Good afternoon everyone. I'm going to do this without notes, so apologies if I forget everything. Firstly a little bit about who I am. I'm a lawyer. I am not your lawyer though, so none of this is legal advice. None of this is something that you should pay attention to. This is based on Australian law. The circumstances will be very different in other places and I'm going to skip over some stuff because it's really complex and not very interesting. As my GitHub activity page shows I'm also not very much a developer. I occasionally tinker with things when I feel like it would be entertaining and then they don't work. So this is where my story of freedom of information begins and I'm going to ask you to bear with me as we run through a little bit in chronological order and then we mix and match a little bit when we get further through. So in late 2013 there was an election in Australia and Asher Wolfe, for some of you may be familiar with, tweeted this during the course of the Senate scrutiny. So the Senate voting system in Australia is pretty complex and so is counted by a computer. Firstly, we have a single transferable vote. That means that you end up with lots of fractional votes, lots of things that are at different values being transferred around. It means we also have group voting tickets, which means that, and some of you may have seen the presentation this morning about visualising how those GVTs work, but basically it means that preferences can be, before votes are even transferred, preferences can be divided up. So you can start with fractional votes. Dozens of candidates, about 150 in the more popular states, hundreds of counts. So each count is around going through passing on various values of votes onto different candidates. It all takes place with fixed point precision, which is very interesting because the law doesn't say fixed point precision, the law just says fractions of votes, but the Electoral Commission has consistently used fixed point precision. The result of that is that you end up with loss by fraction. So you end up with some votes not being counted because there's a truncation of fixed point and then a couple of votes don't get counted. The result of this hugely complex system is a really significant dependence on a comparatively small number of votes. Famously in Western Australia, 14 votes would have made the difference between not just one, but two of the candidates, or two of the senators ultimately being elected, changed depending on how these 14 votes went. Thankfully we ran that election. So that was Ash's tweet and I immediately thought, well, there's a way that we can find out a little bit more about this software, a little bit more about the machines that it runs on, a little bit more about how that works and that is freedom of information. So these are two sections or parts of sections from the Commonwealth Freedom of Information Act and they really embody the purpose and intention of the legislation. Firstly, that information held by the government is to be managed for public purposes as a national resource. That's really fundamental to what I'm going to be talking about continuously and that is that government information is created by taxpayers or created using taxpayer money and should be available as a national resource and that is embodied here. The freedom of information law goes back 250 years next year was the Swedish Freedom of Information Act and it's premised on this idea that that which is built with government money, that which is created with government money, should be a national resource, should be accessible to the people who paid for it. The other thing that's important in freedom of information law is it creates a legally enforceable right for individuals to access documents of an agency. Now, document and I don't expect you to read this is very, very broadly defined and you'll note that it includes any other record of information. So basically any information that is in some kind of recorded form that is held by a government department is in theory amenable to freedom of information action. So it's in theory accessible to any individual. So they talk there about paper or materials, maps, plans, drawings, photographs, diaries, sticky notes, videos, audio files, anything really that already exists should be accessible under freedom of information as well as any copy reproduction or duplicate of that. So I thought this is going to be easy. I want to know how votes accounted, what the software is. I knew that the software had been built in-house at the Electoral Commission so I thought it was a simple matter. I'd just stick in this request and I would get the software back. So on the 4th of October after procrastinating a little bit, I put in a request through the right to no website which means that it was public and said, please can you give me all of the source code for the system used to count Senate votes and also any data specification. So I was worried that they give me source code but I wouldn't know what the input formats were so I wouldn't know exactly how the votes were counted. Exactly a month later so precisely on the last day I got a response that basically said no. It also, commonly with freedom of information requests, you also get a list of the documents that they've identified that they're not going to give you access to. They wouldn't even give me that so they said we've found 54 documents in that broad definition but they couldn't tell me anything about the documents and the basis for that was, they said the code used in counting votes was commercial in confidence. That surprised me. I didn't see why it would be commercial in confidence and honestly they went into a bit of detail explaining it about 22 pages worth but I really didn't see that there was any commercial value in keeping that code secret. The Electoral Commission disagreed. So a couple of days later I put in a request for an internal review and that was basically me saying hey I think you got this wrong can you pass it up to a manager who can, someone higher up in the organisation to review that. And once again exactly a month later just on the last day of the deadline they responded and said no again in exactly the same words including some paragraph references which should have changed that didn't change. So it was a real copy paste response. So when they said no I knew that I was, for the second time I knew I would have to go to an external review process. I knew that I would have to take this further. So I asked for an electronic copy and they'd sent me a PDF, a scanned document that had been put into a PDF that they then emailed. So I asked for something that I could copy and paste from because I wanted to copy out chunks of text and say no that's wrong for this reason, this reason, this reason. The response I got back was we sent you a letter saying that we weren't going to give you the information, that completes these obligations so we're not going to give you a copy in electronic form or in word form. I've also put up there section 20 of the FOI Act which says we're an applicant who's requested access to a document in a particular form, access should be given in that form. So I pointed it out that this was the case, others pointed out that PDFs which are just scanned images are not readable by screen readers or accessible for people with disabilities but I said look I'll just leave it, that's fine. Someone else on the Right to Know website, Matthew Ladner, took it upon himself to put in a freedom of information request for that document in word form and guess what they said. But that's going to be important later. So I'm going to then went ahead and put in a request for review with the Office of the Information Commissioner. Fast, free, good, pick two, that's the rule, right? So Information Commissioner review is free and good but it is not fast. The problem is that they were disbanded on the 31st of December subject to legislation not actually passing the Senate so they still exist they just don't have any money or any staff or any officers. So well before that time in June they said to me look we're not going to be able to make a decision before the office gets disbanded at the end of December. So they punted me off to the administrative appeals tribunal which is a court. That means that I couldn't rely on them to make a decision. The court process is going to cost some money. In addition it was going to require legal representation. Yes I'm a lawyer but I don't do a lot of that sort of work. Certainly not on this side so it was going to be a bit difficult for me to get involved in that and I was thinking about just giving up. I also asked them if they could just make a decision and say they should at least give me the list of documents. I figured once I had that there'd be some file names there'd be something in there that would enable me to make a better argument. They said they couldn't make a decision about the list of documents because that wasn't an access to a fusal decision under the Freedom of Information Act. So I'd applied for access to the source code then come back and said we're not going to give you this list of documents we've compiled so that wasn't a decision to a fuse a freedom of information request that was just them being difficult. So and this to me is where the law is a little bit like computer security. On one side you're trying to design systems that are impenetrable and can't be circumvented. On the other side you're trying to use the system that exists to be as difficult as possible and to cause problems or to do things that are not necessarily intended. So this is where I started my crowdfunding campaign. I thought look there's going to be an application of $861. There's going to be additional fees, transcripts, legal fees, access charges if they ever give me access to the information they get to charge for that. So I thought I'd raise $861 plus the 10% possible fees. When I initially set that up I was thinking maybe I'll make it a lower target. I really didn't think that I was going to raise that money so but I decided no I'll go for the full amount and we'll see how it goes. 11.41 morning I launched the campaign by 1.20 p.m. that is within 100 minutes I'd reach that funding of $861 plus 10%. Thank you. All in all over the course of 30 days I raised more than $10,000 towards this case I had donations ranging from $2 to $2,000. It was truly incredible the response that I received, incredibly humbling for me as well to know that there are other people out there who think this is a serious issue. I should note that there are still some outstanding rewards from the possible campaign. I know that there are some donors in the audience those things will be forthcoming. I expected to have to do about 10. I have to do about 210. So that was really successful. That was really fantastic. So I went down to the AAT and I filed my application. Meanwhile so I went back to the AAC and I said I would like to request that list of documents that you wouldn't give me before. I make this a quest under the Freedom of Information Act and that way when you say no I can go back to the Information Commissioner and get my free review and get a decision just on the list of documents. They said my request was vexatious. That made me a little bit angry. It's a great way to insult a lawyer is to say that they're being vexatious. It also it has the potential to impact on my career. If someone says that I'm vexatious, if that gets published there's a real possibility that future employers would not look kindly upon that kind of thing. So I was a little bit insulted. I was a little bit angry. I did the thing you should never do and I told them what they could do. I said if you really want to go ahead and file a vexatious application declaration so they did. So now I'm glad to report that after about four months again, good free, not quick. The Information Commissioner came back and said that I was not a vexatious applicant that there was no merit in the submissions made by the AAC that I was. They described my original request as being fanciful, as not containing material of any merit, as being ludicrous. They talked about collaborations. They said that Matt Lauder and I had worked together in order to circumvent the process because he put in an FOI request. The Information Commissioner dismissed all of that, said that the very basic threshold which was that I had to put in multiple requests had not been met. Two requests which is all I'd done wasn't enough and that there was no merit in the AAC's application. So that's really good to know that it turns out I'm not vexatious. So the next thing that happened was Senator Lee Lee Annan from NSW moved that the material be disclosed directly to the Senate. So this is a power that the Senate has to compel ministers to provide documents to the Senate and as you can see there the motion was to within one week of the motion table all correspondence relating to the decision to have me declared vexatious and the source code for the software. So that would have meant that all of this stuff was publicly released. I could withdraw my application. That would be the end of it. This is when I started to get a bit of media attention which really helped the crowdfunding campaign. So thank you AAC. This is where I got that label vexatious digital activist which I really like. So this was a real success when this motion passed the Senate and the Senate then compelled the minister to release the material except the government didn't do anything about it. They wrote one page and said we're not going to respond. So in theory the Senate has things that it could do. It can censure the government. It could in theory dismiss ministers and all that sort of stuff. They're not going to do that. They don't care that much. But it was very nice for those three days to hope that that might be the end of things. So then what's next? Unfortunate typo there. Appeals process. So that's where we're at at the moment. I lodged my application and my appeal in the administrative appeals tribunal. That's gone back and forth. I received about 300 pages worth of documentation from the AAC's lawyers explaining exactly why they thought it was secret. There are a couple of things that they consider to be particularly secret. Features of EasyCount, which is the name of the software, that they doubt that others could reproduce without the code. These include the fact that it is object-oriented. The fact that you can type in numbers and it automatically advances to the next text box as soon as you've typed in enough numbers. It automatically considers the validity of votes prior to allowing users to finish entering on that screen. And it plays a noise when there's something invalid. So yeah, it's really high-level advanced material that we're dealing with here. And you know, it's obviously why it's so deep or secret. There are three significant issues which are going to be raised in the hearing. The first one is what constitutes a document. So lots of things constitute documents. They say that all of the source code is a single document. So we're talking about 270,000 lines of code contained in 2,400 separate files in a source control system, I understand. And they say that all of that is one document and either I get all of it or I get none of it. I disagree. They were lying on a case that says that individual pages in a diary are not separate, that the diary is a single document. That's probably fair enough. I think there's a good case to argue that each individual computer file is a separate document. Or at the very least, there's probably some logical distinction you can make around particular classes or something. There's no case law on that at the moment. So that's going to be a novel thing that's being argued before the AAT. I am quietly confident that we can win on that one. The other two issues are related. Firstly, is there a trade secret? And secondly, is there any commercial value that the AAC will lose by publishing the source code? They say that there is commercial value because they are competitors. There are other people who run election for larger organizations. And those people will take their code and discover how to do things that they might not otherwise know how to do or be able to do things faster because they've seen the AAC's code. That's in essence their argument on both of those counts. The problem that I have is that all they have to demonstrate is that there's some value lost. Probably has to be more than a dollar, but it doesn't have to be very much. They don't have to demonstrate that the commercial value lost is outweighed by the public interest in us knowing how votes are counted. They don't have to demonstrate that the commercial value loss will actually happen just that it's reasonably likely to happen. They don't have to demonstrate that it will happen tomorrow. They just have to demonstrate that it's reasonably likely to happen at some point in the future. So it's a very low bar for them to leap in order to prevent any further access to this information. As I said, the public interest is actually irrelevant, which I think is a really significant problem with what I'm trying to do. If public interest was irrelevant, I have no doubt that I would win. Because it's irrelevant, it might be a bit harder. So the other thing that's important is that my argument essentially rests on the fact that copyright will be preserved. So even if they publish all this information, they still own the copyright over the source code. That means that they can control who uses it, who makes derivative works from it, who takes copies of it. That means that or I say that means that they won't lose any commercial value because that value will be protected by copyright. I'm in the process now submitting the final documents there. The final part of that argument, that's due in this Friday. And then we'll proceed as I say to hearing in May or June. So there's a broader lesson here. I think it's really important that we have access to government-created software. It's really valuable. If any of you were in Audrey's talk this morning, she was talking about government economic models and government modeling systems and the fact that they need to be open sourced in order to enable better discussion and better understanding of government decision-making. I think that that is essential. I think that things which are produced with government money should be produced for the benefit of the people, not merely for the benefit of particular part of government. I think government is not a commercial entity. Even though governments sometimes provide fees for services, as the Electoral Commission does, I don't think that that's a good reason to say the government's interest should be solely commercial in these types of activities. So freedom of information is a really useful tool, I think, in extracting information from government because it has the force of law. You can actually, if you win the case, force them to disclose any information, any document that includes source code. In theory, it includes every revision of source code that's stored in a source control system. It's really well respected by government. They take it seriously when you put in an FOI request, even though there aren't very many sanctions that can be applied to them. And it's available throughout the public sector. It doesn't matter whether you are dealing with a local council or the federal government, the Electoral Commission, a government business enterprise, a federal department, a minister's office, all of these organizations have to disclose documents in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act or local variants thereof. But it's the wrong tool. Using FOI to get source code is like playing cricket with a tennis racket. Occasionally, you might get a hit in, but you really actually need to change the game. Firstly, it's expensive, not just in terms of the cost of going to court, the cost of those legal processes, but in terms of getting access to the material if you're allowed access to it in the first place. Mark Newton requested access to the source code for the cybersecurity help button. Some of you might remember from a couple of years ago. It turns out the government spent $300,000 and didn't get the source code for the cybersecurity help button, but it was rejected by Apple for just being a web view. But Mark Newton then requested access to the government contracts that were associated with that. And they said, in order to proceed, just give us $450 and we'll go right ahead. Well, that's not something that we can or should expect any individual to do. And it's not necessarily the best use of raised funds. I support the idea of a freedom of information fund, a fighting fund. I think that's extremely valuable, but that's not the way we want to be dealing with these things. We don't want to have to go through that process. In particular, because of the next thing there, copyright is maintained in whatever's released. So as great as it is to be able to see, for example, the source code of the MyGov website, let's say for a moment we could get access to that. We can't because it's an unreasonable diversion of the resources of the web team, apparently. But copyright is maintained. That means nobody else can use that material in any way. You can't build on it. In theory, you can't even submit patches. You can't say it should be modified in this way. All you have, all you can do is look at it. This substantial unreasonable diversion of resources one is something I haven't touched on. I was very lucky that the AAC didn't say that giving access to the code would be a diversion of resources. This is the main reason used to stop people accessing things, especially where there's some technicality around it, where it requires specialized knowledge to know what should be sacred and what shouldn't be. What they say is that would take more than about 40 hours worth of time by whatever estimate and that's an unreasonable diversion of the resources of the agency which should be dedicated to whatever the agency normally does. So that immediately puts a stop to any further request. That's been the primary excuse used for almost every other request for source code. It's been given in response to requests for things like backup and testing information, information about the procedures used around easy count. So that's a really significant way that governments can basically put a stop to things by saying we think it's going to be too hard so we're not going to bother. Interestingly, that was raised when I put in my request for that schedule of documents, that list of 54 documents. They said it would be a substantial and unreasonable diversion of their resources to give me that two-page document, which they already had. But they said that it would be too hard to think about whether I should be allowed access to it or not so they weren't going to do it. Thankfully, after this court application was made, the lawyers talked them down and said release the list. They released the list, most of it was out of scope. Of the 54 documents, two were source code or data specifications. The rest were things like user manuals and random projects, printouts and that sort of thing. The final problem with FOIs is that there's a really defensive culture. When you go in with an FOI request, people, the people who respond are the legal department, the vast majority of the time. They constantly want to say no. That's their default position. It's very hard to get any material out there. Also, when it comes to source code, they just don't understand. This was Pete Lawler's request for some information about what the version of visual basic easy count runs on. He sent that through Write2Know and their response was the AC currently uses the version of visual basic in csharp.net. It's like the time my mother asked me the difference between Google and a PC. Love you, mum. More than that, this response came after a page of saying, well, we don't have to tell you, this isn't a properly formulated FOI request and we really have no obligation. That's the culture that you face when you try to use freedom of information to deal with source code or indeed anything that's even remotely technical. So what do we need to do? Well, I think we need to work towards open by default and that means open source for all government software by default. National Library of Australia, Geoscience Australia, those both have Github. I'm sure there are other people in government contributing back to the open source world, but they are few and far between. They are small teams working on dedicated pieces of software where somebody's been able to say, hey, this is a good idea or they've been forced to because they want to use GPL. This is really important. I think this is the next big step for the open software for the free software movement. We have done it before. We have worked towards the use of open formats. I know that DocX is not well documented, but the fact that it's documented at all is because people in the free software community pushed for the use of open data formats. We have open source software being used within government. It's now considered a viable option when governments are tendering for work. We have open documentation and open data. The default license for all new written documents in the government is created commons. That's a huge achievement that occurred as a result of the work of people in the free software and open source movement. It occurred because we could demonstrate the benefits of those things for government. Now open data is huge. GovHack is huge. More and more government agencies from the local level to the federal level are realizing those benefits, releasing data by default. I got a particular benefit when for my crowd funding campaign I used a photo taken by the AAC and released under creative commons, so thank you for that. So as I was saying before, government code should be open. We know that there are benefits for open source software. Government is not a part of someone in an open market. It actually has a different place in the world and that place should be providing benefits for individuals. This is a high level policy decision that needs to be made. The only time it will happen is if it starts from the top and comes down. There are things that people can do at an individual level and those are things that people are doing at places like Geoscience Australia and people are doing, I know, at various local government organizations, but realistically in order to make this work properly it needs to be high level. I think there are huge benefits to that, not just in terms of the usual benefits we get from open source software, not just in terms of the benefits for the community, but benefits really for the people who are within government, for government itself, in terms of improved collaboration between public and private sector, improved collaboration between government departments. I think Shadow IT is a really big area where you have people who are creating VBA applications inside spreadsheets to do advanced analysis because there's a small group of people who need that, but they're using a different system to other people who are doing that in state government or in different branches of government. If all of this material were opened by default we would be able to merge those things, take the best of each world and use that consistently and ideally bug-free. And I think that Freedom of Information Reform comes into that. I think we need to be able to say that we need to be able to compel disclosure at some level, but ultimately it's an executive policy decision, not a legislative change that is important here. So this is my explicit call to action. There are ways that we can make this happen. We have to talk to politicians, we have to push for it locally within departments with people that we know. We have to prove the benefits and I don't think that that's a particularly hard thing to do. This is something that Linux Australia might be working on and this Friday at lunchtime there'll be a Linux Australia boff where I understand there'll be conversations about the future of Linux Australia and what its involvement should be in this type of lobbying. There's also the Open Australia Foundation which does a lot of this work. It runs the right to no website and various other websites around democratic engagement and by the way any money that I have raised that I don't end up spending on this court case will end up going back to the Open Australia Foundation for that reason. So I just want to finish with a big page of thanks. These are all people who have donated money or time or moral support or ideas who have acted as experts and this is just the list that I was able to compile when setting up my website. There are hundreds of people who have been supportive of my activity here to try to get access to this source code. I think really though we need to do more than that. We don't just want to look at this individual project it's not just about the Senate voting source code I think we really need to push for change in whole of government policy which is going to be a move towards more open source software from every branch of government as the default position. So that's the end of my talk and I'm happy to take any questions. Thank you Michael. I'm glad that there is a lawyer trying to uncover source code for elections and I'm especially thankful that you came here to talk to talk about it. Thank you. Given that the source code for the programs that count your elections is actually the method by which your politicians are elected, what legal basis do they claim for not telling you how you get your representatives elected? So the short answer is that it's subject-oriented. So they genuinely so the Senate counting class inherits from a proportional representation class that inherits from a generic voting class and they say that they use the proportional representation of the generic voting classes for other software that is used to count commercial elections and therefore that stuff at the very least needs to stay secret. Oh and by the way you can have everything or nothing. So in essence that's their argument is that because the code is also used elsewhere that has commercial value that needs to stay secret. So the question was can you not challenge the election of a senator on the basis that it might be invalid. You would have to find someone willing to do that. It's very very expensive to go to the Court of Dispute of Returns and you generally have to put down a deposit of about twenty thousand dollars to start that process. But also I don't think it'll be successful. I don't doubt that I don't think that any elections have been affected by bugs in the software. It has been the subject of some external verification. I'm not sure to what extent that is it's certainly not a proof of functionality but there's been some testing. I'm sure they're aware of the issues associated with the electoral connection does a very good job a lot of the time anyway. So I reckon that it's probably okay and it will be unlikely to have affected the result but I still think it's important that we see what the code is. Considering the freedom of information is expensive and probably not the best tool as you said is there any other legal research that can be used in this place? Nothing that is as broadly applicable. So there are some things there was a bit of a discussion about whether the electoral act requires scrutineers to be able to observe the internal workings of the computers. There are other pieces of legislation that give you access to certain types of information but generally speaking freedom of information is the one that has the broadest application so that's why I focused on it. Just checking with you aware of the use of open source software in the about 2001 ACT elections you're familiar with that evacs etc. Yes yes I wonder whether they the existence of that and the source code helps at all with the arguments you're making? It certainly helps and it's also helped with the public campaign because there were some bugs found in evacs by one of the people who's been working as an expert witness Professor Rajiv Goy. So it means the existence of publicly available election software means that I have a strong argument to say there's nothing secret about what they're doing but evacs and a lot of the other software the Victorian software which is also part of which are also available. They're not designed to work on multiple different types of elections or on elections which are sufficiently similar where they are. They're mostly first passed the post systems rather than proportional representation systems. Yeah so and the ACT one only works on the hair clerk system that they use in the ACT so it's not broadly applicable to some of the other types of representation that EZCAP can deal with but it is certainly something that I'm arguing about. Thank you very much. It was a very interesting presentation. Those of you who are not New Zealanders might be interested to hear that I think it was two cycles ago in the local body elections. The government changed the system to allow proportional representation voting in some electorates and they got the program for counting the elections wrong and it took them about six weeks to produce the election results. Yeah. Which leads me to the general observation that when dealing with a bureaucracy and governments are generally bureaucratic never impute malice when incompetence will explain the observation. Absolutely. I could not agree more and yeah as I say there have been bugs known to exist in the ACT system. In Australia that could have affected the election and I know that there have been issues in New Zealand as well. I was going to ask you to expand on the issue of scrutiny is because in New Zealand we're I think investigating the electronic voting systems for the national elections which haven't been used in the national elections in the past and this question has come up with scrutiny is we'll be able to you know because how can you trust the system where there's a black box that comes from some vendor or whatever so to a common person's way of thinking scrutiny should be able to fully inspect that part of the system as well so is there any sort of legislation around scrutiny that will allow you to get access. Number one and the other one is I don't quite understand RAC selling actually selling services or software to you know commercially so that they are. Well so and there are two things that the AC is doing one is they sell commercial services where they run elections for local governments that are able to tender in New South Wales and also certain private organizations. They also license out the software to the South Australian and Northern Territory electoral commissions to the value of about $10,000 a year so whoop do you do. In terms of that first question about scrutiny is it's very very hard to know the law is not drafted in a way that it understands the existence of technology. It's drafted on the basis that people will be doing this by hand and even the law in Australia that specifically refers to computers talks about the way the computer has to operate not anything about how the scrutiny process operates in that respect. There's probably an argument to be made that scrutiners should have access to all of that material. The AAC actually said when they started redeveloping EZCAP that they would give access to political parties. They've since rescinded that invitation and I can't use it in the court case because parliamentary privilege. But I think there's a strong case that scrutiners should have access. There's a potential legal case but it would be difficult and expensive to argue. Always the problem. Thank you very much again Michael for coming to us with this interesting talk. The lighting talks start in 10 minutes at 4.35 in the Fisher and Piker Room.


All right, welcome to this intermediate Python course that is in representation in Python. This is a small rerecording of the first part of the course because we had a mess up when we actually did that the first time. So to access the course material, you can go to our GitHub repository whose URL you see here, okay, and whose page you see there. And the first step that you have to do is to get all of the content which contains both the notebooks but also solutions to the exercises and everything associated. So it's important that you get that. For that either clone this repository if you know or just click on this green button there and download the zip file. Once this is done and you have all of the content and zipped of course in your computer, load up a Jupyter notebook instance or Jupyter Live if you prefer, navigate to where you have put the material and at some point you should end up with something like this. Then if you go there and start up the first notebook, here we are going to be able to start up with the content of the course which is to learn how to load up tabular data and start analyzing it looking at it with Python. So this is a menu for this very first lesson. First off, we are mostly going to talk about Pandas libraries, yeah. And so Pandas is a library that is based off of NumPy arrays and implements the idea of a data frame which is heavily inspired from the R data frame where it's basically tabular data okay, organized according to rows and columns, okay. The columns have column names of course and the rows may have names often by default it will be numbered in a bunch of numbers and sometimes it's names that have more sense to that actual labels which we refer to as index, all right. And so a data frame is composed of several columns and if we delve a little bit into the structure of a data frame, each column is actually what today its own little custom type which is what Pandas called a series, all right. Which also have index and a given type. We'll go back to that in more detail later on during the course. But first off, the first thing that we need to do is to be able to load our modules there to make sure that we have all of the required libraries. Okay, all right, so this worked. And then we need to be able to read tabular data inside Python, okay, from a file, typically a CSV file or a CSV file as the Pandas data frame. So let's look at it together. Our base function is called read underscore table. And to that you basically give the file path of the file that you want to read and a bunch of parameters, typically the set parameter which determines which is the separator between field. So in the CSV, it's tabs in the CSV, it's coma or semi-columns, might be some things. Whether or not there is a header, okay, and when it can be found by default it will expect a header. And you can also ask it to skip some rows and there are, as we will see also, many, many, many other options that one can use, okay. So let's try and load some data there, all right. So import Pandas as PD, as PD is a very classical shortcut alias for Pandas. So DF as will be the name of the viable that we want to create from this file, there's a CSV file that contains data about the Titanic passengers. So we look at it and the header shows us the first few rows. So very useful to check that reading one pocket. Now there is something there. You see it doesn't look super nice. It looks like it has read everything in a single big column containing all of this data. So there follows our first micro exercise where you can try and fix the cell above so that the reading there goes more smoothly and it gives us a better result, all right. And if you have the time, you can try and look up for the head to see that there is a function that maybe helps you to have different default values for read table and makes you like, makes your life a bit easier, right. So in the actual course, we wait, we give people more time to solve these, but then in the video version, of course, we will cut directly to the solution. So just put them on pause if you want to work, otherwise I'll correct right now. So to try and solve that one, of course, you can gather that here, the problem is that the separator in the CSV file is a coma where has the default here is tab for PE.readTable. Of course, if you are unsure, you always want to check this with the help function. Okay, so the help. And if you kind of look at what's in there set by default, it's a tab, all right. So if you then just go back there, okay, get this right. And then you just set the separator as commas and you read that one, then you'll get something much, much nicer, much, much closer to what you would actually want to have, all right. Now there is an alternative is that pandas also has implemented some read underscore and then the format name alternative function. And because CSV is such an ubiquitous format, there is already a read CSV with the default separator as a coma that exists there. And so you can get the same sort of result using directly PE.readTable.read.score CSV, all right. It's always useful to know both functions and both possibilities when it comes to usage. Okay, so that's for the correction of this little micro size. And the next part is just a little commentary on that and also a reloading. If you've not done it, be sure to run that cell to reload the rest of our data sets because we will use that for the rest of the notebook going more and more detail in the different part of the single data sets. All right, so that's it for my little part. And then I'll give the floor back to Robin with the original video from the original course for part one. Okay, so now another aspect that we might have to deal with when loading data from disk is whether we have a header or not in our data set. So in the example we had so far, if we look at the actual file on disk, so if I go to data.titanic.csv. So here I just have a look at the actual file on disk and we see that the first line of the file actually contains column names, okay. So what happened is that pandas actually automatically detected that there were column names and so it uses these values, the first line of the file as automatically as column name. But now let's see what happens if I try to load a file that has no header. So this Titanic no header file, it actually doesn't contain this first line with column names. Okay, so you see that what happens here is that pandas has taken used the first line of the file as column names, which here is actually not appropriate because this is not supposed to be the names of the columns. It's simply the first row of the table. Okay, so if this is a case and I want to avoid it, I need to explicitly indicate that header equals none, all right. So if I add this header equals non-argument, now pandas will be aware that there are no header values in our file and so there should not be any column names. All right, so now the import is done properly. And of course, since I didn't give any column names, so what pandas does is that it simply uses numeric values by default, so the columns are simply named after their position. And as we will see, and as you should be used to with Python, the indexing or numbering always starts with zero. So the first row has position zero and the first column has position zero. So for people who come from ours, this can be a bit unexpected because in ours, the numbering actually starts with one. Now, let's assume that our data does not contain any header but that we actually want to give column names to our file, to our data frame, sorry. There, what we can do is that we can add the pass optional names argument to the read table function and we can specify the names of the columns, right? So you see that I simply pass a sequence of strings. Here I give a list, but I could also give a tuple, for instance. And now I have imported my data and the values I have passed here in my list have been used as column names. So only requirement is obviously that the number of names of strings that you pass to the names, argument matches a number of columns. So this is how I can set column names. Now, it's also possible to set row names and this is what we see right now. We see that by default, so row names have, I mean, if there are no row names in our file, then the rows simply gets a label or the name that corresponds to their position, so start with zero. So just a vocabulary point in pandas, so row names are called the index of the data frame. Okay, so whenever we refer to the index of the data frame, it means row names. And we can access these, so access or set these row names using the dot index attribute. Right, so let's see what happens if I load a file that contains row names. So here, I just want to show you the, we just print the start of the file as it is in the, you know, in the original text file. So we see that we have column names and then we have so different rows of data. Now, what is different with before is that you see that I don't have a name column anymore. So if you actually count the number of elements you have in the first line, you will see that you have one less element than in all the other lines, all right? So let's see what happens now when I load this file. And you see that what pandas automatically did here is that it used the first value of each line as that is not the header, it used it as name of the column. Okay, so as index value. So now the index values are no longer, you know, the default numeric value is zero, one, two, three and so on. Now the first values of each line in our file has been used as row names, so as index value. And so the reason, I mean, the reason why Python pandas, sorry, did this is because it detected that the first row of the file has one less values than all other rows in the file. So when this is the case, pandas will automatically assume that the first element of each line contains index value, so it's a name of the row. As I mentioned with dot index, if you, it's a dot index attribute of the data frame contains the index value. So then anytime, for instance, if you want to access row names, you can query this dot index attribute of the data frame, for instance, here I display the five first items. Maybe here, just a note to say that you can see that the type of the object returned by dot index is not directly a list or tuple, it's actually an index object. So most of the time you can use this directly as a, I mean, it's an iterable object, so you can use it in a loop or so, just as if it was a list. But that times, if you really need to pass to have the content of the index as a list, then you have to explicitly convert it. So for instance, here, but you can do this simply with, by using the list construction, like that. So here you see I have the five first element of the index now as a list. So there are times if, for instance, the file that you're loading has not, it's the exact structure where the first row has one less value than the other rows. For instance, our data file is the same as we had in the beginning, so it's the same number of column names as elements in the subsequent rows. But for some reason, I want to use the name column as index values, then I can always manually, manually, so it indicates that the index column should be the first column, corresponds to the first column of the data I'm loading. I do this with the index underscore column argument. So I can either pass a position or I can say, this gives the same result. I can say my index corresponds to the column name of the data frame. So if I do this now instead of being a regular column, the name column here is actually the index of the data frame. So it's not a natural column anymore, it's the index. If I want to check to make sure, I can print the list of columns. So you see it starts with sex, age, and so on. And name is no longer a natural column. And you can actually see here in the display that the name label is a bit lower than the other ones. I'm really sure that this is an index. Okay, so these are the basics of loading a data frame with pandas, of course, there are a lot of other options for read tables that we will not look at all of them, but we just listed a couple of here that can be useful. For instance, you can pass the NA underscore values as an argument to indicate to Python which values in your data set should be considered as NA values, so sort of empty values of your table. If you want to automatically convert certain values to true or false or the Boolean true or false, you can do this with a true false values argument. If your data is compressed, there is also an argument to pass to pandas so that it automatically decompress your data before loading it and so on. So just a quick example here.  The data is quite messy in it. You see it has two columns. And then I have, for instance, for NA values, I used the data frame user strings missing and not available and also an NAN. So, but actually all this should be NA values. And also I would like that the values, which contain only true and false values. And so the numeric values, zero should be converted to false and any other so one and two should be converted to true. So I can fix this by passing the following arguments. So NA values, I will give a list of all the strings that should be converted to NA. So for instance, missing and not available should become NA. So true, one and two should be true and false and zero should be false. When you see that when I pass these arguments now, my data set is, my data frame is much cleaner. I have only true and false values and all the missing values are proper NA values in the table. As I quickly mentioned, at the start, there are many other functions to read specific tabulated file formats. We just listed a couple here. You can directly read Excel files, JSON, which is actually not a tabulated format but it's still a structure type of data. So you can directly read JSON files, SQL files and so on. So we didn't, you can click here to see the exhaustive list. There are quite many specialized functions to load all sort of different types of files. Okay, so if you're using a fairly common type of file, it's quite likely that Panda already has a function to read it. So please check the documentation. All right, here we have another small micro exercise. So when you ask to read this file here and you have to check if, you know, make sure that the data frame is nicely imported. So we'll have the right type of separator and also make sure that's a test if there's a header or not.  But obviously I gave the wrong, it's not a tab delimited. And you see that I only have a single column with all the values. So here, so separator actually seems to be simply a white space. So I can now add white space as a separator. And now you see it looks a lot better. So I have my different columns and rows loaded properly. Now maybe one more thing I could do, but you know, this depends again on the type of analysis I want to do with the data, but maybe in this case, so you see that I have the first column contains gene names and then each column is actually the count of how many times I see a given sequence in the gene. So maybe for this particular analysis, I would like to have the index of my data frame equal to the gene names. And so I could do this. If I want to do this, I need to manually specify it and I use index called argument. And here I have two options, either I can say it's the first column, so zero, or I could also pass the name of the column, which is gene. So this both give me the same result. And now you see that the actual index of the data frame corresponds to the gene names. Maybe one more thing, maybe some people might have tried to load it without compression. And you see that if I do this, it actually also works. So in this case, compression argument is appears to be sort of optional. So what happens here is that because ZIP is such a ubiquitous compression format, Pandas actually is able to auto detect what if files are compressed with ZIP. So for ZIP file, it's not absolutely necessary to specify the compression, it's auto-detected. All right, are there any questions? Let me just check. Good dog, no. All right, so hopefully by now, how we can load the files is clear for everyone.


And of course I am barefoot as I usually am. I have been for about the last decade and today I'm gonna talk to you about why I'm barefoot, the benefits of being barefoot and what maybe you could get out of it too. And if I could sum that up in one thing the reason why it's because I believe these things work. I believe that hundreds of thousands of years of evolution has it more figured out than the last couple hundred years of humans and shoes. But there's a lot more to it than that so stay tuned and I'll share it all. So I haven't always been barefoot. I have to be honest I think always there's been a little bit of an interest at least. Even when I was in high school growing up in northern Wisconsin with frigid cold winters I seem to remember trying to go outside barefoot and I seem to remember going to parties and college in my sandals even in the middle of winter. So it's always been a part of me. But it wasn't until my early 20s I was in New Zealand and Australia and I had a mentor. I was doing a study abroad program and this guy his name is Gary. He's from Tasmania a pretty wild guy and we'd be climbing over mountains on our hikes and this guy would be doing it barefoot. Everything we were doing whether it was climbing or hopping over rocks or walking through town this guy was barefoot. And I saw that and it just intrigued me and I thought hey if Gary can do this then I have to be able to as well. So I started to take my shoes off and walk with Gary and at first maybe I'd only make it a half mile or a mile but pretty quickly I was making it a little bit more and a little bit more and that's what I did. I started off small and built it up and built it up. A few years later I remember I was in Northport New York and there was a 10k the Cow Harbor 10k and I had never run a competitive 10k that's six kilometers of not really a competitive person but I decided hey I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna try to do it barefoot and see what happens. So I started out in the back of the pack thinking that I would be pretty slow with everybody else having shoes and wanting to take it easy and I started out and I just found myself passing dozens and dozens and then hundreds and hundreds of people and I finished the race in about 44 minutes I think it was. It was the fastest that I've ever ran you know really one of the fastest I've ever ran in my entire life and it was barefoot. So what happened was I just found myself continuously exceeding what I thought that I could do with my body and I found my body working naturally and I found myself working within the boundaries that I had with my body and I just grew into it. Now a lot of people they can understand walking barefoot you know at the beach or maybe in a nice field or hiking in a you know smooth place but I go barefoot pretty much everywhere even in the streets of New York or in the alleys I'm generally always barefoot. Now I put on shoes sometimes of course especially when I'm visiting colder climates but generally my goal is to try to be barefoot as much as I possibly can. So being barefoot for me is definitely about freedom. I get a great sense of freedom from being barefoot but it's about so much more than that. For me it's about allowing my feet to do what they've been designed to do. So there's a couple of things that I want to talk about that I'd like you to think about. First of all let's talk about the modern shoes and we'll start with arch support. So arch support this is your arch right here and the idea of arch support is it supports that arch. Now the problem with that if you've ever broken a bone and had to wear a cast or know a friend who has what you've seen is that by not using something it atrophies and the problem that I see with arch support is when you support the arch it doesn't have to do its job anymore and it atrophies. So these modern shoes actually can create weaker feet and it's not just the arch it's the muscles it's the ligaments and it's the tendons. Our feet have a higher concentration of muscles, ligaments and tendons than many parts of our body and wearing these shoes that give that support actually allow for the feet to not have to be strong and not have to be able to do what they naturally do. Now it doesn't just end at the feet though. Of course we know everything about us is intricately connected. It's very easy to remove things and say this is your eye and that's your foot and it has absolutely nothing to do with each other but of course we know that's not true. Everything is intricately connected.  So for me being barefoot is allowing it's about allowing my body to work as it has been designed over hundreds of thousands of years. Another thing that's really special about the feet is the feet have more nerve endings in the bottom of our feet than most other parts of our body. I have to imagine that the lips would have more nerve endings for example they're so sensitive but of all the places of our body this has one of the highest concentrations of nerve endings. Now why would that be? Why would that be the case if they were designed to just be stuck inside of a foot? My belief is that the shoes cut off the body's ability to receive information. So when I'm running barefoot and I'm walking barefoot my body is able to receive all of that information and have me be more connected to my surroundings more connected to the earth that is underneath me and I believe that cutting off those nerve endings can have very meaningful implications as well. There's something that happens when you start to let those nerve endings do their job and this is a part of being barefoot and that is that you develop calluses. So I like to say that it might appear that I'm not wearing shoes but in a way I actually am they are naturally built in soul right to the foot. So my soul is very thick and I can step if I step on thorns for example most of the time they just go in a tiny way not even to the sensitive part not not to the part that hurts because the callus has been built over it. So I'm able to step on little pieces of glass for example which I do sometimes and it generally goes into the callus and doesn't go deep in. So a lot of people worry about these things like that. People always say well doesn't it hurt? Don't you get injured? Well first of all you build it up over time. If you've been wearing shoes for decades it takes you time for your feet to reliberate and become a part of the land but also again just remember these were designed to function in the first place. A lot of I think shoe shoe industries today are multi-billion dollar companies. This is a huge industry. Do you really think that the way they design everything is always for the best interest of our feet and our health or do you think that money may play a large role in the way they do things? There's actually studies out there that show that once shoes get above 100 dollars you actually see more injuries and that's the next big part that I really want to talk about and that is that by by being barefoot what I've found is that I'm actually able to stay within my boundaries. Think about this for a second. Our shoes are designed with absorption, shock absorption in them. You see on these commercials how it shows the perfect shock absorption. Okay I'm not a very good impersonator but what where do we see the most knee replacements and hip replacements? It's from sports like basketball, like tennis, like track and field on concrete where people are wearing shoes and just pounding their feet down. So by being barefoot what happens is I am required to take that impact naturally. I use my legs and my feet to to step down and jump down in a way where I take that impact in but what happens with the modern-day shoes is they allow us to really hit down hard and it does take some of that impact but not nearly enough. So what I found is that the modern-day shoe actually allows me to go beyond the natural limitations of my body and allows me to injure myself even more. So like I said I've injured my feet a few times but the injuries that I've had are minor compared to the long-term damaging injuries that you see in this societal way of just allowing ourselves and pushing our bodies beyond what they're actually capable of doing. So being barefoot forces me to stay within my body's capability. Now speaking of forcing me to do what my body is designed to do and what I want to do being barefoot also keeps me out of places that I don't want to go. You know the sign no shoes no shirt no service well a lot of places won't allow me in barefoot. One of those places is bars. I don't really want to drink very much I don't really want to go to those places so being barefoot actually prevents me from going to those places even when I might slip up and go to them because I'm often out and about with no shoes at all. So being barefoot just kind of keeps me outside and keeps me if I'm not outside in more chill places the places that I want to be rather than in shopping malls and consumeric consumeristic places and bars. So being barefoot really just kind of forces me to live the life that I actually want. Another thing that being barefoot does is it forces me to slow down. I have to pay attention to where I'm going with shoes you can just plow over everything and not have to think about the ground beneath your feet but whether I'm walking or I'm running I mentioned that wearing shoes really connects me to my surroundings because I have to look where I'm going. So people worry about stepping in dog poop for example well I actually am watching where I'm going so I'm less likely to step in dog poop than with shoes because I have to pay attention to my surroundings and I'll notice glass people often that are walking with me are like stop Rob there's glass I know there's glass I'm the barefoot one I have to pay attention to that so you start to pay more attention to your surroundings but again it slows me down I want to live a relaxed life I want to live stress-free and largely anxiety-free and being barefoot really slows me down it makes me have to pay attention to where I'm going I can't as hurry as much and it really just as much as it keeps me working within my body's capabilities it also keeps me slow and helps me to live a more you know relaxed calm stress-free life and again a big part of that is keeping me out of the places that that aren't a part of that back to the dog poop thing what about the hygiene of being barefoot the interesting thing about it is that being barefoot I find it's easier to practice good hygiene than with shoes and socks that might be counterintuitive to a lot of people who think that the world is this dirty place and where germs are a bad thing thing that's a whole another thing to go into or that I have gone into in other videos but the important thing is there's a lot of problems that are created with shoes and one of those is bacterial problems and fungal problems think about this for a second where does fungus grow it grows in damp dark places if you have a wall that's in the blazing sunlight that's not where fact bacteria and fungus grows it's going to grow on the shady side of the house where it's cooler and where it is moist so with feet where is fungus going to grow in damp socks inside shoes where it's dark and moist or on feet that are exposed to fresh air and sunlight athlete's foot and foot fungus is a product of stuffing our feet inside of damp shoes damp socks being barefoot prevents that fungus and prevents athlete's foot so it's actually being barefoot is a form of good hygiene as far as the the dirt and stuff that gets on to the bottom of the foot well it's a wet day today so you can see that there's dirt on the bottom of my foot but the thing about being barefoot is i actually pay a close attention to my hygiene my feet are very important to me if i was wearing shoes i could easily leave dog poop on the bottom in those crevices but if i'm going to get something on my foot i'm going to wash it off so being barefoot actually creates naturally good hygiene another part of that is exfoliation you see a lot of people's feet who has just so much dead skin on it and these toenails that are just gunked up while walking barefoot is a natural exfoliation in fact my favorite way to exfoliate my whole body is to go to the beach and just use sand to rub my body but my feet are being exfoliated constantly so it it builds up the callus as needed but it doesn't hold on to all the dead skin so it's another form of good natural hygiene a couple more things one is minimalism and money and sustainability wrapping all those things together so minimalist wise some people have dozens of pairs of shoes the average person i don't know might have a dozen pair of shoes sustainability wise that's extremely destructive to have to need so much for me this is about saying i don't need so much i'm a human being with a human body and i can exist without so much of a need for such a large amount of modern produced stuff now companies like Nike tell you that you're supposed to replace your shoes every 500 miles that creates an incredible amount of garbage and pollution but it also burns a lot of money my goal is to live with very little money and my bare feet are definitely a representation of that i've been wearing i've had two pairs of shoes for the last about four years so you can imagine just how much less money i spent how much less trash that i create how much less dependent that i am on these this industry that i see as a destructive industry and of course as i said being barefoot keeps me out of the shops so i can actually spend a lot less money in that way so those are some of the reasons that i'm barefoot those are some of the benefits that i've seen from it and those are just things that i think are worth thinking about and it's not about you know any form of being dogmatic and doing something a hundred percent of the time my goal is to work with the earth to tread lightly on the earth to enjoy my treading on the earth and be connected to it and being barefoot as much as i can does that if i'm in cold climates again i wear shoes but if it gets up to 50 degrees fahrenheit 10 degrees celsius on a warm day i'll try to get out especially even the blacktop can be warm on days like that so i do what i can to be barefoot as much as i can if it's cold outside at least i can be barefoot at home and giving my feet that that fresh air and that connectedness if you are interested in walking barefoot and connecting to the earth in that way then i recommend starting somewhere you have to start with where you are and who you are in the place that you're in that is what you have to do is embrace the situation so start walking barefoot maybe just around your yard then maybe around the block then maybe walk a mile then go for a walk in the woods and you can start by walking in the easier places the places that are smoother and and softer rather than starting on you know really difficult gravel for example so start where you are start small if it's your desire to walk barefoot at the very least remember to question these basic things question these industries that we know their ethics are flawed and just go deeper with these things so i hope that you got a lot out of that at the very least just thinking about it thinking about the evolution of our feet and thinking about the very basic thought of what's got it better figured out hundreds of thousands of years of evolution or Nike in the last hundred years my bet is on evolution thank you all for tuning in i love you all very much make sure to subscribe if you haven't and you want more content like this invite your friends and share this video with anyone you think would benefit and go ahead and comment if you have questions last make sure you go to robgreenfield.org barefoot where i share more information links to details and my story as well all right love you all see you soon


The Cavalcade of America, sponsored by the DuPont Company, maker of better things for better living through chemistry, presents George Tobias in Schoolhouse at the Front. Before our show begins, here's a piece of interesting news behind the headlines. Recently, a loaded glider was towed across the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. The tow cable was a hundred-yard length of rope made of nylon. Nylon, tough and resilient, can stand the strain of raising a heavily laden transport into the air and towing it thousands of miles across the ocean. Tonight with George Tobias as our star, we offer a new radio play, Schoolhouse at the Front, written for Cavalcade by Frank Gabrielson. Later in the program, we will introduce a special guest, Lieutenant Colonel Morton A. Seidenfeld of the Army's Special Training Branch. And now DuPont presents George Tobias as George Annas in Schoolhouse at the Front. My name is Corporal Alfred James Deming. In civilian life, I was principal of a grammar school in Pennsylvania. Now I'm in the Army and I'm still teaching school. And I'm still teaching the alphabet, the multiplication table and where the equator is, the same as before. But there's one difference. I'm not teaching children anymore. I'm teaching soldiers. Soldiers found to be illiterate. You see, our modern Army is a complicated thing and men can't be taught to fight until they can read and write. Here comes my class now. Ten men. When they arrived at camp, eight of them couldn't read. Five of them couldn't sign their names and one couldn't even tell time. Now they know... Well, perhaps the best way to tell you about my class is to tell you about George Annas. He's that big soldier marching second. Before he joined the Army, Annas was a professional wrestler, self-described as Hercules the Greek. Your papa is always good, Mary. All he does is make face, no wrestle. That's a ceiling blacksmith, no fight. Just make loud noise. Like that, like pitch, like Mussolini. No, no, you are better. Your papa is always better, Mary. Oh, hello, Mr. Goldie. Hey, that was an OK match tonight. Yes, here's your dough. She counted for me.  Want a match in Bridgeport next week? No, Godmatch next week. Hitler and Mussolini and hero... Hero Hito, papa. Hero Hito. I go in Army. Well, Heik, well, you should ought to make some soldier. Best soldier in Army I make? When do you go? Tomorrow. Next day we're going to be over. There's $45 here, all right, papa? Well, come on, Mary. What kind of splits for that? What's the matter, Mary? You don't like your ice cream? It's swell, papa.  No. Well, what do you want? I take you to Army? What kind of Army this country going to have all soldiers bring the little kids? Nobody fights, just eat bananas, please. Going to lose the war. Handkerchief, papa. No. I need handkerchief myself. You sleep. This is my sister. Two banana splits, here's your check. How much this say, Mary? It's 50 cents, mister. Nobody ask you how much, Mary. It's 50 cents, papa. When I want you to tell me how much the check, I ask you. Here, take money. It takes two quarters to make 50 cents, mister. That's right, papa. Okay, okay, take two quarters. Gee, thanks. Papa, will you send me a picture in uniform? When I just plain soldier, or you want to wait till I get the officer? Are you going to be an officer, papa? How many times I have to tell you, George Annas, Hercules the Greek, your papa is going to be best darned soldier in whole U.S. States Army. Upon his arrival at the induction center, George Annas, like all selectees, was given the general classification test, a test which determines to a large extent the type of advance training the soldiers receive. Please, what is this paper for? Read it and fill it out, soldier. Please, I don't understand still this paper. Look, soldier, read it, write the answers. For instance, here it says, what is your name? George Annas. But don't tell me, write it in. Oh, the paper say I write my name? Sure, right there. That paper nuts, I know can write. That paper's nuts. It's me, Mary, papa. Yeah, listen, Mary, I told you I'm going to be best soldier in army. What's happened, papa? They're going to give me special training. I'm functional illiterate. Annas. Here. Annas, that's me, George Annas. Just answer here, please. Barbeury. I'm here, Corp. Who? Private James Wong Foo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pay attention, please. I pay, I pay. I think only you mean some other James Wong Foo. I see. Listen. Yeah. What's the matter, Comyshevsky? Just say here. Don't repeat your name, please. Comyshevsky. I said not to repeat your name. Comyshevsky. What's the matter, Comyshevsky? Don't you understand English? Comyshevsky. You speak Polish? Polish. Ah, Polish, Polish, Polish. Yes, yes, I'm from Poland. I'm from Warsaw. I live in the end of Poland. I live in the end of Poland. Does anyone else here speak Polish? Aye, aye, Popov. Can you explain to this man in Polish that there's been a mistake? He should be next door with Corporal Tekka, who teaches the foreign language group. Comyshevsky got to go next place, huh? Yes, that's right. And tell him to hand this note to Corporal Tekka. Corporal Tekka, synch. Corporal, you speak Polish, don't you? You speak English, don't you? You should be next door with Corporal Tekka. Please, be so kind to that man in Poland and go to Corporal Tekka. That's the class I speak in English. I don't know if he's very fluent. Please, if Corporal Tekka speaks Polish, I don't speak Polish. I'll go to Corporal Tekka and he'll be more fluent in Polish. Comyshevsky wants to say that he speaks English. He says he works very hard to learn. Fine. Good luck, Comyshevsky. Hey, Comyshevsky. And now, then, Popov's here. Ruga? Here. Smith? Here. Toliver? Here. And Zizbek? Here. That's eleven. Ten without Comyshevsky. My name, by the way, is Deming. Corporal Alfred Deming. Now, before we begin our work, I want to make sure that we all know exactly why we're here. Would any one of you men tell me? Are you sure? You're Anas? That's right, George Anas. All right. Why are we here, Anas? I know. Sergeant, tell me. We are functional illiterates. And do you know what that means? Sure. It means army like us so much, they want to give us special training. Yes, that's right. This is a special training unit. You know what kind of training you're going to get here? Excuse me, that's a crazy question. Why? There's only one thing anybody need to show soldiers how to fight. How to fight with fists, the knife, the gun, the tank, the airplane. That's all soldiers need to know. A soldier has to know more than that, Anas. What's more? Before a man can be part of this army, he's got to have the equivalent of a fourth grade grammar school education. That means that he has to know how to read and write simple English and how to do some arithmetic. For instance, if a man can't write his name, he can't sign for his pay. I make it cross. A cross can be anybody, Papo. But if you write your name like this, A-N-D-R-E-W-P-O-P, P-O-V. See how easy this is to write it? Is that Andrew Papo? Yeah. He spelled me. He spelled me. And you can do it, Papo, easily. And when you write your name like that, you're not just a little mark. You're Andrew Papo, and everybody knows it. Boy, that'd be darn fine-looking name. All right, let's get to work, shall we? Now, here on this chart is what we call the alphabet. It's made up of 26 letters. All these things are letters. And all words are made up of some combination of these letters. Now, this first letter is A. You say it after me, please? A-N-D-R-E-W-P-O-P. Hey, please, a minute. Can I ask a question? What is it, Anas? This leather business is sound like go to school. It is a school. A school is for kids. A school is also for anybody that has to learn. It's for kids. I know. I got the other in school. Little like that she is. She learned the same thing you want to show me. To read, to write, to count, to watch the back of the neck. I suppose you show us that too, huh? You bet we do, soldier. I'm a big, tall man. I can't go to school. What my friends say?  I shake my head.  I shake my head.  I shake my head. What do you do in war, herk?  The army won't let you fight until you can read and write and figure. It's going to be a long time than before George Anna's fight. We'll see, soldier. This is a largely way to treat first-class functionality later. Let's get on with the lesson. What letter am I pointing at, man? A. This is B. Say it. B. C. C. At the end of a few weeks, most of my class was making progress. They could read simple things. They could do easy sums. Well, that was eight of them. The other two had learned nothing. One of these was Ruga, who tried hard, but whose mind was poor. The other was Annas, whose mind was good, but it just wouldn't work. I just about decided to report him as hopelessly maladjusted and unfit for service. When one day in class, as we were reading aloud from the soldier's reader... I live in camp. I am in the army. I have an army number. What is your army number, television? Four million four hundred and forty-six thousand and four. Annas? Yes, corporal. How many times do I have to tell you to stop looking out of the window? There's a plain way up there, and I'm watching it. Never mind that. You pay attention here, please. I pay all attention I got, corporal. Then why don't you learn something? Maybe I dumb. No, you're not dumb. Your sergeant tells me that you have the makings of a good soldier, Annas. Soldier? Sure. That got nothing to do with school. Any man who can learn the manual of arms can learn to sign his name if he wants to. Everybody else in this class can do it now. Not Ruga. Never mind Ruga. Don't you feel funny still making those crosses?  We won't go into that again, Annas. But from now on, you work, or you'll find yourself in trouble. All right, let's get on with the reading, please. May I ask it first question, please? What is it, Papa? I find it two words in letter. I cannot understand it. You want to show me the letter? Sure, it's right here. These two words, see? Banana split. Your daughter says she's thanking you for the money you sent her for a banana split, Papa. Banana split? What does that mean, teacher? Class? Ice cream on banana. Ice cream on banana. Right. And now, how come that you send your girl money for it when you don't know what it was, Papa? Oh, not my kid. This is not my letter. Who is it then? The Greeks. Oh, what are you doing with it? Well, he's poor ignorant as fellow, so I read his mail to him. Why do you do that?  He comes and says, I wonder how a kid is home. I read letter because I feel sorry. You read letter because I pay you two packs of cigarettes. Uh, Papa, let me get this straight.  I'm sorry for him, too. Papa, I hate to see a man lose a good thing. But after this, you let Annas read his own mail. If Annas wants to know what a letter says, let him learn to read it the way the rest of us have. You are listening to George Tobias as George Annas in Schoolhouse at the Front, a new radio play on the cavalcade of America sponsored by DuPont. As our play continues, George Annas, a Greek wrestler played by Mr. Tobias, is getting into difficulties because he refuses to apply himself in the Army's training course for men who cannot read or write English. Mail call, mail to Kenzie, Babcock, Jester. Hey, you got leather for Annas? Keep your shirt on, buddy. Toliver. Here you are. Wilson. Wilson, give me. Not got for Annas? My kid, my kid, no writing week now. There's one for you, you'll get it, buddy. Epstein, Jones, Charlie, Brown, Annas. Me, that's me. George Annas. That's me. A little later that day as I got the story, Poppov and Smith and some of the men were sitting around quarters shooting the breeze. You hear Corporal tell me today I do good schoolwork?  Who is teacher pet? You buttered a corporal like he was a waffle. Yeah. Who else work as hard as me, huh? Who else knows already the general orders? Listen, my general orders are, one, to take charge of this post and all government property in view. Two, to work my post, keeping always on the alert and observing everything that takes place inside our area. Hey, I'm trying to read this here. Three, to report all violations of orders I'm instructed. Four, to repeat all calls from posts more distant from the guardhouse than my own. Five, to quit my post, don't even crop me at least. Six, to receive obey and pass on to the central authority. It is me all orders. Seven, to talk to no one except the line of duty. Eight, to give the alarm in case of fire or disorder. Nine, to call the corporal of the guard in any case not covered by instructions. Ten, to salute all officers in all colors and stand a smart case. Five, and three, to fight for challenging, to challenge all persons out on me by post and to allow no one to pass without proper authority. And I suppose that is teacher's bed.  Here comes a Greek. Hey, Papa, what's the matter? Papa, have you lost his voice? Yeah, about two minutes too late. What? What do you want? Got letter from Keith. Read for me, huh? No. What do you mean, no? I pay you two packages, cigarettes, like all time. Cannot read letter. Never mind, Peter, I pay four pack cigarettes. No. I pay eight. I don't care you pay eight hundred. Why not read letter? Why not? I'm not sorry for you no more. Look, I gotta know what the kids say. Maybe she need money or something, huh? Who's gonna read me letter? What's matter, you guys? All afraid of pizza, huh? Well, it ain't that, brother Greek.  And do what you're all under-eating. But I gotta know what kids say. It's whole week since I don't hear. Ask the teacher. Teacher, I quit the army first. Don't get mad. What I need teacher for. Go ahead, one you guys, read letter. I ask, please, read letter. Well, as long as you say please, give it here. You read letter? No, no.  What'd she say, Smitty? Hey, hey, this is serious. Yeah, look, fellas. Yeah? What's the matter? What's the matter, is kids sick? Oh, we ain't got the heart to tell you, Herc. Tell, tell. You promised you'd read letter. Well, I just read it, didn't I? Read? Read to who? To myself. You didn't think I was going to read it out loud, did you? Ha! You don't read it! You don't read it! What with the kid? I gotta know. All you gotta do is read your own letter, Greek. Well, just soon I find out how his kid... I come and break your neck, Mr. Private Smitty. Please, you get the house of Dimitrios Constantino. Sorry, they do not answer. What you tell me? My sister home all time. Ring phone. See answer? Sorry, they do not answer. Oh, look, operator. You must make mistake. Ring phone. I gotta find out about my kid. I think she's sick. I gotta find out. Ring phone. Sorry, they do not answer. Ring louder, then. I gotta find my kid. Around five o'clock, I was working with Ruga, who came every day for extra lessons. Two times two is four. Two times three is six. Yes, that's right. Two times five. Five is ten. Please, Corporal. Corporal Deming, I got to see you. You'll have to wait on us. I'm busy right now. But look, it's a letter from my little kid. Something's wrong. I call home and no answer. I think maybe put a little kid in hospital. What is it you want me to do? Read a letter. Tell me what's wrong, please. Sort of a sudden interest you're taking in reading, isn't it, Anas? Well, aren't you here for to teach me to read? My job isn't to teach you to read your letters from home, Anas. I'm supposed to give you enough education so you can become a fighting soldier, that's all. Ruga comes every day for an extra hour or two and works with me. Why do you do that, Ruga? I am not so smart. Work hard for me. Army say I got to learn or kind of fight. I have mother in Tugoslavia. I did have brother there, too. What do you think I think about Greece? About U.S. states? I fight like anything for them. Well, you got to finish school first. I finish, huh? Only read letter, huh? No, Anas. I put up with enough from you. But my kid... Learn to read, then. Corporal, I think now Anas work hard. Maybe you let Ruga read letter to him, yes? You think you can, Ruga? I try. George, you feel bad. All to know about little girl. All right. Give Ruga your letter. What does it say? Dear Papa, I have a... a surprise for you. By the time you get this letter, and Anastasia... Anastasia. And I will be in your camp. I am so... excited that I can all write no more. I will tell you every thing when I see you. You loving daughter Mary Anas. The kids. The kids, you come to see me, huh? There is a P.S. Read them, read them. And Anastasia say, please do send me... Do not send me any more quarters. Quarters. I am eating too many. But is this word, please? That's banana split. What's the matter? You can't read. Now Anastasia can read a lot more than banana splits. And so can the whole class. Even Ruga. They'll be graduating soon, and they'll make good soldiers. Here they come now, marching to class. You hear them? That's more than 10 men. That's all the special training units in all the camps. Thousands and thousands of men from the 48 states. Men from over the seas. Men who did not have enough education to serve their country under arms. There'll be better soldiers now, and better citizens later on. Here they come, on their way to school, 20 years late. But on their way to school at last, to the schoolhouse at the front. Thank you, George Tobias. In a few moments, Mr. Tobias will introduce Cavalcade's special guest of the evening, Lieutenant Colonel Morton A. Seidenfeld of the Army Special Training Service. Before he does, we want to tell you the story of the capture of sunshine by chemistry, and how this development is helping to produce 60 billion eggs this year. Have you wondered what the food situation might be if there were not plenty of poultry and eggs? There are at least half a billion chickens in the United States at the present time, the greatest number ever. They're expected to lay nearly 60 billion eggs this year. Poultry products have become a $2 billion business in wartime America. But the poultry man raising more hens, producing more eggs than ever before, is facing problems he has never faced before. He is hampered by serious shortages of vital ingredients which he must have in the feed he gives his flock.  One shortage that has not developed, a shortage that might have been more serious than any other faced by the poultry man, has been prevented by chemistry. Chickens, just like human beings, must have certain vitamins, especially vitamin D. A chick needs vitamin D to grow sturdy and strong. A laying hen needs it for health and egg production. And every poultry breeder knows that vitamin D assures him more eggs will hatch. Luckily for America's food supply, vitamin D is one shortage the poultry man doesn't have to worry about today. For DuPont now manufactures vitamin D for poultry in quantities that meet all of the needs of America's greatly expanded wartime poultry industry. Sunshine captured by chemistry. That's what it amounts to in matter-of-fact scientific terms, for vitamin D is the sunshine vitamin. And using domestic raw materials of which the supply is secure, ultraviolet rays, identical with those in sunshine, are what DuPont pours into them, using great banks of powerful ultraviolet lamps in place of the rays of the sun. Hens and chicks must have vitamin D the year round. And not only today, when there is plenty of summer sunshine, but next winter as well, when skies will be overcast, this stored up chemical sunshine will help to see to it that you have plenty of chickens and eggs. Poultry men are doing all they can. So are feed manufacturers. Their record is amazing, 60 billion eggs this year. And we at DuPont are happy in the knowledge that their task is made easier by delsteral deactivated animal sterol, one of the DuPont better things for better living through chemistry. And now the star of tonight's Cavalcade, George Tobias. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. As I'm sure all of you recognize beneath the comedy of tonight's Cavalcade is a serious condition that demands correcting. For its part, the Army is doing what it can. In Washington now as a gentleman who will tell you what is being done. It is my privilege to present Lieutenant Colonel Morton A. Seidenfeld of the Army Special Training Branch, Colonel Seidenfeld. The story we have been listening to tonight carries with it inspiration and hope for many other Americans who, like George Annas, have not had an opportunity to learn the fundamentals of our language. It is a serious reflection upon our national culture that two of our Axis enemies, Japan and Germany, can boast a higher degree of literacy than the United States. Education is the foundation of democracy. We must never lag in strengthening that foundation. Among potential soldiers, illiteracy is a serious handicap and a hazard to successful military operations. The Army is doing what it can to salvage the ability of some of the men who cannot read or write English but who are otherwise eligible for induction into the Army. Our public schools are also cooperating to help the literates prepare for regular assignment when they are called to the colors. The Army welcomes any other assistance it can receive to help develop capable soldiers from the large group of Americans similar to Annas and Popov who eagerly desire to serve our country. Beneath the surface of tonight's amusing story, there is a real tragedy. How unfortunate it is that there are still many Americans so unlettered that they not only fail to realize their handicap, but instead they actually boast that they are functional illiterates. Through proper education, these men might readily take pride in their increased ability to serve our country at war and in this new learning, we'll permit them to enjoy the greater opportunities in our land when the peace for which they fight returns. To most people, a diamond is a jewel. To some, it is an instrument of war. Next week, Cavalcade presents an action-packed Nazi spy melodrama about the men who risk death for diamonds for industry. Our play, Diamonds at War. Our star, the popular screen player, Charles Coburn. Be sure to hear Cavalcade next week when we present Diamonds at War starring Charles Coburn, the famous Mr. Dingle of the motion picture The More the Merrier. The orchestra and musical score tonight were under the direction of Donald Burry's. Cavalcade is pleased to announce that tonight's star, George Tobias, is soon to be seen in the Warner Brothers feature picture of the Berlin's This is the Army, which will be presented nationally for the benefit of the Army Emergency Relief Fund. This is Clayton Collier, sending best wishes from Cavalcade's sponsor, the DuPont Company of Wilmington, Delaware. This program came to you from New York. This is the National Broadcasting Company.


How do you know if you are a riparian owner? If you have a watercourse, ditch, stream, river, or culvert on or next to your land you are known as a riparian owner. Riparian owners are responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of watercourses on their land to ensure that they are not a flood risk to other people or property. Well maintained watercourses can significantly benefit the local community by reducing local flood risk and create habitats for wildlife. West Sussex County Council has produced this short film to help individuals and communities understand roles and responsibilities when it comes to maintaining watercourses. The cost of maintaining a watercourse is minor compared to the costs that can arise from flood damage, not to mention the distress and inconvenience caused by property flooding. Look after them. We will now explain each element of potential riparian ownership using this picture of six homes that have various watercourses within their land or close by, unless otherwise shown on the title deeds all of the landowners in this picture would normally be riparian owners up to the middle of the watercourse. House A is responsible for all of the watercourse running through their garden. House B is responsible for the watercourse behind the fence at the bottom of their garden. The ditch is running outside the property. Surely that's not their responsibility. If it runs adjacent to your land and even if it does not fall inside your property boundary as set up by your title deeds, for example, if it's the other side of a fence wall or hedge then you are likely to be responsible for the maintenance of the watercourse bank on your side to halfway across the bottom of the watercourse. So unless the title deeds show otherwise or the land is clearly owned by someone else, it is presumed that each party owns to the middle of the watercourse. House D is responsible for the piped, culverted watercourse buried in the ditch in front of their land and the underground pipe which runs beneath their property to the pond. House E is responsible for the open ditch in front of their house and the pipe section under their access bridge. House F is responsible for the watercourse at the end of their garden behind their hedge and land owner G is responsible for both the watercourse running along the edges of their land and the pond. Just to recap, if both banks of a watercourse run through or under your land, you're fully responsible for maintenance. If it runs adjacent to your land, including the other side of your fence or hedge, you're likely to be responsible for maintenance of the bank on your side to halfway across. Riparian responsibilities are set out in the Land Drainage Act 1991. Riparian responsibilities under law are to pass on water flow without obstruction, pollution or diversion that would affect the rights of others, to maintain the banks and bed of the watercourse, including any trees and shrubs growing on the banks and any flood defence that exists on it. To maintain any approved structures on their stretch of the watercourse and keep them free of debris, these may include trash screens, culverts, wares and mill gates. Riparian owners must not build new structures, for example culvert, bridge or boardwalk, that encroach upon the watercourse or alter the flow of water or prevent the free passage of fish without first obtaining permission from the local authority or environment agency. Common problems affecting watercourses are allowing silt to build up, which can reduce the capacity of or block watercourses, failing to keep vegetation growth under control, disposal or storage of garden or domestic rubbish or waste on the banks of watercourses, failing to clear the entrances to piped watercourse, failing to obtain consent for any building, planting or alterations within eight metres of the bank. The ditch by my property runs alongside a road. Is it the responsibility of West Sussex County Council to manage it? This is a common question and often creates some misconception. Although the county council and highways agency in their role as the highways authority has the right to discharge rainwater from the highway into these ditches, the landowner is responsible for maintaining it. However, if the highway authority has created or piped the ditch specifically under their highway powers, they become responsible for its maintenance. Likewise, most pipes or culverts beneath the highway and of the bridges over watercourses are the responsibility of the county council. The riparian owner of any ditches alongside roads is normally the adjoining landowner, as the highway boundary invariably lies along the top of the bank closest to the road. Adjacent owners should not carry out any work on the ditch, which would restrict road surface water draining into it. There are three categories of roadside ditch, a ditch created by the highway authority and owned by them solely for draining the highway, which is the responsibility of the highway authority, a ditch on the roadside of fences and hedges, taking land drainage as well as highway drainage, which is the responsibility of the riparian owner, a ditch on the filled side of a fence or hedge, taking land drainage as well as highway drainage, which is the responsibility of the riparian owner. What are the consequences of a riparian owner's failure to look after a watercourse? A drainage problem for the property owner and neighbouring landowners, potential flooding of properties, the highway and all the surrounding land, possible enforcement action taken against the riparian owner by Environment Agency, Westside Account Council or local authority under the Land Drainage Act 1991. This is where communities have come together delivering operation watershed projects. We have found improved awareness of responsibilities and benefits, greater connectivity within communities and a common focus for volunteer groups, empowering groups and individuals. What role could community groups such as Parish and Town Councils play? They could raise awareness, coordinate activities, raise funds or produce an emergency plan that will support the most vulnerable people in their community. A good example of this is where communities have come together delivering operation watershed projects. We have found improved awareness of responsibilities and benefits, greater connectivity within communities and a common focus for volunteer groups, empowering groups and individuals. What role could community groups such as Parish and Town Councils play? They could raise awareness, coordinate activities, raise funds or produce an emergency plan that will support the most vulnerable people in their community.