically lower these numbers and I'm going to do this I'm going to go to the master limiter and I'm going to first add one more decibel of limiting and then even more than one decibel of output gain reduction or not not a hole and I'm going to export it again as revision two now the good thing about ardor and exporting is that the analysis is also saved as a png file in the folder of your export so you have this and you can send it to someone to prove what are the parameters of your export etc and you can also like have it there for comparison and it's done we have a new export and the true peak is below negative one decibels which is what we want and now we are at negative 12.4 LUFS which is great negative 14 would be better but we don't have we don't have actually transients like in my music there are much more transients I really like to make the drums have a huge spike at the start and usually I don't hear that stuff and this is also why it's easier to limit or crush these things such tracks because the drums don't really jump up and this is also an example of such a track we don't have too much transients the drums we could have more and then we would hear the effects of limiting more here these are pretty hard to hear I don't hear any effects of the limiting which is good I don't like to hear the effects of limiting the the limiter is not there to be a flavor of the sound it's there to make sure that you don't clip so yeah all right this is all for today this video is a bit longer than I thought surprised because I'm not I hope you've learned something master your tracks and tell me what you think if you have any questions or suggestions please leave them in the comments section below and I'll see you in the next video bye wait a minute I forgot about something oh big thanks to all my patreon supporters who are helping me dedicate more time to spend on the videos the process of making these are very time consuming and also as I go I often report bugs and request new features for software that I use because my pipeline is 100 open source and based on Linux and partly why I do that is to help that toolchain develop and actually someone asked me a question why use open source software and there is commercial software that could get your job done faster and I'm going to make a separate on fire rambling indefinitely video about that but for now let's just say that I care about the community and about the software a bit more than I care about getting things done in the fastest possible way which kind of hurts me sometimes so anyway big thanks to all the patreon supporters and everyone who bought my music on bandcamp if you want to find out what do I do head over to bandcamp.com and see for yourself listen if you like that consider subscribing because that lets me know that my content is what you need and yeah it's going to help me out bye by the way it's already May and this thing is rolling along since December


Everybody forced here ripping a six-box mixer for Scott f Scott has a 2022 playbook football 2022 top triple threads baseball 2022 contenders optic football 2223 Bowman University 2022 top scroll black and 2023 archive six series from baseball as well alright, I don't really uh, let's Archive six series 2023 once per week Wonder if we can maybe Well, that's nice a one-of-one Tim Anderson Tim Anderson from Ginter 2017 Tim Anderson a one-of-one. That's a good start. That's sweet. Let's do TC black 22 top scroll black Polar Pete Rookie variations say a Suzuki and a green rookie Lars new bar. He's been playing well lately to 99 New It's on clothing line. That's new on it. Really? Yeah, I gotta get some of my new my new boots Rookie Otto Colton welker Ricky base Otto Colton welker Oh man, that one broke Sam New boots Bowman you Bowman you inception called neuter Booter Oh That's the most ridiculous name Bowman you inception There's a Caleb loved with one ninety nine Like ended up not transferring or something like that. It's like grades or something. Yeah You love love got an auto here of Tyrese Proctor got an auto to ninety nine is Kishan Barthelamy Kishan Barthelamy Base cards here. There's a Nolan Smith Marvin Mims Howdy was talking Marvin Mims last week. Yeah, so that was pretty cool Playbook 22 playbook Jumbo patch to 75 is John meets you the third three color rookie jumbo patch bowman you I Think Todd has licensing for some, but I don't think they use any like logos in that And bowman you pro stuff and chrome. You'll see some logos. I believe Nice meet you there Drake London hot routes Jersey rookie to one ninety nine. Yeah, who's got autos in this? That's so cool Alexander Madison goal line graphs and 99 Not it's not as a raven. Unfortunately, but Derek Mason on the Titans. Yeah, I've seen a Derek Mason. There's some crazy vet autos in this And a George Pickens rookie Jersey Auto playbook to One art of two ninety nine nice pickings good box here, too All right, I'll do contenders out to you then triple threat since he's a redemption everything you can say live autos are slim pickings You could say that And you'd be Might sound like a fool, but you'd be right Something to think about something to think about making the new breaker schedule Yeah, I'm breaking from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. Yep straight line perks like our breaking To call it our veil breaking chef's were slipped Greg Dulcich rookie green pulsar auto to 30 Drake London silver variation rookie ticket RPS We got London on the track There's a silver corral not it not a golden corral, but a silver corral And it X's and O's of Barry Sanders Fortunately, not all you can eat at the silver You pick three all right and 2022 triple threads Ice Drake, that's a that's gotta be his new nickname, right? All right, he's in Atlanta's you ice tray ice Drake. Yeah true True Michael Chavis also confirmed Trey young fan via tiktok Why did you see a Michael Chavis tiktok? They're asking where's he Atlanta? I think they're asking a bunch of great players their favorite basketball players He said yeah, I like I like Trey young man. Just the ice tray celebration. It's awesome. All right So my chavis confirmed Trey young fan. I'm glad I know that now Things are so much better O'Neill cruiser to 299 Willie Mays and numbered to 125 Tom Siever Triple jersey game use Louise Robert to 18 What would you have done if you didn't know Michael Chavis his favorite NBA player? How would you have lived Mick doubles on the die cut there? And Jersey on a as money ground all the 25 Yeah, I don't honestly don't have an answer for that question. So it's a good point. I guess I don't You guys gonna see the new Don Deanna Jones movie In the Indiana Indiana Don's in the temple of dawn to 75 Greg Maddox 259 Nolan Aronato. Oh, this is cool three of three the big Hertz or a some column of the big units triple relic auto Oh Free passes. Oh, man. I love some free passes. I don't know what Nice big Hertz and Jersey card Manny Machado to 36 Manny Machado I else didn't Machado That is gonna do it appreciate it's got fun mixture. There's always get him out to you