Archive for November 2009

Talk the talk, but not yet walk the walk

November 22, 2009

Are there still people in the world today who speak the truth to those in power who lie? This might seem a not unreasonable conclusion from two recent articles in the Times.

First, the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a widely respected founding member of the present Iranian religious hierarchy, is mounting his own verbal attack, questioning the present Iranian leadership’s legitimacy. Montazeri, now in his mid 80s, a former close collaborateur of Khomeini (before their falling out), and one of the present supreme leader’s, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, former teachers, seems fearless.

In his own words: “A political system based on force, oppression, changing people’s votes, killing, closure, arresting and using Stalinist and medieval torture, creating repression, censorship of newspapers, interruption of the means of mass communications, jailing the enlightened and the elite of society for false reasons, and forcing them to make false confessions in jail, is condemned and illegitimate.”

Yes, fearless, because in Iran today people are imprisoned, tortured, and killed for saying, even thinking, much less than this. Could the Ayatollah Ali Montazeri’s words, assuming they were reaching his fellow Iranians, be a spark leading to a conflagration and eventual destruction of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s coterie of thugs currently ruling Iran? One hopes so.

Second, we read about Russia’s president, Dmitri Medvedev, who yesterday, the 21st of November, while speaking at United Russia’s (the governing party’s) annual congress in St. Petersburg, accused the party of backwardness, warning its leaders among other things that they must learn to win elections honestly if their party is to survive.

His statement is a bit bizarre in that “its leaders” are, at the top anyway, Vladimir Putin and Medvedev himself. Couldn’t Medvedev have done much himself to undo the “backwardness” of which he speaks?

It’s well-known that Prime Minister and United Russia founder Putin is responsible for much of the “backwardness,” of Russia, as well as that of his party, in not allowing such Western beliefs in free markets, free expression, uncensored media and more of the like to become established among the Russian people. Medvedev ought rather to have been speaking directly to Putin.

In any case there is no indication that Medvedev’s words have many takers, many adherents, in the Party or in the country. And as long as his accusations in regard to the Party are not backed up by the Prime Minister nothing much will change.

What’s going on between the President and the Prime Minister seems to be the good cop bad cop routine. Medvedev’s good cop words are playing to the Western liberal media and Putin’s bad cop words and actions to the middle and old aged reactionary Russian nationalists, still bitten with Soviet nostalgia, still more than willing and ready to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin, and still, probably, a majority of the “electorate.”

In regard to the respective governing roles played by Putin and Medvedev there was a recent op ed piece in the Times by Maxim Trudolyubov, the editorial page editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and currently a world fellow at Yale University.

Trudolyubov tells us that when visiting in America the question he is most often asked is, who is in charge in his country, Russia. While he admits to not knowing the answer he does have a lot to say about the subject.

The present governing structure of Russia, he says, is a duumvirate, like that of the two ruling Consuls in ancient Rome. But unlike the Roman Consuls who had different powers and reponsibilities Putin and Medvedev have different audiences.

Medvedev’s audience are the young people, those who have little or no direct experience of Soviet Russia, those who tend to be sympathetic to Western liberal ideals. And his audience are the Western liberals themselves, the readership of the New York Times (of which I am one) where he is often and amply quoted,  all those again including myself who want desperately to hear a Russian leader indicate by his words that he too is supportive of the beliefs and governing traditions stemming from the Enlightenment.

We have, it seems, forever, wanted Russia to be a part of our liberal, democratic, free market, and rights based world, and Medvedev’s words play to our longing in this regard. Again the good cop.

But ultimately Medvedev’s kind of truth telling is probably about as effective in changing the prevalent attitudes and beliefs in Russia as are the words of the Sunday preacher or the classroom teacher in changing the beliefs and behaviors of their parishioners and students.

Returning to my original observation that here were two truth tellers, Montazeri and Medvedev, attacking those in power who lie, I have to admit there may be no substance to my conclusion, especially as regards the Russian president. The words of both men are just words, words we like to hear, but that remain without impact on either country, Russia or Iran.

Montazeri did not stand up among the various crowds of Iranian protesters that we’ve recently read about. Would his actually being there in the streets have made a difference in the recently failed demonstrations in Tehran? Maybe.

Ok, he’s old and physically weak, and it’s probably not within his power to stand up in this fashion. For whatever reason he has chosen to remain out of the physical struggle, comfortable, secure, well provided for at his home in Qum.

Medvedev’s case, of course, is quite different. He is risking nothing at all. Instead, he seems to be enjoying a “comfortable” presidency. Most significantly he has not confronted directly the anti-rights and anti-democratic acts of his ruling partner.

Not yet is Medvedev walking the walk of the long line of truth to lie tellers who preceded him, the hundreds, the thousands of Soviet dissidents, those like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Yelena Bonner, Joseph Brodsky, Vladimir Bukovsky and so many others.

Michael Porter on strategic thinking

November 17, 2009

Well over one year ago Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School outlined what he thought were the sources of our country’s exceptional prosperity. The U.S. has prospered, he said, because of a “set of unique competitive strengths.”

These were:

an unparalleled environment for entrepreneurship, for starting new companies.

an entrepreneurship fed by a science, technology, and innovation machine that remains by far the best in the world. (In 2007, American inventors registered about 80,000 patents in the U.S. patent system, where virtually all important technologies developed in any nation are patented. That’s more than the rest of the world combined.)

the world’s best institutions for higher learning

the strongest commitment of all countries to competition and free markets.

an economic policy highly decentralized across states and regions. (think of the entertainment complex in Hollywood or life sciences in Boston)

the deepest and most efficient capital markets of any nation, especially for risk capital.

a  willingness of entrepreneurs to restructure, take their losses, and move on to the “next big thing”

Assuming that our prosperity does stem from these sources, an assumption that most of us would readily make, shouldn’t it be the government’s highest priority to get behind programs in support of these sources?

And yet when one looks at what has most occupied the executive and legislative branches of the government during President Obama’s first year of office one looks in vain for major Congressional or Presidential initiatives to strengthen anyone of these sources.

(See, for example, an astonishing WSJ report on the difficulties, including wait times of at least 12 and sometimes as long as 20 years, that highly skilled and highly talented, and therefore highly desirable, foreign-born professionals encounter when seeking to become permanent U.S. residents.)

Instead of policies to increase our competitiveness, and thereby our economic prosperity in a now global economy, we hear mostly about government  bail-outs of too big to fail banks and car companies, about the 100s of billions of stimulus dollars going to increase consumption rather than production, and hesitant, timid, and certainly inadequate congressional proposals to reform the country’s system of health care.

And if all this wasn’t enough to prevent us from doing the right thing there are a number of other problems and issues, any one of which could almost by itself undue our prosperity and for which no reasonable and obtainable solution is even yet in sight, let alone on the table, a few of the weightiest of these being the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, immigration, and our system of public education.

The President seems to be all tactics, leading skirmishes, waging battles, but the strategic thinking for which he was known for as a candidate, has not been transformed into particular strategic priorities and initiatives.

Instead, President Obama seems on the one hand to be trying to hold things together (because when he assumed office things did seem to be falling apart) — the economy, the war effort. On the other hand the particular attention he has given to health care and job protection, in the form of new entitlements and tariffs, clearly stems from promises made during the campaign.

Too bad. It does seem to be that our leaders are failing us. The President because he seems unable to break free from the entrenched political, corporate, and military centers of power in the country. Is it because he is without sufficient courage to go it alone, for he does seem to have sufficient knowledge?

And the Congress? It is still subject as much as ever to partisan bickering, its members still unable to put the country’s welfare ahead of their own private interests.

In Michael Porter’s words:

“Republicans keep repeating simplistic free-market thinking, even though the absence of all regulation makes no sense. Self-reliance is preached as if no transitional safety net is needed…. Republicans seem to think business can thrive without healthy social conditions.”

“Democrats, meanwhile, keep talking as if they want to penalize investment and economic success. They defend unions obstructing change in areas like education, cling to cumbersome regulatory approaches, and resist ways to get litigation costs for business in line with other countries. Democrats equivocate on trade in an irreversibly global economy. They seem to think social progress can be achieved only at the expense of business.”

The Exceptional Nation

November 9, 2009

Much has been written about America, the exceptional nation. And if there is one thing that makes us exceptional among all the world’s nations it must be the sort of thing I read about in today’s NYTimes, in an article entitled, Boy Who Fled Vietnam War Returns as U.S. Officer.

hefledasaboy

Justin Mott for The New York Times

Cmdr. H. B. Le visited family members in his home town of Hue, Vietnam.

“Cmdr. H. B. Le, the first Vietnamese-American to command a United States Navy destroyer, had just stepped ashore on a formal port call, making an emotional return to Vietnam for the first time since he fled as a boy on a fishing boat at the end of the war in 1975.”

I’m sure this sort of thing happens elsewhere, but I know it happens more here, and so much more that it probably plays a big role in making us what we are.

There are of course a myriad of less attractive things that are also very much our nation, and these things are much written about, but for this moment let’s not think about them but let’s savor this truly “exceptional” although quite ordinary moment in the life of the country.

And to read this, and to think there are those already here who would set themselves up as somehow having more right to be here than all those like Cmdr. H. B. who would come here. Let’s hope, as we revise our immigration policies, that these people won’t be heard.

War and Newton’s First Law of Motion

November 8, 2009

Why are we still at great material and personal cost to ourselves continuing to send our sons and daughters to fight, and, for some, to die in Afghanistan? Googling does turn up a number of answers, but none of them are convincing, no more than the domino theory ever satisfactorily explained our decision to remain in Vietnam.

The best answer found may be the highly questionable hypothesis, that by remaining in Afghanistan we are taking the fight to Al Qaeda, rather than allowing Al Qaeda to take the fight to us here at home. But there is simply no direct cause and effect linkage between our being over there and their not being here and carrying out further 9/11 like acts of terrorism.

At the present moment the whole country is awaiting President Obama’s decision — will he begin the withdrawal of our forces, or will he give General McChrystal the additional troops requested? Or something else?

I fear very much that his decision will be not to withdraw but to hold the line and keep our forces there while maybe even increasing their number, much as the General recommends.

Why would he do this if there is no convincing reason to continue the war? Isn’t it obvious to all that we’re not going to bring a feudal, tribal society kicking and screaming into the modern age?

Nor are we going to create a liberal democracy in a hardscrabble land where any loyalty or allegiance that people may feel is only to heads of family and local chieftains, not to any federal officials no matter how enlightened, which of course is not the case with the highly corrupt Hamid Karzai government in Kabul.

The answer to why he would do this, decide to keep going, must be that this war, like a physical object, is subject to inertia, or the tendency of an object in motion to remain in motion, or an object at rest to remain at rest, unless acted upon by a force. It would take more than he’s ready to give to do so. Not enough fight in him to end the fight?

This war like all wars is an object in motion, but unlike past “good” wars there is no end in sight, nothing that would bring a stop or a reversal to that motion, such as when, in World War II, the overthrow and destruction of the leaders of Germany and Japan brought ends to our wars with their countries.

In order that the Afghan war be ended it must be acted on by an external force, a force greater than the forces keeping it in motion. Is the President ready to apply, or is he even in possession of sufficient force, to turn things around so to speak? For one, to face up  to the military-industrial complex?

Again, I don’t know, but I’m afraid not. Furthermore what’s in motion in the Middle East, and not just in Afghanistan, is much more substantial and resistant to external forces than, say, a single aircraft carrier or battleship, themselves not easily turned once in motion.

Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion is a physical law, describing the behavior of material objects in time and space. Could war itself be such a material object, subject to physical laws?

Well yes, I would say, in reference to the War in Afghanistan, for otherwise there is no explaining why our ruling elite, including once again the “best and the brightest,” good, smart men such as Barack Obama and Robert Gates, would decide to continue with this reckless expenditure of our national treasure of money and lives. It’s just easier not to change direction.

So our continuing to remain in Afghanistan defies common sense, but not the laws of motion. And the war motion, for more than 8 years now, has been in just the one direction, that of greater and greater engagement, greater commitment of our forces, all this a kind of acceleration, taking the war even further in the same direction and rendering it thereby even more resistant to any opposing forces that might have slowed it down.

So far no one in our leadership seems willing and ready to slow the war effort down, if not bring it to a stop. No one seems interested in taking on the inevitable and unintended consequences of an abrupt change in direction. And so it goes, and goes on.

The President, like so many before him, including the best of his predecessors, prefers the devil he knows, the war itself (which was not of his creation), to the devil he doesn’t know, or the abandonment of the fight, much as did Washington (OK, he wasn’t yet the president), Lincoln, Roosevelt, Truman, and Johnson in their wars.

But in the other cases (with the exception of Johnson, who just as inexplicably, as did Bush and now Obama in Iraq, continued a “bad” war in Vietnam) these wars did have reasonable and desirable ends (if not reasonable means). This one, like the war in Vietnam, doesn’t.

What will it take to bring this war to an end? Must we await, again, a new president who is elected on the promise to end the war? We may still be surprised and hear from our president that he is going to do it himself, as he promised during the campaign in the case of Iraq, and that he will be that external force that will stop the war’s motion, bring an end to the inertia.

Guest Columnist, Ardeshir Cowasjee, writing in Dawn

November 5, 2009

[Those who continue to insist that government is the problem, that less government is better (and no government best of all), might read the following piece by Ardeshir Cowasjee in order to soften their own anti-government hard line, realizing perhaps that in some instances government is absolutely necessary and essential, and that the lack of government,  representing in this case law and order, permits a situation not unlike our own chaotic frontier time, with all the injustices characteristic of that period in our own history, when the ungoverned would simply grab what they wanted. But, I would add, Pakistan today is probably much worse, much more insecure, more violent, more chaotic than our own wild, wild West, now relegated for our own security to book and film.]

‘How much land does a man need?’
By Ardeshir Cowasjee

cowasjee

Saturday, 19 Sep, 2009, Dawn.com

illegal_construction_608

Illegal construction being removed in Karachi’s Orangabad area. – APP File Photo

THIS nation [Pakistan] will remain unchanged in its deprivation and depravity until someone comes along who will ensure that we follow the first dictum of our founder and maker, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and impose and maintain law and order.

Women and children will continue to kill each other over sacks of flour, pious men will rape three-year-old children, and the blasphemy laws will cause suffering and even murder.

A few good men are doing their best to help us get there, at least as far as the eating up by the lawless of Karachi’s open spaces is concerned. On Aug 20, 2009 I addressed the honourable chief justice of the Sindh High Court, Sarmad Jalal Osmany, requesting him to convert into a constitutional petition a letter written to him on Aug 6 by Shehri, the environmental NGO, concerning the illegal conversion and subsequent disposal of some 60 amenity plots in various areas of Karachi.

CJ Osmany was good enough to convert my letter into a petition (CP D-1998/2009). The first hearing was fixed for Sept 15, but the matter could not be taken up due to time constraints. It will be heard in the near future.

Then we have the turf war between political mafias over land in Karachi, which came to a head in July 2009 with the chief minister banning the disposal and leasing of plots by the city government. Nazim Mustafa Kamal filed a challenge in the SHC, but before the citizens could intervene on the grounds that due process was being exploited to conceal brazen encroachments on amenity spaces, the sparring duo kissed and made up and the case was withdrawn.

Four of my columns this year have been devoted to the illegal conversion, grabbing and disposal of land (including amenity plots) all over Karachi. The pillage includes parks, playgrounds, beach promenades, sewage treatment plants, government building plots, even plots in the sea (in the vicinity of the Clifton Ziauddin hospital) and planned areas around the northern bypass which are being doled out by the city government to ‘favourites’.

An anti-encroachment force formed in mid-July this year by the provincial government under the Board of Revenue to investigate and tackle the land-grabbing orgy has not yet, after the passage of two months, had its first meeting. Land-grabbing in our city, with its related violence and killings, continues unabated.

Yet another bit of positive news on the land front concerns a plot of land allotted long ago to the Horticultural Society of Pakistan for the establishment of a botanical garden, a necessity. A petition was filed in the SHC in 2005 against the cancellation of this allotment by the Sindh government. It was allowed and the cancellation was deemed to be without lawful authority. Since then there have been numerous encroachments by the CDGK upon the 30-acre plot and the society has managed to merely establish a small temporary office.

The matter of the encroachments came up in court last year (CMA 9409/2008) and this year on Aug 24 Justices Mushir Alam and Ather Saeed ordered that all the encroachments be removed within one week, observing that: ‘.. public functionaries’ duties are to protect the property of the public and not to indulge into unauthorised use and/or encroachment of the property’.

And more — Pearl Builders’ petition to protect their interests in the corroding Costa Livina skeleton which blights Bagh-i-Ibn-i-Qasim was disposed of last week by a divisional bench of the SHC which observed that the allotment of amenity plots and illegal commercial constructions thereon could not be ‘regularised’ under the Karachi Building Control Authority’s amnesty laws.

The city government advocate orally informed the court that proceedings would be initiated to cancel this allotment under law — so it would seem that, after the passing of two decades, a portion of the park will be returned to its legal owners, the people of Karachi.

Now, on to the case of Makro Habib and its superstore built on the old Grammar School Webb Ground, a playground for the deprived people of Lines Area. The petition filed by concerned citizens is now in the Supreme Court and was last heard on Sept 3 by the honourable Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Chaudhry sitting with Justices Ghulam Rabbani and Jawwad Khawaja.

After hearing the lawyers of the Military Estates Officer and Army Welfare Trust attempt to convince the bench that the playground was not an amenity plot and thus could not be used for commercial purposes, it was the turn of Makro-Habib’s counsel.

As noted the CJP in his order, ‘Mr Muhammad Akram Shaikh, learned senior ASC who attended the court yesterday, apparently hale and hearty, statedly collapsed suddenly with vertigo coupled with cellulitis after attending court in this case as is evident from the adjournment application submitted by him.’ So, the matter has been adjourned until Sept 30.

In all this, Leo Tolstoy’s short story — How Much Land Does a Man Need? — comes to mind. Russian peasant Pakhom, wishing to amass land, received a unique offer from the landowning Bashkirs. For 1000 rubles, Pakhom could walk around as large an area as was possible, starting at daybreak. If he arrived back at his starting point by sunset the entire land covered by his travels would be his. Pakhom was a greedy man, he overdid it, and as evening approached he realised his error. He frantically ran as fast as he could to get back to his starting point in time. When he got there, exhausted, he dropped dead. The Bashkirs buried him in a six-foot by three-foot plot — an ironic answer to the title question.

So much for man’s craving for land.

A Modest Proposal for Handling the Differences Among School Children

November 1, 2009

We’ve only recently moved to Tampa, about a year ago to be exact when we moved into our son’s house while our new home was being significantly renovated for our own purposes. Now it’s completed, but we’re still moving in, taking things out of hundreds of boxes as spaces are prepared for them. Books in particular.

Just this morning while going through books I happened to pick up David Berliner’s and Bruce Biddle’s 1995  The Manufactured Crisis. Picked it up and began to leaf through it, not expecting much other than the usual left liberal criticism of the still on-going conservative right’s attack on the public schools, and indeed, the Berliner/Biddle book begins with a sharp putdown of the 1983 broadside, bearing the imprimatur of Ronald Reagan, A Nation at Risk.

But lo and behold I was flabbergasted as I turned to their Chapter 7, Fundamentals of School Improvement, and encountered their thoroughly radical proposal concerning the management of heterogeneity (the differences among school kids). This single reform, if it had been enacted which it of course wasn’t, would have thoroughly revolutionized our public schools, and while doing so probably earned the Right’s blessing, and the Left’s condemnation.

Now my particular interest in this ancient (1995) radical reform proposal directly speaks to my own principal criticism of how schools, both public and private, are structured, one that I have been making now for nearly 50 years or more, almost since the time I begin teaching and saw that the great differences, differences of all kinds, among kids in the classroom most of all prevented learning from taking place, at least for most of them.

I criticized, condemned the schools to inevitable failure, for placing children of the same age, and therefore  most probably equally ignorant of the world, and with widely different abilities and interests, in the same classroom, and more or less keeping them together until they reached 17 years of age. Why has that structure been so widely accepted, for some 150 years or more? Doesn’t it fly in the face of common sense?

The more natural learning situation, as in families, and for some time in this country’s history in the one roomed schoolhouse, is to have children of different ages together. This allows for children learning as much or more from one another as from the teacher.

When the whole burden of learning is placed on the single teacher only those few children who happen to be ready for whatever is the day’s lesson will learn, and the others….? well we get A Nation at Risk and any number of other exposés of all that our children are not learning in the schools.

Anyway, Berliner and Biddle propose that we radically change the way we manage heterogeneity. If you want to read what they have to say in its entirety go to the Chapter 7 excerpt posted on my Must Reads.

To cite just a few of the authors’ words from this chapter:

“Today, American public schools commonly segregate students by age and presumed ability. Students having roughly the same chronological age are assembled into classroom groups representing specific “grades,” and often those students are also sorted into ability groups or “tracks” that are to be given different curricular experiences. In fact, so common are these practices today that many Americans assume they are “natural” and cannot conceive of other procedures for conducting education…. [it is our opinion] that age-segregated classrooms create many problems.”

What do the authors propose in order to change things? And I would especially ask that you think about, as I did, how could these liberal, public school defenders, ever imagine that their super-radical proposal could possibly be accepted by the super- conservative, and super-protective of their own, educational establishment? And of course it wouldn’t be. Helas!

According to the authors, “the key to maximizing the effectiveness of schools lies in creating subject-matter lessons that bring together all students whose levels of knowledge about the subject are about equal—regardless of whether they acquired the knowledge they now possess quickly or slowly.”

[Can you imagine anyone successfully doing that? Equal levels of knowledge about the subject? Not my experience of kids. Equal ignorance of the subject was much more the rule. Knowledge of the subject is not something kids bring with them to school. Don't they go to school for that?]

“Let us propose,” they say, “that schools take in children on the day of their fifth birthday or some other agreed-on marker age…. Each child would then be assessed for his or her knowledge in various subjects, and the professional staff would move the child into appropriate-level reading and other academic lessons depending on those assessments. And as soon as the child was able to master basic skills for each subject, the child would be moved on to more advanced lessons.

“In such a model for schooling, the child is moved upward through the curricula as fast as the child’s achievements warrant…. All lessons taught, from kindergarten to high school graduation, would be designed to help students move through the curriculum at their own rates. And this means that all students would be challenged in the most beneficial ways throughout their schooling.

“It would also mean, of course, that classes would be composed of students who varied greatly in age. A specific ten-year-old, for example, might be a whiz in mathematics and would be found in a calculus lesson early in the day…. the school we envision would help both those who are “speed” and those who are “slow” in various subjects to get the most out of their educations—and achievement levels for all students would shoot up.

“….teachers, students, and parents would learn quickly that children may excel in one subject but move quite slowly in another, and this would reduce their tendency to make holistic judgments about students who are thought to be either “superbright” or “hopeless.” Thus, such a school system would help to eliminate the stigmas presently acquired by large numbers of students who are thought to be “poor learners” or merely “ordinary.”

“Thus, the ways in which Americans presently conduct schooling conspire to make ‘losers’ of many children. In contrast, the type of school organization we envision would sharply reduce this type of stigmatizing. Students who are slow in one subject would know that they are fast movers in others. And those who were truly interested in moving more rapidly could explore ways to do so.”

Amazing, isn’t it, that they could propose this with a straight face. And to think that within the same school the division in regard to the speed at which children learn would be substantially different from what is now called ability grouping. For isn’t the rate, or speed at which children learn the most common evidence of ability? And more often than not children who learn quickly in one area learn quickly  in most other areas as well.

No, what the authors propose is just another version of tracking by ability, that which the authors themselves put down as being dehumanizing, creating winners and losers. Why do we find it so hard to accept that there are, in most if not all areas of endeavor, at least in regard to achievement, winners and losers.

Biddle and Berliner needed to go much further, do away with the school itself, not just the present age divisions among the students. With great benefit to their proposal they might have made use of Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, basing their divisions and separations among kids more on these than on different learning rates. In this regard they might better have proposed multiple school or learning environments and/or structures based on the widely different intelligences and abilities of kids (and people).

For most of all the way to handle heterogeneity or differences among children, and also among people, is to provide multiple environments, for living as well as for learning. By providing instead a single environment, in the case of children the school building itself, and keeping the kids all there together, inevitably comparisons between kids will be made, and of course there will be winners and losers, and all the other demoralizing effects of age segregation that Biddle and Berliner would avoid.


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