And the 21st Foundation has been promoting peace across Taiwan Street. Why don't you do a survey on how people really think about peace? Do they really mean peace when they say peace? Since everybody seems to be happy if the United States show a willingness to continue selling arms to Taiwan. Everybody feels secure, everybody happy. If there's no arms, we think we will be in big trouble. But does that really mean peace? And then they will think about this, so I push them a little bit more. I say, well, remember what happened when we had this celebration in Taiwan of the hundreds anniversary of the Republic of China? On the day of the hundreds birthday of the nation, Dana Ronsfield went to see President Ma Ying-jeol. And Ma Ying-jeol bowed to him and also said that he was a second lieutenant when he retired from the army. So he was much lower than Ronsfield, so Ronsfield really senior to him. And then he awarded Ronsfield the highest national award ever given to a foreigner. And so I asked my host at dinner, does this sound like a peace-loving people to you? A country that gave an award to Ronsfield, which almost a criminal in Europe. They got a little bit interested. So I said, well, if you're willing to invest in what people really think about peace, I'm willing to design the research for you. So we did. But then what I have in mind in this research, before I started when I do my research design, what I did is to find out how much people would like to sacrifice in order to achieve political independence from China. If you compare value of peace with value of independence, how people would wait to balance them? Where's the balance? How far people are willing to go? That's what I was thinking to find out in the beginning. So I had some of the questions. A couple of questions that I asked was suggested to other large surveys, social surveys in Taiwan in the past. But most of them actually turned down my suggestion. I was actually only one to ask two questions with... Oops, let's find the question. The two questions I was really interested to ask in the beginning was, let's see, D4 here. If China resorts to armed unification and the government gives up fighting, the people should continue to fight by all means. That's one question. And the other question is... What is it? Okay, D1 here. If the government conscripts people to have war with China in order to achieve independence, people have the right to deny conscription. These are the two questions I have had in mind for a long time. But I didn't get any chance to do any survey on this. But I did write something out of this initial thinking. I called it the right to surrender. People's right to surrender to their enemies. That, of course, caused a lot of trouble in Taiwan because people think that if you have the right to surrender and the PLA comes, then would that mean that Taiwan would be part of China immediately? And I remember the Ministry of Defense held a news conference exactly to answer that question. We didn't know in the beginning why the Ministry of Defense had that specific news conference until nobody asked the question and the spokesman pointing to a military newspaper asked a generous to ask the question. The generous asked him the question that Professor Shi said that people have the right to surrender to their enemy. How the Ministry of Defense responded to that? So we know the whole purpose of that conference is to answer my question. Then, of course, they gave some standard questions. And the reason the Ministry of Defense wanted to hold the conference to answer that question was because they had mammals from legislatures telling them they will be asked this question in the next session during Q&A at the legislature. So they decided to hold a news conference to preempt the question that will be asked by the legislature. So they actually not target immediately, target the legislature. It is the legislature targeting at this question. I'm interested in people's right to surrender or people's right consciousness that they can legitimately decide whether they want to surrender or not because I think if people have the belief in their mind that they are the one deciding whether they want to fight or not, then, of course, then they can decide to surrender to whatever enemies they don't want to fight. But that doesn't necessarily mean anything specific about the future of Taiwan or relationship between Taiwan and China because if people can surrender to Chinese, then people, of course, can continuously surrender to other people. So that means that this right to surrender is a right to control life rather than the right to giving in to a specific regime. But I guess most people cannot go into the second step. They're only interested in whether or not this will allow the PLA to take over Taiwan freely. So I have these two questions in mind. I've been asking my students and other people these two questions because I think we can actually divide the world into... Let's see. Where is it? No. This is one. Yeah, but people can see, right? This is huge enough. Because if you set up a cross table from answers to these two questions, then you can see that people can be categorized into four different types of rights thinking. If people... These two questions actually ask two things. One is that if you want to initiate war in order to acquire independence, would you do it? And the other question is that if someone invades your territory, would you fight or would you give up fighting? So it's kind of different things. One thing is more active. The one question is more active. The other question is kind of a reactive. It's responsive to a situation. I would think that those people who believe that they have the rights to control in their own life, they may answer these two questions in different ways. It's not that they will answer the question specifically in a common way. If you have only one question, would you surrender if PLA attacked Taiwan? Then you have only one dimension. But if you ask these two questions, you could actually see people can be separated even though people believe they have control in their own life. They can still be broken down into different types of rights conscious. Rights conscious referring specifically to their thinking on their own subjectivity. So if people... Well, let's see. This rights to territory refers to those people who will not go out to fight for independence. If nothing happens, but they will try very hard to defend their land if invaded. That's what I call rights to territory. In Chinese, actually I was talking about this aboriginal consciousness. Meaning that people who are not interested in the life of the rest of the world are not interested in expanding or conquering the rest of the world. But you don't come in here. So I call this, in Chinese, an aboriginal consciousness. And these are people who will not fight in any... On the other side, the... Oops. But you can see my... Yeah, specifically. These are people saying that if you ask me to go out to fight for Taiwan's independence, no way, I'm not going to fight. If you're going to tell me to give up, if people invaded Taiwan, well, I'll give up. So these type of people will not fight in any case. You can call it right to surrender, but it's not necessary. They're surrendered to PLA. And there are people, of course, very strongly believing in Taiwan independence or any quest for independence in the other parts of the world. If you have to fight to get your independence, you do it.  I'm looking for my own independence. And there's also interesting group of people, which is not a small number. 21%, almost a little over one-fifth of the population, or respondents, said that they would not... They would go along with the government to fight for independence, actively, aggressively. But they would also give up if the government gave up defending the invaders. I call these people ready to submit to whoever is more powerful. So if the government tells you to do this, you do this. The government tells you to do that, you do that. If the invader is stronger, you surrender. If you're ready to fight for your own independence, enter the government's leadership, you do it. So you can divide people in this way. But this is just something I want to show you what I really want to do in the beginning. But then after I got the result of all these questions, I no longer interesting in that cross table, although you can still write articles out of that cross, just breaking down of the four categories of peoples. Basically, you could see from... You could see that people are really quite strong on their belief in Taiwan's independence. Half of the people would be willing to fight, or almost half of the people would be willing to fight in any case. This is a good message for any... But that doesn't really mean, of course, if conditions really require them to fight, they would go out and fight. You don't know because people answer the question out of the context. So you really don't know what they will do in specific situations. All right, what I actually found out from this survey, and that actually lead me away from my original research design, is that I find that, first of all, I find that most people feel quite important facing cross-relationship. We could look at the... Most of the questions when asked, people show quite a pessimistic feeling. The two very dramatic ones at the bottom, we're proud of democracy and liberal democracy in Taiwan, but I'll show you really the pessimistic feel about democracy. Question seven and nine. If a majority of Taiwanese expressively supports independence, China will renounce the use of force as a means of unification. As you can see that with pros and cons, 80% of people say no, but that doesn't... That's common sense, right? But look at the next question. If a majority of Taiwanese expressively supports unification, China will renounce the use of force as a means of unification, still 51% of people say no. That should be a surprise, right? We would think that, well, if we accept unification, there will be no threats from China using force, but people say no. Suggesting that people have a very low sense of control over peace across Taiwan Strait. So that's very interesting. That means that democracy as a source of legitimacy doesn't really prompt people to assert their sense of control over things across Taiwan Strait. But on the whole, let me just quickly go over this ten question I asked, and I'll read also the original Chinese presentation of the question. So some of you may have a deeper feeling about the question if you can hear the Chinese wording of it. The first question, if the government conscripts people to have war with China in order to achieve independence, people have the right to deny conscription. I think it's not a coincidence it's become the first question because that's what I care most in the beginning. And the Chinese wording is that if someone says that if Taiwan wants to achieve independence and have a war with the mainland, the government has the right to deny conscription. Please repeat this. The next question, if China resorts to army unification and the government gives up fighting, the people should continue to fight by all means. In the Chinese wording, if someone says that if the mainland has the right to unify Taiwan even if the government gives up fighting, the people should continue to fight by all means. The next question, you've seen this before. If a majority of Taiwanese expressively supports independence, China will renounce the use of forces and means of unification. In the Chinese wording, if a majority of Taiwanese expressively supports independence, the mainland will give up fighting and unify Taiwan. Please repeat this. The question that coupled with this one, if a majority of Taiwanese expressively supports unification, China will renounce the use of forces and means of unification. In the Chinese wording, if a majority of Taiwanese expressively supports unification, the mainland will renounce the use of forces and unify Taiwan. Please repeat this. The next couple, even if arms purchase were cost-tensioned with China, Taiwan should still proceed with purchase. If someone says that even if the purchase of weapons was cost-tensioned with China, Taiwan would still continue to purchase weapons. Please repeat this. The question coupled with this, if arms purchase requires a higher tax, people should still support. Someone said that in order to increase the defense power, even if the government taxes, the people should still support. Please repeat this. If the ruling party is the DPP Democratic Progressive Party, China will not force unification. Someone said that if the ruling party is the Democratic Progressive Party, the mainland will not immediately promote unification of the two parties. Please repeat this. The next one, if it is the DPP who carries out openness tool and exchange with China, people should feel safer. Someone said that if the ruling party is the DPP who carries out openness and exchange with the two parties, people should feel safer. Please repeat this. The last two questions. The longer the current situation lasts, the more bargaining chips Taiwan will have with China. Someone said that the current situation of the two parties will have more bargaining chips between Taiwan and mainland. Please repeat this. The last question. Taiwan will become independent eventually, even though China opposes. In the Chinese wording, someone said that Taiwan will always be independent. Even if the mainland is not willing to, it is useless. Please repeat this. I guess we can go through this 10 questions and show you the result. It doesn't really... I mean, most results are not very optimistic. I guess we don't really have to show the result for you to understand why people are not optimistic about it. Like, I don't have it with me. I must have it somewhere. I should have it here, but I forgot to put it in. Maybe this is the one. No, this is the one. Actually, this is the one, right? You can see from the list. You can see, for example, the one I just mentioned, Taiwan will become independent eventually, even though China opposes. 46% of people say yes. 53% of people say no. Or at different degrees, say no at different degrees. The longer the current situation lasts, the more bargaining chip Taiwan will have with China. 34% of people say yes, but 66% of people say no. So you can see, on the whole, people who are holding a pessimistic view are sometimes slightly more or sometimes much more than people holding optimistic view. How much you think DPP can help to control the still-human cross-Taiwan Strait? You have D3 and D5. D3 asks if the ruling power is DPP, China will not force unification. 27, 28% of people almost say no. Yes, 72% of people say no. If the DPP who carries our openness to an exchange with China people should feel safer, well, slightly more than the last question. The 33% of people agree, and the 63% of people almost disagree. So on the whole, you could say, oh, well, people feel they cannot control distribution across Taiwan Strait by electing a pro-independence party. People cannot have a better control over the Taiwan Strait if they wait longer. People cannot have better control over Taiwan Strait if they say they want to reunify with China. It doesn't seem to be just any way that people can really develop a sense of control over Taiwan Strait. But this is just a very superficial analysis. Just look at the immediate results from the survey. But if you go deeper, you do some other analysis. You do factor analysis, like I did. If we do factor analysis from the answers of these 10 questions, basically you'll find I never had such good statistic fit when I do factor analysis. But somehow the fit seems to be so perfect this time. You have three factors coming out of factor analysis, grouping the answers to these 10 questions into three dimensions. These three dimensions seem to be quite good in terms of explaining people's answers to their questions. Because you can see these statistic correlations quite high. Usually my past experience, if it's more than 0.3, I take it. I take it with 0.333 and 0.412. I took these two questions as one factor. I'm satisfied with 30%. But now you have 7, 0, 9, 60, 0. They're really very fit. That means that all these five questions are highly correlated with one another. Answers to these five questions are highly correlated to one another. That means that if you agree with this question, it is DPP who carries out openness to and exchanges with China, people should feel safer. If you say yes to this question, then the chance that you will say yes to some other question, like if China resorts to army invocation and the government gives a fighting, the people should continue to fight by all means. So you see there are quite good fit here. And these are the five questions. Maybe I should just read them again so you could have a stronger sense of how questions or answers to these questions related with one another positively. If the DPP carries out openness and exchanges with China, people should feel safer. Agree. Taiwan will become independent eventually, even though China opposed. Agree. If the ruling party is the Democratic Progressive Party, China will not force unification. Agree. If China resorts to armed conflict and the government gives us fighting, the people should continue to fight by all means. Agree. The longer the current situation lasts, the more bargaining chip Taiwan will have with China. Agree. Then of course you can turn around and say disagree to all these questions. The reality perhaps is that most people have said disagree to all these five questions. But since the answer comes together through factor analysis in this way, that means it's like one dimension. If you move closer to the other end, then you will probably tend to agree with all these five questions. If you move to another end, then you probably expect that you will disagree on most of these questions. So it's not looking at the macro distribution of agree and disagree to each specific question. Rather, we should look at the dimension itself. The dimension tells us that if people agree, then they tend to agree on all five questions. If they disagree, then they tend to disagree on all five questions. In other words, there is a dimension. Whatever name you give it to, there is a factor that would affect people's answer to all these five questions. That factor we could name differently. Some people suggest that we can name this factor as a resistance factor. I think it's fine that shows strong sense of resistance to China. But since I'm also interested in how people are feeling about their ability to control the results, I name it as a prospect factor. In other words, would your prospect change if you have a different ruling party, if you have a different time frame, if you have a different confrontation situation? How would that change your prospect? I call it prospect dimension. In other words, if people feel they can control cross-strait relations better via the elections of pro-independence parties, then they will feel they can fight China if they want to strive for unification. And there's the other second factor here. Second factor is also very interesting. If we look at the results of our purchase, it's interesting here. You can see that even if our purchase caused tension with China, Taiwan should still proceed with purchase. 68% people agree. 32% people disagree. But then, of course, people are pragmatic. If you ask if arms purchase requires high attacks, people will still support. Then you can see the support drop dramatically.  Even so, they want to buy arms. But if you look at the factor analysis, the message is quite clear. If arms purchase requires high attacks, people should still support. Agree. If the government, even if arms purchase caused tension with China, Taiwan should still proceed with purchase. Agree. So even though you see more people decide to give up on purchase if they have to pay more tax, you can still see a factor running through the answer of these two questions.  So if you are determined, then you will answer these two questions. Agree. We agree. And there's another question highly associated with this determination factor. If the government conscript people to have war with China in order to achieve independence, people will have the right to deny conscription. No. You have no right to deny conscription for the sake of independence. So that's really determination. So if people say, we should buy arms, don't care about cross-relationship. We should pay more tax to buy arms. Don't worry about your own economic well-being. We should fight China actively, even though China did not come. We should fight if the government chose to fight. We go ahead. So this is what I call a determination factor. In other words, there is a factor which related to determination that will affect people's answers. The other factor we find, let me see here. Also in the determination factor, there is a question which statistically shows the relatedness of 0.363, which I consider good enough. And this question, I'm sure it doesn't surprise you to go along with this determination factor, is that China resorts to armyification and the government gives us fighting that people should continue to fight armies. Yes. Although this one is not strongly associated with the other, that doesn't mean there's no relationship. The third factor, which I call the legitimacy factor, do we consider legitimacy an important factor affecting cross-relationship? The two questions. If a majority of Taiwanese expressively supports unification, China will renounce the use of force as a means of unification. Agree. If a majority of Taiwanese expressively support independence, China will renounce the use of force as a means of unification. Agree. That's something also interesting, I think. That means it is not your positions on independence or unifications that allows you to feel a stronger sense of control. It is the legitimacy generated by the popular pony that gives you the sense of control. That means you can affect the Chinese decision by showing that you have a popular support, despite the position is in line with the Chinese position or not. It doesn't really matter. But then, of course, you say the other side of the story is that people say no. The reality, of course, we just see a majority of people say no to both questions. But then there is a significant of responders say yes to both questions to allow. And these smaller group people must have answered these questions very consistently in order to give a very high statistic performance here. It's almost 80, and this is 0.65966. So you have a legitimacy factor suggesting that if people feel strong about legitimacy, the power of legitimacy, then they think they can have better control of cross-strait relationship. So on the whole, from this factor analysis, we acquire three dimensions, three factors. Then we can say that if people feel they can control the cross-strait relationship via some pro-independent mechanism, either electing pro-independence party or purchase, or basically pro-independence party, or showing their determination, then they have a better sense. They can face a stronger opponent with more confidence. And secondly, if people are determined, most people perhaps are not that determined, but then if people are determined, then they probably are ready to give up their economic well-being and fight Chinese because you look at the D1. So determination factors would be related to willingness to fight and the capability to fight. The third factor is legitimacy factors. If people feel they can enhance their legitimacy through popular polling, then they feel better control of cross-strait relations. Now, this is not just cross-Taiwan-strait, I think. This is not just about Taiwan-China relationship because if you don't look at the specific contents of the questions, if you look at only these three factors, then that analysis can actually be applied to all asymmetrical relationships between Vietnam and China, Cuba and the United States. In other words, we could say that if people have determination, they will be willing to challenge the stronger party. If people can generate legitimacy in their choice, in their policy choice, then they will be willing or they'll be ready to challenge the stronger party. If people have means to give them a better prospect, then they will be willing to challenge the stronger party. So this is not just about Taiwan-China relationship. This is also about whether or not in an asymmetrical relationship the weaker party is psychologically ready to challenge the stronger party. I think that would be very, very interesting implication and I have some other interesting maneuver in here. This is the... I put these three factors in a figure. This is just for fun. We have two-dimension independence and peace where you place yourself. The three-dimension basically show you that independence and peace could go hand in hand. If you have pro-independence party, our leader, then you can have independence and peace at the same time. Determination factors, if you are ready for independence, you're willing to give up peace. That's what we show in the factors. And the legitimacy factors, as long as you have legitimacy, it doesn't matter whether you are for independence or you are against independence, you will have peace. That's just the way we put on the map. Another analysis. Factoring analysis is how you group the answers and try to figure out the statistical association among different answers. Now, I also run a cluster analysis which helps you to know how respondents, how people can be grouped together according to the way they answer the question. It's not grouping the answers. It's a group of people. I run cluster analysis along these three dimensions where you just show you through the factor analysis. Basically, cluster analysis allows you to decide how many clusters you want. This is not like factor analysis. The machine will generate factors for you. In cluster analysis, we research you have to decide how many clusters we want. So I decide to ask my assistant to run three clusters, four clusters, five, six, seven. And I have all those results and I compare them, I find. This is really lucky. I have very good feet if I have five clusters. So there's almost no problem this time just to pick up how many clusters you want. I want five because all the other three doesn't show all these good feet. These five clusters suggest to you that there is a group of people. It's a group of one. I should name it, but maybe I'll do that later on. I don't know why I didn't name them. I thought I'd love to give people names. Anyway, people who have less confidence in DPP or their chance for fighting will have stronger determination. That's interesting because since they don't think they can maintain peace, they want more arms. And of course they don't think voting matters at all. This is all very strong because beyond one, it's very good. Almost every number is greater than one. This is really lucky. And the second group of people showing negative to all three. I didn't really try to generate stories from this cluster, but I guess I could. I could have very good stories out of these five different group of people. Group one, there's a group of people doing this and this group of people doing that. This group of people, of course, is very pessimistic. Now I can do anything. There's no way legitimacy will come now. But then you see there are different kind of people there. It's not just one kind of people dominating everything. It's not just pro-unification people or pro-independence people. Pro-unification probably is too strong for you. It's not just pro-independence and neutral and non-independence people. It's not that easy. There are five group of people showing very different preference on different factors. And this fifth group is also very useful. You can see positive on all three factors. But one thing that is interesting is that although I didn't give a story to all five groups, you can see one interesting implication. For the fifth group, which is, of course, not only just pro-independence, but very confidence of the prospect for becoming independent. If they really want to mobilize people into pro-independence, they really can't do too much. If you look at the other four groups, if this group wants to stress the importance of leadership, for example, if you have pro-independence party, then you can achieve independence. At least three other group people say no. If they say, well, you know, get arms from United States, then we'll fight Chinese and we'll beat them. Another three group people say no. If they say, well, you know, just vote for independence. Two group people say no. So even though the fifth group people is probably the top group of independence in Taiwan, they probably, I don't know where they are, they're definitely not in DPP because I don't see determining independence people in DPP. But they're somewhere in the society. And you can imagine why these people when they articulate their positions, they had a hard time to convince the majority of the people because whichever dimension they take on, there will be probably a significant number of people alienate from their position. So it's hard for them. That's something, I don't know, the marketing people for really pro-independence forces should look at and try to design something out of this. But this is just to tell you, it's not easy to promote pro-independence position in Taiwan. Although you find over 50% of people waiting to fight for independence, but in terms of marketing or promotion or in terms of articulation of their position, it's not easy. That basically tells all the result I have, but I forgot to make the acknowledgement in the beginning. Let me just do this. This is sponsored by 21st Century Foundation. Sorry about that. I like the foundation, but I forgot to thank them. But then this actually conducted by Professor Zhang Youzong, who in the beginning, he did a kind of experimental survey in a very creative way. He has his assistants, went to all those universities who had what do you call it, professional degree school or night school, whatever, because those schools recruit students from society everywhere. So basically it's a small society. And they are elite because you have to be college-graduated, educated before you enter this kind of professional school. So it's a good test. Out of that test, then he ran an in-house survey from the random sampling, which of course becomes extremely expensive, but because the first stage of research with all those college-educated, professional school students who are basically over 35 in terms of age, educating college, so they're like opinion leaders. We have quite good feet there, but the foundation will support us to expand into in-house survey and randomly select it from Taiwan population statistics. This is very, very expensive, but then thank you, thanks to the foundation that we're able to do this. So I don't have a really wonderful systematic theory to give you, but I think this preliminary result is already interesting enough. It generates very good feet of three factors. It shows you an overall and optimistic picture about how people feel their control over cross relations. But then it gives you a very strong hint. If people feel they are able to control, they must be performing much better on these three dimensions.  That's a legitimacy factor. You show your popular support that the Chinese will give you. That doesn't mean that Chinese will really give you. It just means that people will feel they are able to challenge the stronger side. But if you look at history, because of doing this project, I'm working on asymmetrical relations. I started reading literature on asymmetrical relationships, and the puzzle seems to be there for a long time. Although international relations theory generally failed to explain why in an asymmetrical relationship when the weaker party decided to challenge the stronger party, the stronger party often decides to concede. There isn't much research on that, but I think it would be interesting to look at it. If all the people in the world can be in some way caught by all these three dimensions, then that means people in the stronger power will also follow the same logic. That means that if they see the weaker party, the stronger party can gather enough group of people, popular enough to show their displeasure with the stronger party, the stronger party probably will give in, because they don't think they have legitimacy. If they don't have legitimacy, they probably will let you have what you want for time being in order to restore or at least to stabilize asymmetrical relationships. Imagine if China and Vietnam coming together and fighting over this, on the whole, but then fighting over this territorial, maritime territorial sovereignty. If the Vietnamese decide to escalate, wouldn't that be a much bigger problem for China in the longer term? Why would China sever that? Why wouldn't China just settle down on the issue by concession? Why don't they just do that? Why don't China just say, well, North Korea, you killed this guy who really pro-China, then I'll punish you? Why would China do that? So although this is a survey on the weaker power, but if you go to the stronger power, I don't know if they do the same. If you run the same survey in China against the United States, would you probably get the same thing perhaps? I don't know. That could perhaps indirectly explain why in an asymmetrical relationship the weaker party can still manipulate in certain ways in order to get concession from the stronger party. This, but of course, rely on much extensive research in the future for the time being. I think I'll stop here and hear your comments Thank you. And we take questions. Do you want me to? Anyone questions? Charles first, and anyone? We take one first. Professor, thank you for your presentation on Charles Chieng Research Associated in the Centre. And I must say, it must be the most positive talk that I've ever heard from you. And I didn't expect to listen to so many econometrics in such a pretty good talk. And from your data, in my understanding, probably people in Taiwan can be grouped such as, you say, three clusters. And in my interpretation, I would say people would, they want peace, they desire peace for three different reasons. One is they calculate. One is they believe. One is they obey. So there are different reasons. And what impressed me is they are so different from each other because they either belong to this group or this one or the other one. There is not a significant mixture among them. So my first question, actually, I have two clusters of questions. So my first cluster is why people in Taiwan they want peace in such different ways. And what is the reason behind it? Because there must be a reason to explain why people differ each other in such a significant way. So this is the first cluster of questions. And, well, another one in this cluster is how about the KMT and the DPP? Which cluster these two main parties belong to in your theories or in your model? The second cluster of questions is already second. Another cluster, that's how do they change? There should be a time scale behind this.  And will they change in the future? Okay, that's two cluster of questions. You can only answer with more confidence to your last question. Will they change? Yes. If you look at the cluster analysis, that's actually the message there. You could combine your answer in very many ways and you get this five cluster. That means it's easy for people to change the position and still feel being with a group of other people. So it's not difficult for people to change. And if you look at the cluster, there are five different clusters. It's not difficult for people to change. So the structures there are ready for people who want to change the positions. I mean, the structure of population. You have five clusters showing all different combinations. But the other two questions, since this is empirical, I really can't answer where DPP or KMPT are. But you might want to ask them. I suspect that there will be widespread on all of these clusters. DPP itself or KMPT itself will be... Maybe there will be more people belonging to the fifth group in DPP. I'm not even sure of that. So really, we have to depend on... You know, I probably could get data because this is only a small part of the result. We have about 50 questions to ask in total. And we also have people's party affiliation. So maybe I can just run a party affiliation of this and depend on how much you want to pay. But I mean, this is... I actually acquire consent from the foundation to show you this. But the other part, I don't know. I don't know whether they want to show or not. Because there was someone in the foundation who wanted to run the president. I hope you know. So they probably don't want to show what the result is. Because the foundation was found by Eric Zhu's flooding law. But then the research itself is conducted by... Any questions? Can I ask one? I'm interested to know if you can... I think you probably have already in your mind. If you can tell us what's the five names you give to each cluster. No, I don't have it. I just feel I'm so somehow negligent. I should have because I love to do this. It should be quite interesting. I love to do this but then I... I don't know why I forget. How is the proportion between five different clusters? I mean, because you got a thousand people. Maybe the cluster five is very big or very small. If we don't have this information... It's the technical fault on my side because I can't do this myself. I don't know how to run SPSS. And it's not my assistant. He just... Right. Yeah, it's the technical fault on my side. I'll try to talk to Professor Zhang and see whether he can get his assistant to do this for me. Anyone? David. One of the things that you mentioned was the... You mentioned that there was a sense of pessimism and that was one of the key findings in this study. And I was wondering, even though you probably don't have the equivalent data, but to what extent is there a pattern of change there? In other words, if we did this survey mid-1990s, would the results have been very different? Because I know you've mentioned you've been talking to your students about this for a long time. Any impressions on that? I think the data itself also, I don't have this longitudinal statistics, but I think the structure of data itself already shows it's highly changeable. It's very volatile. But then this itself is very... It's a strong harbinger for anyone who tries to affect the result. On the one hand, you can say, wow, I really can mobilize people in a very short run. It appears that the society on the whole is not very fixed to any certain position. There's no structural pattern. Then I really could generate something through some perfective means in the short run. But in the long run, you'll say, gosh, I really can't do anything because this people looks like they can think in any other way tomorrow. So I guess it's a good thing for politicians that means they can manipulate. It's a bad thing for statesmen if they really want to do something. It's not something that... So even though I don't have the longitudinal statistics, you already can tell the structure is very shaky. Professor, thank you for sharing the very insightful survey with us today. And according to this survey, I wanted that could we suggest that maybe some of us could revise the previous impression of the previous argument that claiming that the people of Taiwan, the ultimate value of the people of Taiwan is to pursue the peace.


Hi, everybody. My name is Adil. I'm a software developer at Autodesk, as Jeff mentioned. Where is Jeff? I can attest to the fact that it's a great place to work. There's something that you can be sure of. There is lunch and everything. So yeah. So my talk today is about something that I built before I was hired by Autodesk. It's pretty much before we start talking to that, I'm going to mention something. This talk is to part the flask part and the electron part. The flask part, we're going to run it through it fast because I assume that everybody pretty much is really familiar with flask. So we're going to go through it quickly. This is what we built for this project. Don't worry if it's a little bit fuzzy, just because there was some kind of number that I want to not be very visible. But the idea was that we needed a key PI for our marketing effort. We needed a way to be sure that each one of the marketing action was given some form of result. The problem was we are getting a lot of information from a lot of sources and a lot of different formats. We have mail-in, we have direct marketing, we have conventional marketing, digital marketing. And this data was getting in in so many formats that we needed a way to be able to gather it together and to analyze it. So this is why we chose Python and we used this framework to be able to congregate this data and make it work together. And this project was aimed to a non-technical user. So we needed a user interface that was understandable by everybody. So for the Flask part, we used a simple Flask app with the large app structure as recommended by Flask. And we did some tweaking on it. And once we have the core functionality up and running, we needed a way to package it. And this is when Electron come to work. Electron is a Node.js framework built by GitHub when they were building the AtomIDA. They needed a way to use web technology to create desktop application. So they come out with this idea. And once they figure out that it was good, immediate, public, and available to everybody, some of the apps that are built with Electron are Skype, Slack, all these things, more and more apps that are more with interaction with the web. They're using Electron to build it. To start with Electron, it's really simple. What you need is two files, a package, the JSON file, we're going to declare the app details and the main process or a main.js file to declare the app and run the main window. So once we had the Electron scovled, we needed to compile the Flask app in a way. Is it better? Oh, I'm sorry. We needed to compile the Flask app in a way to make it portable. And Python has already a great package for that. It's called PyInstaller. It's really simple to run. You just have to install it and run the command in a way to precise that it's exactly this is my file I want to run and this is the extra data I want to add. The F flag here is going to allow the PyInstaller to compile everything into a single app. And the add data is going to add the rest of the information. And using the child process in Electron, you can call the Flask executable and run it. And we have a structure like you see in the left with the Flask app already compiled and the Electron data already. The Flask app is going to take some time to run. So we created a loading page.  If you want a splash windows form, it's going to show you exactly the right windows without any additional information. The Electron, at itself, it doesn't allow users to compile the app to an executable. You need another package called Electron Packager. That is going to check all the code with the assets and the app itself and compile it to an executable. To run the Electron Packager, you need some flags. For example, you need to have to specify the icons so that the app is running the right way. You need also to ignore all the files that you don't need so that you reduce the size of the app. And there is some form of compression using the Asser method to allow you to protect your source code. For example, if you have a lot of files that you want to protect and nobody, you don't want people to have access to them. You just run it with that and it compiles it. Once the app is compiled, the good news is it's protected, nobody can access your source code. The bad news is you can't add any data to it. So if you have some activation key or something, you will have a hard time to run it. And this is where Python and Electron have a good way to detect in which operating system you are and to push the extra data exactly in the right folder. And you can access it and deal with it. The Electron app usually comes without a menu, so you need to declare a menu so that you can add extra functionality to the Flask app. Interacting with the Flask app using the menu can be done either by Ajax calls or by command line. This is the talk. It's quick. There is a lot of extra documentation in Electron in the documentation. And it's going to allow you to have more information about the auto-update and the native functionality. Any question? Yes, what PyInstaller does exactly is it gets you a reduced copy of the Python runtime beside all the packages that your app is going to be needed to run. And it puts everything in a simple executable. This executable, as it is, it's good for an app. The only problem is not giving you any UI. This is why packaging it using Electron was good so that we can add Node.js functionality to the app and show UI for the app. We tried multiple times, but having doing it that way will give a lot of variables that we can't account for most of them, and that gives a problem with the time. Bundling the app using PyInstaller was the only way to ensure that it's going to run no matter in which environment you run it. Thank you.


I'm Grace Loddick and this is Educating Ourselves in These Difficult Times on ThinkTech Hawaii. I am a communications major at Hawaii Pacific University and intern here at ThinkTech. In my series I cover the unique challenges presented by coronavirus and how it has impacted education. In today's episode we will be discussing the challenges facing the high school class of 2020 in the wake of the pandemic. We will explore how high school social events, extracurricular activities, classroom experience, senior thesis, graduation, and college plans have been affected by COVID-19. Today my special guest is Lauren Baker, senior at Trinity Christian School and incoming freshman at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona. She will be sharing how coronavirus has impacted her role as a high school senior and give us an inside view on what graduating in the class of 2020 looks like. Thank you for being a guest on my show today Lauren. Thank you so much Grace. Of course. So to help provide some context for our viewers today, could you describe what an average day-to-day life looks like at Trinity Christian School for you? Absolutely. So attending Trinity Christian is like being a part of a family. I come from a small school, small private school in Kailua, and the average class size is around 12 to 13 students. And so my graduating class is a class of 12. And it's interesting because the teachers know us personally and I know my classmates like family as well. And so it's just that personal bond that I have both with my teachers and with my classmates. It definitely sounds like a wonderful experience that provides both the best of academics and having a tight-knit social circle. So for today's discussion I'd like to be focusing on how coronavirus has changed those academic and social aspects of high school for you. So overall, could you give us an overview of how the classroom experience and feel has changed from you once it went from an in-person setting to an online setting? Absolutely. So it was tough to transition to online school at first, especially during my senior year when I have my senior thesis coming up and then also with just finishing my senior year with all these capstone experiences such as states for speech debate, senior thesis, and all these other activities that comes with being a senior. And so giving up those experiences was tough at first, but it came a lot easier with the support of my teachers knowing that they still cared for me and that I could always reach out to them online via email, text, and whatever. And then also just through my classmates as well, knowing that I'm not the only one going through this, that there's so many other seniors experiencing this loss as well and that no matter what I still get to graduate high school regardless. I think that's great that you're keeping a positive mentality that despite it all, you still will be able to finish. What sort of coping tactics have you been using during this stressful time and what strategies have you found have been most helpful in receiving support from others? Yes. So a few things that I've been doing to cope with coronavirus and the loss of experience from my senior year has been through talking with my classmates, talking with my friends through FaceTime, texting, also just hanging out at home has been great too. I've been baking a lot, which has been very therapeutic and it's just been great to connect with my family more as well as, you know, I'm still connected with my family, friends and classmates as well through social media and texting. Do you believe that the coronavirus pandemic has somehow negatively affected your social life and experience with connecting your classmates? Like I understand that senior year is often a time where we feel like we need to hold on to these very last moments that we have with these people that we've been attending school with for quite some time. Has that been the experience for you? Yeah, it's been tough spending the last two months of my senior year at home and away from my classmates and my family really. And it's just been tough because, you know, we have this vision for our senior year where we have prom, where we have graduation commenced in ceremonies, where we have senior thesis, senior soak day, senior ditch day and all these experiences that we've been looking forward to for four years, even more than four years and to not have them has been hard. But I've found healing and I've coped with that just honestly knowing that I'm not the only one going through this time. I think that's definitely the ideal mentality to have. I think that we can often hold on to experiences and the loss that comes with sudden and unexpected situations like this. But that's definitely reassuring to hear that you found a way to cope with it. And I think that's definitely inspiration for other seniors going through this difficult time as well. So for your class schedule for this last year, what types of classes have you been taking and what have been the challenges of converting specific classes to an online format? I would say the most daunting class that I took this year was senior rhetoric and rhetoric class for seniors at Trinity Christian School is when all the seniors have to present a senior thesis. So that's a 20 minute memorized speech, well researched, passionate, as well as a defense for 20 minutes in front of a panel of judges. And so it was tough to transition into an online format, mainly because at the time where we had the stay at home order where we can no longer go to school was the time where we started actually presenting our senior thesis and really memorizing it and making sure that our blocking, our presentation was to the best of our abilities. And so what we had to do instead of presenting in front of our teachers and our classmates in person was record ourselves in our homes and send them into our advisors and our teachers as well.  And then my teacher would be hearing my senior thesis once a week when it should be vice versa, really. I think it's great that you were still able to at least have that feedback from your instructors and your family and to be able to practice your senior thesis. But what was presenting your actual thesis like? Was it different from the usual format of presenting it in person? So I actually presented my senior thesis yesterday. Congratulations. Thank you.  And then this year it was a minimal audience. So around under 10 people in the room that we were presenting the senior thesis. And so it was me and then the three panel of judges as well as just a few guests that I had. And then how we did it this year to still receive the wide audience was Trinity Used Facebook Live. And then our Trinity community could still come in and watch all of us seniors present our senior thesis and what we've been working on for this whole school year and still receive the questions, the feedback and the encouragement just on an online setting. I love that they were still able to somewhat retain some of the classic experiences of being able to give it to a large audience, at least through using Facebook Live. I know that perhaps it feels a little different, but it's definitely the gesture that counts. Since you had to convert your senior thesis to a bit of an alternative format, did teachers make any changes to the grading scale or make any exceptions for the circumstances? No, actually, the teacher still held us to the standard for our senior thesis of making sure we were off-scripts, that we knew our research and that we were well prepared for the Q&A and for defending our senior thesis as well. I think the only difference was really the lack of audience that at first seemed like a little bit of pressure off of us, but then knowing that we still had an audience from Facebook Live still added the pressure and maybe the fear factor into presenting our senior thesis. You mentioned earlier that you were also an active participant in speech and debate throughout high school, and I'm sure that definitely helped you in your thesis as well. Could you give us an overview of how the speech and debate season was altered as a result of the pandemic? Yeah, it's a little bittersweet. I've been competing on Trinity Speech and Debate Team for all four years, and after we finished our normal qualifying season for the state tournament, we finished all of our normal tournaments, and the last tournament right before states was our last tournament, and so after that would have been the state tournament and it would have been done for me and for all of my other competitors in the Hawaii Speech League. And unfortunately, because of coronavirus, we had to cancel speech and debate, but the National Speech and Debate Association is having an online national tournament, as well as a senior open for all of the seniors who want that sense of closure for their speech and debate career. Wow, so will you be participating in the national tournament sponsored by the NSDA? I will not. I decided that it would be better for me to focus on my senior thesis and to have that focus on my senior thesis instead of doing the open speech and debate tournament with the National Association. However, I know that there are people that did the tournament of champions online and are still going to nationals or doing the senior open, and I wish them really the best of luck. Wow, so for the senior national open championship, did they divide it up by states, just having competitors compete against others in their state or was it open so that competitors from Hawaii, for example, would be able to compete with people from California? Yes, it was the senior open tournament, and so Hawaii decided not to send any qualified people to nationals just for a sense of maintaining fairness in our speech community in Hawaii, but instead they invited the seniors to participate in the senior open, so that was just an opportunity for all seniors in speech and debate to do this online tournament format as a sense of closure to perhaps have a friendly competition with people from or students from around the country. So you talk about how speech and debate has allowed you to have some sense of closure for an activity that's been very important for you throughout high school. I understand that other high school experiences, whether it be drama performances, sports, tournaments or prom are also events that many high schoolers enjoy and would like to participate in, but unfortunately those experiences have been stripped away as a result of COVID-19. Did you participate in any other activities in high school and during your senior year that provided a similar opportunity for closure? I would really say I did cross country in the fall season, which was really fun. Actually, I did get to finish that, which was exciting. However, every May at the end of the sport season for Trinity, we have this thing called athletic banquet and that's when we recognize all of the athletes that have participated in Trinity athletics for that past year. And so participating in cross country for all these years and not having that last athletic banquet to recognize the seniors and for their participation in athletics for all these years that we were at Trinity was tough. However, we made adjustments to the athletic banquet and instead the coaches and teachers made videos for us recognizing our seasons as well as the seniors to say goodbye and that they enjoyed having us on their sports teams. That's definitely amazing that they were able to make those changes for you and still keep some of that experience of feeling like you're being celebrated and recognized for your efforts in the sports team. Lauren, actually in a moment we will be taking a short break. Again, I'm Grace Lodik and you're watching Educating Ourselves in These Difficult Times on Think Tech, Hawaii with my special guest, Lauren Baker. We will be back shortly. Hello, I'm Lillian Cumick, host of Lillian's Vegan World, the show where we talk about veganism and the plant-based diet located in Honolulu, Hawaii. I'm a vegan chef and cooking instructor and I have lots of information to share with you about how awesome this plant-based diet is. So do tune in every second Thursday from 1 p.m. Aloha. Welcome back to Educating Ourselves in These Difficult Times with my guest, Lauren Baker, high school senior at Trinity Christian School. For the last segment of our show, Lauren, I'd like to be focusing on prom as well as graduation and how COVID-19 has affected your future plans for college. So first, I'd like to talk about prom. I know that this is an event that many high school students look forward to, spend countless hours planning the perfect dress, your date, how to get to prom, food, venue. How did Trinity alter their prom plans for this year since I understand it typically takes place during this month? Right. So I am fortunate enough to have loving and supporting parents that have lobbied to actually push back prom to June. And we're having prom at Mid-Pak Country Club and it is still on, especially since coming from a small school provides us the ability to maintain social distancing, I guess. And we can still have prom. I still get to find the dress. I still get to go with my friends and still have that experience of having my senior prom, really. That's so fun. I guess that being in a small school really did pay off in a certain way because it enabled you to still have a prom because there's so few people. I understand that graduation is also a huge hallmark event to help culminate your senior year. Has Trinity helped create a different graduation plan than what is usually planned? Right. So usually graduation at Trinity is, the seniors go up on the stage and then they have a typical wide audience. All your family, friends, your community show up and watch you walk the stage to get your diploma. This year for graduation, we are doing an outside private ceremony where the seniors will be on our athletic court and then the parents will be in a car on the parking lot by the sports court watching the ceremony from Facebook Live. And then once we have our private ceremony, we'll have a social distanced lay reception where all the seniors will spread out along the sidewalk of our parking lot and cars will be able to pull in into our parking lot and drop off a lay at our table or stand and then a designated person will be able to give us the lay. That's so sweet. I love how Trinity has still made such an effort to help retain so many of the experiences that high school students look forward to for the end of their high school careers. We actually just got a question from one of our live viewers. They wanted to know more about your senior thesis topic. What was your senior thesis on?  Wow, that is definitely a deep topic. Could you perhaps tell us what was the inspiration behind choosing to create your project on this topic? I am a strong advocate for rights, for human rights and to bring justice for people that are victims of these forms of violence. And I wanted to really have a challenging thesis not only for myself, but also for my community to show that perhaps our choices and how we view people as maybe objects sometimes can contribute to a larger scale problem of sexual violence and ultimately sex trafficking. I think it's vital and I love how you took the time to shed light on an important topic in our society. I think that people often don't think too deeply, just clicking on a website in their free time and they don't realize how it really does contribute to a larger problem at scale. So I definitely congratulate you for taking this stride and taking the challenge to help cover an issue that's so pervasive in our society that perhaps many of us don't even realize. Is this area perhaps something that you'd like to go into in college to study more in depth or pursue as a career? I plan on attending Grand Canyon University, right? And I'll be majoring in government with an emphasis in legal studies and then minoring in communications. And so it is my dream perhaps to maybe be a attorney for women in Hawaii specifically that have been victims of domestic violence. So perhaps a family or marriage attorney would be my dream job.  I think that that's definitely a challenging career that many people feel hesitant to pursue just because of the extensive education and knowledge required for it. But I love that you're still taking the time to pursue that despite the fact that it may be a challenging career path, albeit rewarding, I believe. So for your future plans at GCU, will you be able to attend classes on campus for the fall or has GCU arranged a different plan for incoming freshmen? Right, so as GCU is leaving it optional to students to go back onto campus, personally, I do plan on going to GCU in the fall. I'm really looking forward to it and having that fresh start and meeting all these new people in Phoenix. And hopefully with the coronavirus curve staying flattened, we could truly go back onto campus without any fear of COVID-19. In the light of the pandemic, has that affected your college decision or your college planning? I would say so. In a sense of money, obviously, college is already expensive and wanting to make sure that college could be as affordable as possible in the wake of our economy going on a downturn now because of coronavirus. And GCU did give me the best opportunity that was economically reasonable. It gave me the best package really. And coming down to it, GCU did offer me the community that I wanted at a cost that was reasonable. What were the main aspects of GCU that stood out the most to you that caused it to be a college of interest for you? Right, so GCU offers me a large campus experience. Actually, they have 20,000 students on campus, large campus, always in development, clean and safe. And that is what I was really looking for in a university is somewhere where I could be in a larger setting, especially coming from Trinity, where I could expand my comfort zone a little bit but also be somewhere safe. Those are definitely important aspects to be looking for in a college. So what inspired you to pursue a major in government and legal studies and also minor in communications as well? Right, so I think it's speech and debate that really influenced that passion for going into law and going into communications is because I believe that just thinking about how the world and how politics works is just so interesting and fascinating to me and to really learn how to speak up for things that really matter in our community is what has fueled my passion for going into law. Speech and debate sounds like it's been an essential part of your high school experience. Do you plan on continuing pursuing speech and debate in college as well? Yes, I was just accepted onto the GCU speech and debate team. So I'm really looking forward to being able to travel around the country to California to participate in speech and debate tournaments and to really continue my passion for it. Congratulations, Lauren. Have you decided what categories of speech and debate you would like to participate in in college? I think this time going into college, I want to try definitely new categories that I didn't do in high school. So in high school, I did a lot of platform speaking as well as a lot of debate categories while in college, I would like to try more of the acting in the theater side of speech definitely. So to expand my comfort zone a little more. For some of our viewers who might not be familiar with the world of speech and debate, could you tell us what platform speaking is and explain what the types of categories of debate you participated in were? Right, so platform speaking in the speech and debate world may look like original oratory which is a passionate persuasive speech. We also have informative speaking which is just a 10 minute informative non-persuasive speech. And then on the debate side, I competed in the categories of public forum which is a quick and heated debate about current events as well as policy debate which is a in depth year long resolution topic addressing a change in legislation or policy. And then I also competed in Lincoln Douglas debate which is a debate more about values and morals. Those sound like perfect categories to help you prepare for a career in law in the future. It's great to see that you've been taking the time to help to prepare yourself not only for college but for the years beyond as well. I think that many high school students don't necessarily think about how they can be taking steps during their high school years to help prepare themselves career wise but it's inspiring to hear that you've been taking the time to invest in yourself and to do so. At GCU for the acting type of speech categories, do those categories have specific names? I believe they're called like duo interpretation, program oral interpretation, dramatic interpretation and what these more theater oriented categories look like in collegiate speech is where you take scripts from publishings and then you create it into a script really. So program oral interpretation for example is you take multiple genres of literature so that could be just articles, play scripts and poetry and they all have one general theme and then you combine them all into a cohesive script and the presentation should look a bit schizophrenic in a way but then it all goes back to this general theme and thesis that you're fighting for. What inspired you to take the leap of change from doing more policy and philosophy oriented topics to taking a more artistic and theatrical approach to speech in college? Right, so I think I just wanted to expand my experience in the speech and debate world a bit coming from at Trinity, competing in speech and debate was definitely more debate oriented, more platform speaking oriented and I always wanted to try a more theater approach to speech and debate and so just going to JCU and having that fresh start and that ability to perhaps expand my horizons in the speech and debate world is something that I'm looking forward to. I'm happy for you that you're taking charge of your education and expanding your horizons to try something new that perhaps you haven't before and I hope for you that that helps to lead you to experiences that you may not have otherwise had in high school. This actually is the end of our show, Lauren, but I just wanted to thank you again for being a guest on my show today and to thank you for watching Think Tech Hawaii. We hope that today's program shed some light on the unique challenges presented by coronavirus for high school students and help to give you a better understanding of the experiences of the class of 2020 during this challenging time. Again, I'm Grace Loddick and see you every other Thursday at noon. Aloha.


From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and we're digging in with VMware, with the latest update of the VMware Cloud on AWS. Definitely a technology solution set that the ecosystem has been very interested to dig into. And to help us do that deep dive, I'd like to welcome back to the program Kit Colbert. He is the vice president and CTO of the Cloud Platform Business Unit with VMware. Kit, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Stu. All right, so you brought along some slides. As we said, if people want to watch, we've got an executive interview to give kind of the general business update. But when it comes to the technology, I guess we start with the VMware Amazon partnership is a deep integration. We've heard both from Andy Jassy and from Pat Gelsinger on how much engineering work and how critically important it is. Anybody from the technical side understands that one of the interesting things in cloud is that Amazon created bare metal instances to support this solution. So one of the items here is that there is a new bare metal instance.  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so the bare metal support is something that we work very closely with AWS on when we're first launching VMware Cloud on AWS. And the idea there with that bare metal support is that it very similarly models EC2 virtual machines in the sense of each of these VM types or instance types, as they say, are various kind of t-shirt sizes, right? And so they have a lot of these different instance types. And so similarly speaking on the bare metal side, we're also seeing a lot of different instance types there. So we started out with an i3.metal instance and we added an r5.metal instance. And now we're really excited to add what we're calling i3en.metal. And so let's bring up a slide to talk more about all the new capabilities there with i3en. You know, what we had found when we talked to customers is that they love the simplicity of the hyper-converged model that i3 brings. What they said was, hey, you know, we've got a lot of workloads that are storage capacity battle. And so that meant that, you know, they had just each of these workloads, they use some amount, usually a good amount of CPU memory, but they had a lot of storage capacity requirements. What that meant with i3 is they had to get a lot of these i3 hosts to get enough storage capacity to support those workloads.  And so, you know, what we've done here with i3en is dramatically increase the amount of storage capacity. So we can see here, what is it, about 45 terabytes or so. So much, much larger than what you can get, about 4x larger than what you can get on i3.metal today. So, you know, this again, very targeted to those very large workloads that need a beefy underlying server. And, you know, just trying to better align the customer needs and workload needs with the underlying physical capabilities. And so this is just going to be one of many that we'll bring out. We've got, you know, a whole pipeline of these actually. And, you know, again, you can imagine all the different types of VM instance types, right? There's GPU ones, there's FPGA based ones, you know. So there's all sorts of different shapes and sizes. And, you know, as we get more and more feedback from customers, as they're running more and more applications, we'll get more and more of these instance types out there as well. Yeah, really interesting, Kate, it gives me flashbacks. I'm thinking back to, you know, 10 or even 15 years ago when you talked in the early days of did I just deploy VMware on the servers I had or did I buy servers that had the configuration so I could optimize and take advantage of the feature functionality that's needed. All right, when I heard some of the things you talked about there about being able to use certain workloads and the like, one of the feedbacks I've gotten from users is, you know, the overall price of this, let's just say it's not the least expensive solution to start with. So what are some of the new entry level options that you have with the VMC on AWS? How does this update help? Yeah, yeah, first of all, on the price side, what we have found is that this is actually extremely price efficient, price competitive, if you're able to utilize all the underlying physical and bare metal capacity. But, you know, as you just mentioned Stu, you know, the default configuration is three nodes of those I3 hosts. And those I3 hosts aren't small either, right? They're pretty beefy. And, you know, if you just want to get started just try something small. Well, today we do have actually a one node instance but that one node instance is just temporary. It's kind of a testbed, if you will, a proof of concept type of environment. It's not a long term, long running production environment. And so customers kind of have this one node on the one hand or three nodes on the other.  Make it super simple, reduce that price point, again, for a very small footprint deployment and then allow us to scale up. So we bring up the next slide. What you can see is that that's exactly what we've done here as well, supporting two nodes now. And the idea here is this is a full production environment. You get all the great VMware technologies, you can view motion stuff, HA, you get availability and so forth storage policies as you see here. So again, this is meant to be a long-lived, fully supported production environment that can also scale up if need be, right? You might start out with two nodes and then find, hey, I want to add three or four or more and you can certainly fully do that and fully support that. So again, this is just giving customers more optionality and more flexibility for where they want to come in. What we've been doing thus far is talking with a lot of customers that had pretty large footprints and saying, hey, I want to move a good chunk of my data center or I've got a lot of workflows I want to burst. And in those cases, three or more nodes made a lot of sense. What we're finding now is that a lot of customers do want that flexibility to start smaller, just with two nodes, really simple, kind of put their toe in the water, if you will, and get a feel for the service and then expand from there. Yeah, one quick follow up on this. You mentioned that if customers are maximizing, leveraging the full environment that they have there, it's very cost competitive. How are you hearing from customers? What is their growth pattern? Are they getting good utilization? Do they have a good feel for how to manage that economics? In the AWS space, a lot of talk about things like FinOps these days and how to make sure that the technical group and the financial group are working close together. Yeah, so that's a great question actually. And the whole notion of the economics around this is a huge focus area for us. We have a whole cloud economics group, as a matter of fact, that we frequently bring in to talk with customers to help them think through all these different things. There's a number of different considerations there. A lot of them look from going from on-prem into the cloud to the VMC and AWS. And with VMC and AWS, our prices are just public cloud in general. It's very easy to understand the price because it's right up front, you're getting charged, right? On-prem is a bit more difficult to understand that. You've got a lot of capital expenses. You got a lot of other sort of operational expenses, power, electricity, people. And how do you make all the right computations there? So we have whole teams to help people think through that. But usually what we have found is that price is not the main thing, right? Price is kind of a secondary or tertiary type of consideration. The main thing's always one of our primary use cases. It's like, man, I need to get out of my data centers or my data center is that capacity I want to keep it, but I really need to be able to burst to the cloud. Maybe some sort of test dev, like testing the cloud and production on-prem or vice versa. Those are the key use cases that bring customers in. And then it's really a question of, okay, now that you know you want to do this, how do we do this as effectively, efficiently from a cost perspective as well as possible, right? And that's where that sort of economic discussion starts to happen. And then you get into more of the details, like, okay, what kind of instance type do I want? What are the cost metrics of that? Can I actually fill it to capacity? That's where we start getting to those more specific situations for each customer. Excellent. Well, yeah, that really tees up for me, Kit. When I think about the early customers that I've talked to that are using VMC on AWS, they tend to be your enterprise customers. They're no big VMware customers. They have enterprise license agreements and the like. VMware's got a strong history working across the board and you talk about cloud in previous solutions, you've had close partnerships with the managed service providers. So my understanding is you're actually looking to help connect between what you've done with the managed service providers in the past and this VMware on AWS solution. So bring us inside this option. Yeah, let me break it down for you because we do work with a lot of partners. Obviously from VMware's inception, partners have been corridor strategy and corridor success, right? What we've actually been doing, actually somewhat kind of quietly over the past, I mean, 15 years anyway, is been really building out what we call our VMware cloud provider partner program and the VCPP program. And the idea there is that we do have a lot of these managed service providers that can take our software and run it on behalf of their customers, essentially delivering our software as a service to their customers. And that's been great. We've seen a lot of success stories there and we have about 4,200 of these folks now like a tremendous amount spread all around the world, all sorts of different geographies and also all sorts of different industry verticals. And so you see a lot of these folks getting really specific, you know, let's say into the finance vertical, all, you know, in and around Wall Street, providing all sorts of great services for the financial services firms. Well, these folks are looking to evolve as well. And what they're saying and what they're seeing is like, hey, you know, just this basic idea of running infrastructure. Well, I can do that but it doesn't necessarily differentiate me, right? I need to move up the stack and start offering more services and really trying to be a very, you know, sort of boutique and targeted solution for their customers. And so a lot of these customers, you know, obviously want to run on VMC and AWS. And so what we've been doing is enabling these partners to, you know, sell through essentially VMC and AWS to sell these servers to their customers. But one of the challenges there is that they are only able to sell the full sort of bare metal server. They weren't able to break that up or split that across customers as they can do today within their own environments. And in fact, today within their own environments, they use something called VMware Cloud Director and this is software that we give them. And, you know, it's really nice is you can take a vSphere environment, software defined data center and break it apart or kind of carve it up if you will into multiple smaller tenants than the, you know, that each of these customers can and take part of. And so, but we didn't have that functionality for VMware Cloud and AWS. And so that's what the announcement's all about. So let's pull up the slide to talk about that. The basic idea here is we can now enable those same software defined data centers that are running inside of AWS as part of VMware Cloud and AWS to be accessed by VMware Cloud Director. And so what we've done is actually made, we call it VCD for short, made VCD a service that we now operate and it runs there alongside VMC and AWS. And so now these managed service providers can leverage the VCD as a service to roll out access and carve up these SEDCs that they get. And, you know, the takeaway here is that we're just giving these partners much greater flexibility and optionality in terms of how they consume the underlying bare metal infrastructure on VMC and AWS and then give that out to their own customers. Again, giving greater customer choice and options to those customers. All right, Kit, so the other big thing that we've covered this year with VMware of course is the launch of vSphere 7, what that means in the cloud native space, the whole Tanzu portfolio line. So help us understand how all the application modernization Kubernetes and the like ties into all the solution that we're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. This has been a huge focus for us, as you know. You know, we launched Tanzu last year at VMworld and then launched the product set earlier this year. It's finally ready to GA. We've seen great customer interest and customer traction there. And obviously one of the big questions people had was like, hey, how can I get this for VMC and AWS? And so, you know, the specific product they were looking at there was called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. And so the idea with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is that it enables a customer to provision and manage Kubernetes clusters across any cloud, right? And you can do this on AWS. You can do this on prem on vSphere or other clouds and so forth. And so obviously this technology needed to come to VMC. You know, the thing we talk about with customers when it comes to VMC and AWS is this notion of migrate the modernize that we can migrate you off of your on prem infrastructure to this modernize cloud infrastructure that is VMC and AWS. And once you have that modernize infrastructure it makes it much easier to modernize your applications. You've got all sorts of great AWS services sitting there. So now the application itself can start taking advantage of all these things as well as these new type of capabilities. So let's pull up the slide for this one. So what we're announcing here is Tanzu Kubernetes Grid plus on VMC and AWS. And what this gives you is all that great functionality, the ability to get Kubernetes seamlessly running on top of your VMC environment right next to all of your existing apps. So this is not one of those situations where you need separate clusters or different environments. You can have a single environment that can have both your traditional applications and your more modern ones. And Tanzu Kubernetes Grid takes care of all the management of that Kubernetes environment. It ensures that it's up to date, properly lifecycle managed, manage all the security, you get a container registry there. It can elastically scale based on demand. And of course you get all that great consistency as well. And we do have a lot of customers that are multi cloud that are doing things across different environments. And so TKG can replicate itself and give you that consistent management across any of those environments on prem and the cloud between clouds. So that's really what the power of this is. And again, it's really taking VMC from just being a platform for migrating your existing workloads to really being a platform for modernizing those workloads as well. Yeah, it's interesting, Kit. You know, when I think about traditionally VMWare, it was, you know, let me take my app and I'm going to shove it into VM and I'll never think about it again. So what's the change in mindset? How do you make sure that it's not just, you know, stick it in there and forget about it, but you know, can move and change, which is, you know, really the call for today is that I need to be more agile and need to be able to respond to change. So that's a great question. And we actually spend a lot of time talking about this with customers. So if we take a step back, you know, it's important to understand the traditional journey most customers are looking at when they're moving to the cloud. I talked about this notion of migrating then modernizing. Oftentimes, you know, before the advent of VMC and AWS, you didn't have the ability to take those two apart. You had to migrate and modernize simultaneously. In order to move to the cloud, we actually had to do a bunch of refactoring and retooling and so forth to your application. And obviously that created a lot of challenges because it slowed how quickly customers could move up to the cloud. And so what we've done, which I think is really, really powerful, it's kind of broken those two apart to say, you know what, you may have a business imperative to get out of the data center. We can help you do that. We can move, you know, some customers moved hundreds of workloads a week up to VMC and AWS. And then, you know, once you've done that, you're now a little bit more breathing room, right?  And now you can sort of focus on, okay, how do I think about modernizing these applications? How do I think about the interior points too and opening them up and actually getting inside of them? And so I think, you know, the most valuable aspect of the approach that we've taken here is that ability to separate out those two, to get the quick business wins that you need. And then to take the time to think about, okay, how do I actually modernize this? How do I want to? What sort of technologies do I want to use? How should I do this right rather than just need to do this quickly? And so I think that's a really, really powerful aspect of our approach and that we can give customers more optionality in terms of how they approach their modernization efforts. Yeah, so Kit, final question I have for you. The VMware-AWS partnership has been around for a couple of years now. What would you say is the biggest change technically from when the solution was first announced just to where we are today with all the new updates that you've talked about? Yeah, that's a great question. Look, it's hard to pick one, right? I think the biggest thing in general is just the increasing maturity of this offer. And that goes really across the board. Technical maturity, operational maturity, compliance, certification maturity, getting more and more of those under our belt. Global reach maturity, right? We started off in one region, but now we're all over the world pretty much every region that AWS has. You see more and more features, you know, we're constantly releasing new features, new hardware types. And so I think that's really the biggest thing. It's not been like one singular thing. What it's been is just a lot of work by the team across a thousand different areas and moving all those in parallel. And that's really been the heavy lift that we've had to do over the past few years. You know, as we talked about, it was a lot of work just to get this thing out in the first place, right? We had to do a lot of technical work with AWS to enable this bare metal capability. And so we got that one out. We got it out and had that initial service there, but a lot of limitations, right? We just had one instance type, only one region, didn't have as many compliance certifications. So obviously that limited the number of customers initially, right, just because there were some restrictions around that. So our goal has really been to open this up to as many customers and in fact, every customer, all of our 500,000 on vSphere customers to be able to move to VMC and AWS. And so we're slowly but surely every month knocking down more and more barricades to that, right? And so what you've seen is just a tremendous explosion of innovation and effort across the entire team. And so it's really as kudos to the team for their continued effort day in day out over these past three years or so to get VMC and AWS to where it is today. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Kit. Great to talk to you. Congratulations to the VMware and AWS team. And of course looking forward to talking to more of the customers down the road as they take advantage of this, hopefully at VMworld and some of the Amazon shows too. Thanks so much for joining us earlier. Thank you, Stu. All right, and stay with us for a lot more coverage. Of course, VMware, cloud on AWS, really exciting and interesting topic we've been covering since day one. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.


In March, we brought you the story of Cindy Moore, her daughter Lily, who has autism and the struggles they face while trying to shop. When we last saw them, they were celebrating a small victory after Food City began ordering shopping carts just for special needs children and then putting them in each of their stores. But Cindy didn't stop there. Today, we met up with Cindy again to see the newest cart at the Pikeville Wal-Mart Supercenter. Store Manager Scott McPeak said once he heard about Cindy's story and the special cart called Caroline's Cart, the decision to try to get one was easy. I've actually seen the new story and seen that some other stores in the area was getting the cart and I worked with Cindy and she actually gave me some information and actually partnered with our home office and our cart team and we ordered this cart and it took us about three weeks to get in. Cindy says as she continues to reach out to local stores without ordering the carts, she's finding out many store managers aren't even aware they exist. A lot of people don't know and that's what they tell me. When they come and thank me, they're like, we didn't know that existed. I just did research. After a bad shopping experience, I come home and sit down and did research and found this cart and went from there. The Caroline cart is much different than a normal cart and can actually accommodate someone up to 250 pounds, which means Lily can shop with her mother for years to come. She's right in front of me. My groceries are in the back. We came up front and check out. She's still right here where I can see her. She's at ease. I'm at ease. It's just so much better. Since we first aired the story about Lily and their shopping challenges, she has talked with dozens of families with similar needs and she is continuing to reach out to additional local stores. I'm actually trying to work with other companies right now to get them in other stores and I'm hoping that they work with me and we'll be able to see more around at Pike County. Reporting in Pikeville for EKB News, I'm Shannon Deskins.