Mountain Views News, Combined Edition Saturday, June 17, 2023

6

ALTADENA - SOUTH PASADENA - SAN MARINO

Mountain View News Saturday, June 17, 2023 

Philippe Eskandar Named San 
Marino’s Next City Manager

Artist Hit-Boy to Perform 

at Juneteenth Celebration

JPL Creates PDF Archive 
to Aid Malware Research

 
The San Marino City 
Council unanimously 
approved Wednesday night 
an employment agreement 
with Philippe Eskandar to 
start July 1 as the city’s next 
city manager.

 Eskandar is an accomplished 
city leader with a career 
dedicated to public service. 
He is excited to be joining 
the City of San Marino as a 
partner in accomplishing the 
visions and goals of the City 
Council and community, 
and carrying forward the 
successes achieved in recent 
years.

 “Philippe has the 
experience and mindset 
to serve our unique and 
treasured community. He 
has demonstrated to the 
City Council that he will be 
an adept and enthusiastic 
manager of our operations 
and use his strengths to 
benefit San Marino in the 
years to come,” said Mayor 
Steve Talt.

 Eskandar has extensive 
experience in city leadership 
across all facets of municipal 
operations in full-service and 
contract cities. He currently 
serves as the Deputy City 
Manager for the City of 
Westlake Village and has held 
a variety of roles in different 
departments with the cities 
of Glendale, Burbank, and 
Newport Beach.

 As a dedicated public servant, 
Eskandar has pursued 
several educational degrees 
to enhance his knowledge 
and skills. He comes to San 
Marino with a Master’s 
Degree in Public Policy 
from Pepperdine University’ 
School of Public Policy, a 
Master’s Degree in Dispute 
Resolution from Pepperdine 
University’s School of Law, 
and a Bachelor’s Degree in 
Criminology, Law, & Society 
from UC Irvine.

 “I am humbled by the 
trust the City Council has 
placed in me by inviting 
me to be a member of the 
City of San Marino family. 
I am excited to join a high-
performance team of staff 
and City Council in serving 
this special community,” said 
Eskandar.

 The City of Pasadena Parks, 
Recreation and Community 
Services Department is proud to 
announce that Grammy award-
winning rapper and producer 
Hit-Boy will perform at the 
City’s 15th annual Juneteenth 
celebration scheduled for 
Saturday, June 17, 11 a.m. - 3 
p.m., at Robinson Park, 1081 N. 
Fair Oaks Ave.

 Hit-Boy has crafted forward-
looking beats for artists like 
Kanye West, Jay-Z, Nas, Travis 
Scott and Beyoncé. He is also 
featured on tracks by various 
artists, including will.i.am and 
Wale.

 Juneteenth commemorates the 
effective end of slavery in the 
United States. Two years after 
President Lincoln signed the 
Emancipation Proclamation, 
news reached Texas and, upon 
learning they were free, former 
slaves immediately began 
celebrating with prayer, feasting, 
song and dance. Juneteenth 
is now a day to reflect and 
celebrate African American 
history and culture.

 This year’s free, family-friendly 
Juneteenth celebration will also 
feature an art exhibit from the 
Alkebulan Cultural Center, live 
music by Luv From Abuv, a 
Juneteenth history presentation 
by Octavia’s Bookshelf, arts & 
crafts with Armory Center for 
the Arts, community resources, 
and more! Hot dogs, hot links, 
drinks and snacks will be 
available for purchase. Come 
meet new friends or reconnect 
with old ones as we celebrate 
Juneteenth.

 For accessibility information 
and requests, contact CSC@
CityOfPasadena.net or (626) 
744-7311.

 
NASA’s Jet Propulsion 
Laboratory is well known 
for landing rovers on Mars, 
exploring the solar system with 
robotic probes, and developing 
sensitive science instruments 
that observe Earth and other 
planets. But less well-known is 
the lab’s cutting-edge work in 
the digital world.

 In support of a wider effort to 
make the internet more secure, 
JPL data scientists have created 
the largest single publicly 
available open-source archive, 
or corpus, of PDFs. Short for 
portable document format, a 
PDF is a complex type of file that 
looks like a printed document 
and can contain images, movie 
files, interactive forms, 3D 
models, and much more.

 The new PDF corpus is part of 
a Defense Advanced Research 
Projects Agency (DARPA) 
program called Safe Documents 
(SafeDocs) that aims to deal 
with online threats while 
anticipating the security needs 
of PDF users. By working with 
the nonprofit PDF Association, 
which seeks to establish open 
specifications and standards for 
the technology, JPL is helping to 
develop several tools to confront 
these challenges.

 When building the corpus, the 
team didn’t evaluate the actual 
subject matter of the PDFs. 
Their goal was to gather a large 
representative sample of PDFs 
that exist on the internet so 
experts can search for malicious 
software that could be hidden 
in the files’ code. That work will 
then be used to help anticipate 
emerging online threats and 
improve PDF technology.

 “PDFs are used everywhere 
and are important for 
contracts, legal documents, 3D 
engineering designs, and many 
other purposes. Unfortunately, 
they are complex and can be 
compromised to hide malicious 
code or render different 
information for different users 
in a malicious way,” said Tim 
Allison, a data scientist at JPL. 
“To confront these and other 
challenges from PDFs, a large 
sample of real-world PDFs 
needs to be collected from the 
internet to create a shared, freely 
available resource for software 
experts.”

A Digital Feat

 Building the corpus was no 
easy task. As a starting point, 
Allison’s team used Common 
Crawl, an open-source public 
repository of web-crawl data, to 
identify a wide variety of PDFs 
to be included in the corpus – 
files that are publicly available 
and not behind firewalls or in 
private networks. Conducted 
between July and August 2021, 
the crawl identified roughly 8 
million PDFs.

 Common Crawl limits 
downloaded data to 1 megabyte 
per file, meaning larger files were 
incomplete. But researchers 
need the entire PDF, not a 
truncated version, in order to 
conduct meaningful research on 
them. The file-size limit reduced 
the number of complete, 
untruncated files extracted 
directly from Common Crawl 
to 6 million. To get the other 
2 million PDFs and ensure the 
corpus was complete, the JPL 
team re-fetched the truncated 
files using specialized software 
that downloaded the whole files 
from the incomplete PDFs’ web 
addresses.

Various metadata, such as the 
software used to create each 
PDF, was extracted and is 
included with the corpus. The 
JPL team also relied on free, 
publicly available geolocation 
software to identify the server 
location of the source website 
for each PDF. The complete 
data set totals about 8 terabytes, 
making it the largest publicly 
available corpus of its kind.

 The corpus will do more 
than help researchers identify 
threats. Privacy researchers, for 
example, could study these files 
to determine how file-creation 
and editing software can be 
improved to better protect 
personal information. Software 
developers could use the files to 
find bugs in their code and to 
check if old versions of software 
are still compatible with newer 
versions of PDFs.

 “This is open and repeatable 
science. Researchers need to 
have a common data set to 
work with so that they can 
compare results of different 
analysis techniques and 
experiments,” said Simson 
Garfinkel, who created a corpus 
of 1 million files, including 
thousands of PDFs, called 
GOVDOCS1 in 2008 when he 
was an associate professor at 
the Naval Postgraduate School 
in Monterey, California. “PDF 
is one of the most important 
file types on the internet 
today, and this contribution 
of roughly 8 terabytes of data 
provides faculty, students, and 
corporations with up-to-date 
reference data that will power 
research for years to come.”

 The files have been packaged in 
easily downloadable zip files.

 For more information visit: 
darpa.mil.

The MUSE-IQUE 2023 New 
Season Event Schedule

 Join MUSE/IQUE for an 
invigorating new season that 
explores the artists whose 
music propelled social 
change and made us feel like 
we could take on the world.

CENTRAL AVENUE: Songs 
and Stories of Los Angeles’ 
Central Avenue

July 12 at the Beehive | July 
15 and 16 at Memorial Park, 
Pasadena -- MUSE/IQUE 
in conjunction with Los 
Angeles City Councilman 
Curren D. Price Jr. and the 
Central Avenue Jazz Festival 
present: Central Avenue. 
From the 1920’s-1950’s 
Central Avenue was the heart 
of African American cultural 
life: LA’s answer to the 
Harlem Renaissance, and the 
epicenter of the West Coast 
jazz scene. Louis Armstrong, 
Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, 
Duke Ellington, and Billie 
Holiday were regulars in the 
local clubs. Quincy Jones 
has famously said, when he 
moved to LA as a young man 
he didn’t know about the 
music on the Sunset Strip, but 
he sure knew Central Ave. In 
this performance, MUSE/
IQUE honors and celebrates 
the legacy of Central Avenue 
and its impact on our city 
and beyond.

BERNSTEIN AT HEART: 
Learning is Living

August 3 at The Huntington 
| August 6 at The Skirball 
-- Leonard Bernstein’s 
legendary “Young People’s 
Concerts” helped define our 
modern imagination. One 
year after the Broadway debut 
of West Side Story, Leonard 
Bernstein’s groundbreaking 
educational series with the 
New York Philharmonic 
was delivered to audiences 
worldwide via television. 
Inspired by Artistic Director 
Rachael Worby’s idol, we 
learn how these famed 
telecasts became a blueprint 
for learning and a lesson in 
the power of knowledge that 
still resonates today.

RESPECT: The Electrifying 
Music of the Women’s 
Movement

September 8 and 9 | Wilshire 
Ebell Theatre -- Anthems 
and iconic artists have long 
energized our national 
struggle for women’s equity. 
Legions of legendary artists 
have raised their voices to 
move humanity forward. 
From Marian Anderson 
to Lady Gaga, this show 
highlights the singers and 
songwriters who fought 
for women’s rights and 
recognition of their power 
and agency through song. 
Performed in partnership 
with Los Angeles Unified 
School District and Pasadena 
area schools.

GOSPEL AND THE KING: 
Elvis Presley and the Music 
of Salvation 

October 19 and 21 | First 
Congregational Church 
of Los Angeles-- The King 
of Rock and Roll owes 
his crown to a life-saving 
musical tradition that dates 
back hundreds of years. 
Gospel music empowered 
people long before Elvis 
Presley introduced millions 
to its sound. We trace the 
deepest roots of rock and 
roll and discover the history 
of American music that you 
never knew you never knew.

THE POWER OF ONE: 
Featuring a Musical 
Celebration of Abraham 
Lincoln 

November 12 | The historic 
Millennium Biltmore Hotel

This event benefits MUSE/
IQUE’S efforts to share the 
music and imagination of 
our seasons with the most 
vulnerable people in our 
communities. The evening 
features Rachael Worby and 
the MUSE/IQUE orchestra in 
stirring performances of the 
music that inspired Abraham 
Lincoln during his lifetime, 
as well as modern American 
classics that pay tribute to his 
brave leadership. Celebrity 
guests from the worlds 
of stage, screen, arts, and 
literature will give voice to 
Lincoln’s words in readings of 
landmark speeches from the 
Gettysburg Address to the 
Second Inaugural Address, 
and more. 

 Over the past decade, 
MUSE/IQUE has curated 
and presented unexpected 
live music adventures that 
shake loose the customs, 
norms and barriers of the 
traditional concert-going 
experience. MUSE/IQUE 
has never had a formal 
concert hall - the city is the 
venue - and no set genres 
or styles of performance are 
emphasized. Instead, cross-
genre, multidisciplinary 
performances are placed in 
iconic community locales.

 Led by Founder and 
Artistic and Music Director 
Rachael Worby, MUSE/
IQUE is a member-
supported, nonprofit 
performing arts organization 
making radically engaging 
live music experiences 
accessible for all. Built on 
a tradition of community 
and collaboration, we create 
events that feature an eclectic 
mix of artists and artistic 
disciplines in unconventional 
locations – spaces where 
art typically does not 
happen. MUSE/IQUE 
was founded by Artistic 
Director Rachael Worby to 
upend the misconception 
that the performing arts are 
elitist, unapproachable, and, 
frankly, dull! MUSE/IQUE’s 
mission is to build empathy 
and expand imaginations 
through transformative 
live events and strong 
partnerships with fellow 
nonprofit organizations in 
Pasadena and the greater Los 
Angeles area.

 Visit muse-ique.com for 
more information.

San Marino Upcoming 
Events & Programming

Town Hall Meeting on June 22: Pet and Coyote Safety

 Join us for the next Town Hall on Thursday, June 22, at 6 PM! We 
will discuss best practices to address pet safety and coyote-related 
issues. This meeting will take place on Zoom from 6 PM - 7 PM. 
Learn more at: CityofSanMarino.org/TownHall.

Photo Contest - Submissions due June 30

 Attention all photographers! Share what makes you love our 
City and submit your favorite photo of San Marino to the 2023 
San Marino Photo Contest. Submissions will be accepted until 
Friday, June 30. For entry details, visit: CityofSanMarino.org/
PhotoContest.

Brush Inspection

 The Fire Department will begin conducting annual brush 
inspections of properties in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity 
Zone on June 19. For information on annual brush inspections 
and how to ready your home for wildfire, visit: cityofsanmarino.
org/brushclearance. 

Teen Gaming Unplugged

Monday, June 19 at 12:30 PM, Barth Community Room

 Teens in grades 6-12 are invited to drop in for a game day at the 
Library! Board games, card games, and snacks will be provided. 
Registration is not required.

Chazz’s African Drum Circle

Wednesday, June 21 at 1 PM, Children’s Area

 Our voices have power like the beating of a drum. Children 
ages 3-11 are invited to channel their voice by learning the simple 
rhythms and sounds of the Djembe drums. Registration is not 
required.

Indoor Drive-In Movie

Thursday, June 22 at 1 PM, Barth Community Room

 Vroom, vroom! It’s drive-in movie day at the Library! Kids ages 
3-11 are invited to get creative, design their very own cardboard 
box car, and then roll up and relax with a movie. All materials will 
be provided. 

 For more information or registration visit: cityofsanmarino.org.

Meetings

Public Safety Commission

Monday, June 19 at 6:00 PM; City Hall Council Chambers and 
Zoom (Public Access)

Design Review Committee

Wednesday, June 21 at 6:00 PM; City Hall Council Chambers and 
Zoom (Public Access)

'Live at the 
Arboretum' 
with Denver's 
The Fray

 
Los Angeles County 
Supervisor Kathryn Barger 
proudly presents the return of 
the fifth annual summer “Live 
at the Arboretum” concert 
featuring Denver rockers The 
Fray. This event will take place 
tonight at 7:00 p.m. at the Los 
Angeles County Arboretum 
and Botanical Gardens. 

 Prepare to be captivated 
by The Fray’s Grammy-
nominated, double-platinum 
talent as they bring their chart-
topping hits to life. With the 
unforgettable singles “How 
to Save a Life” and “Over My 
Head (Cable Car),” the band’s 
sensational repertoire will have 
the crowd singing along with 
every beat. 

 Spacious circular table seating 
with linens and lawn seating are 
both available for picnicking 
with family and friends. The 
venue also features a variety of 
food trucks and two beverage 
centers serving fine wines, 
beer, coffee, and soft drinks.

 Lawn seats start at only $20, 
with table seats ranging from 
$30-$60. Tickets are available 
by calling the box office at 
(626) 793-7172, going online 
to PasadenaSymphony-Pops.
org, or at the Arboretum on 
the day of the concert, starting 
at 4:00 p.m. 

 Gates open at 5:30 p.m. for 
picnicking. The concert will 
begin at 7:00 p.m. 

 The Los Angeles County 
Arboretum is located at 301 
North Baldwin Avenue, 
Arcadia. Onsite parking will be 
available.

Mountain Views News 80 W Sierra Madre Blvd. No. 327 Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024 Office: 626.355.2737 Fax: 626.609.3285 Email: editor@mtnviewsnews.com Website: www.mtnviewsnews.com