Well, welcome again. So this is part two of the Firefly demo. I talked about one thing that Firefly can do to help you out is to track and initiate token transfers. And another thing that Firefly does really well is help you connect to different chains, right? Both public chains and private chains. So very similar to the previous demo, I'm going to kind of start with private chains, because that's kind of where we started with Firefly 1.0, very focused on the enterprise use case of multi-party consortia that want to exchange data in a controlled way. And then we'll talk about the new functionality in 1.1 with connecting to public chains. So I'm going to use the same workspace that I used for the tokens demo, just a reminder that we have three Firefly nodes here. I have node 0, I have node 1, and I have node 2.  So the point of these multi-party consortiums is that you can create certain things, such as token pools, such as data type schemas, and they'll be shared with everybody so everyone can agree on them and reference the same copy of those. In this case, I'm going to go back to the sandbox and show something that you may have seen before. So we'll breeze through this quickly. But I think one of the coolest things that Firefly does in talking to private chains is this marrying of on and off chain data. So say I have a use case where I'm in a consortium and I need to tell everyone that a shipment has been received and broadcast that so that everyone sees that there's proof that I got shipment X. So I can send a broadcast message, shipment 100 was received, and then send that broadcast message. This is going to, again, be a combination of on and off chain messaging. The actual body of the message is going to go into IPFS, and then a blockchain transaction will be written to point to it. If I go to my timeline, I can see here, messages are always batched up for efficiency, because obviously the blockchain is not great at high throughput of messages. So we're going to batch a bunch of messages up if we were sending a lot at a time. Here it's just going to be a batch of one. But then that hash of the contents of that batch is going to be written to the blockchain. So here's the initiation of it. And then the message is confirmed. I can see everyone receives this, shipment 100 was received, blockchain event was written in block 18. So the hash of that message is written in block 18. And everyone can compare the contents of the message, compute the hash, and check it against the hash that was written on the blockchain. And then you know that these two pieces go together. And because this was a broadcast, everyone's going to have exactly that same blockchain event for block 18. This right here shows the block number and the transaction and log within that block. So block 18 and the same here. And of course, they all get the message confirmed that they can all see this piece of data. So this makes it really, really easy to marry the on and off-chain data and firefly guarantees that regardless of how fast or how your off-chain storage works, the events will always be delivered in the order that they are on the blockchain. So it's a really powerful guarantee. You can order your applications based on that and know that, OK, we're all going to get, if everyone's sending these different shipments that they got, we're all going to process them in exactly the same order, regardless of how reliable or slow or fast our off-chain messaging is. The blockchain is the authority for how to order and process those messages. But if I wanted to send a private message and tell just one of the recipients the contents of that shipment because they're privy to that, I can also send a private message, maybe the contents of the shipment. 100 firefly t-shirts. I think that's wishful thinking. I don't know if we even have any firefly t-shirts left. But you could always check the booth just to be sure. So maybe only org one is privy to this piece of data. So I'm going to send this one as a private message to org one. Run that snippet. There we go. I have some new events. So because I'm the sender, org zero, I see both the initiating operation and then I see the blockchain event and the message itself with the contents of that message, which again, contents of the message could be text, JSON, binary, files, lots of blobs, anything you want can go in there. They'll all be chunked and sent across off chain. Org one, because they are privy to this message, they have a blockchain event and a message confirmed. Here's my details, exactly the same. But org two, since they were not there, they get the blockchain event, but that's it. They see that something was written to the blockchain. It has a hash of a message in it, but they don't know what it means. They were not privy to the message. They are not sent the off chain portion, so they can't reconstruct that. All they have is the hash. They know something happened, but they don't know what. They don't even know who sent it to who. We obfuscate even the sender and the receiver of the off chain portion. So you cannot do anything with the hashes that are on the blockchain unless you also have the data and then you can compare to see that it was the right data. So that's one way that Firefly helps in a consortium. I'm going to show one other way to talk about consortiums, and I'm going to move to public chains as well. I've interacted with a couple different tabs here in the sandbox, and I'm going to go to the last one, and this is for smart contracts. We talk a lot about kind of the three pillars of Firefly being digital assets and on and off chain messaging flows and APIs for building applications, because obviously most blockchain applications will end up having some sort of smart contract work. Firefly has this built in single smart contract for the on and off chain messaging, but that's the only smart contract that it prescribes, and we provide an implementation of that on both Ethereum and Fabric. But you can also write your own custom contracts in Ethereum and Fabric, and Firefly makes it really, really easy to interact with those as well. So the first step with these contracts is to define a contract interface. Firefly comes with a interface format that we created called FFI, just Firefly Interface. We needed a blockchain agnostic way of describing smart contracts, what are all the methods on them, what are all the events on them. So this is the format that we use, but we also support, since Ethereum has a well-defined ABI standard, we also support Ethereum ABI. Fabric, not so much, maybe not a single standard format there, so we don't have one. But again, it's pluggable. Any other format that makes sense to support, we could take that in as well. I'm going to use the ABI format, and I'm going to use a contract called Simple Storage. You might have run into it. It's just basically a get method, a set method. You can set a single value. You can query the current value. And we've extended it, so you get events when it changes. So two methods, one event. It just so happens, the Sandbox pre-populates that, because we do demos of it so often. So I'm going to create a interface definition for the Simple Storage interface. It's going to go in. I see I asynchronously get my events to say that it was confirmed, and then everyone can see it.  I got to do step two. They all got the message. So they know about the interface, but they can't really interact with the interface. I do need to actually deploy a contract that conforms to that interface. I'm going to use the Firefly CLI for that. I haven't shown you live any sort of use of the CLI, but it's a really powerful tool as well. I'm going to use the Deploy Ethereum command. It's a suite of a bunch of different commands, but this one will let you deploy a smart contract to either an Ethereum or a Fabric blockchain. So my chain is called demo, and my contract is at this path. All right, so I'm going to upload my Simple Storage that has the bytecode in that JSON, and there it is. So that's been deployed to my blockchain, my consortium private blockchain, and now I can go down here and register what we call a contract API. So an API is a concrete endpoint that I can use to interact with a particular interface. And so I'm going to build this, maybe we'll do a snippet, I haven't done this yet here, so we'll do a snippet in the code editor. Just to show you how easy it is to take things from the sandbox and go directly to actually building a real application, right? So I'll do create API, not polygon. We're going to the default consortium right now. All right, so this is my code snippet. I got it directly from the sandbox. I'm going to run it as a TypeScript application. And there we go. So what that's going to do is it's going to send a message to everyone, very similar to how we did custom broadcast and private messages, but it's going to send a definition of this contract API. And if I go to each node and refresh, they are now each going to know about the API. So this is a really nice way to kind of advertise. Okay, to everyone in the consortium, here's a new API that we're going to share. This is the address on chain where you can interact with it. You can see who deployed it and you can see the interface that it conforms to. And very cool as well, you can open a generated swagger API for it. So it takes that API and it parses it into post methods. It's not really REST, it's more RPC style, but it's a really, really easy way for sort of traditional web developers to interact with a smart contract that defines whatever logic you like. I'm going to do one more step before I interact with it and that's to register a contract listener. So I'm going to say I'm interested in the changed event. I'm going to create a new topic called changes and I'm just going to add that event. So I'll get notified every time that event happens. This tells Firefly, okay, I'm interested in this event. Please catalog it every time it happens. Give me a queryable database record of every time that event happened and what the parameters were. So now that I have that in place, I'm going to go back to my swagger. I'm on member one or node two, sorry, node two here. So I'm on node two and I'm going to have him set this value. We'll set it to 55. So I do that simple REST request. It comes back accepted and it's going to kind of propagate its way through the chain. I can check the status of it with this ID if I want to but we have a pretty low block time configured. So it should be done by the time I can get back to the right tab. If I look at blockchain events because on node zero, I told Firefly, listen for change events. It's listening for change events. So it cataloged that this change event came in and came from the Ethereum blockchain and this was the output, right? From this address, value was changed to 55. So and then what you can do then in your application is add a web socket that subscribes to these and Firefly will save your checkpoint. You can hack each message, right? So it takes this complicated thing of listening to the blockchain and we put this messaging in front of it so that all you have to do is connect a good old web socket. You'll get all the messages in order as they come. Any messages you indicated you were interested in you hack each one to say that you've processed it, right? And it's just a very, very easy way to go from blockchain to business application logic. So I said I was going to do public chains as well. So that's kind of a lot of the use cases within a private consortium, right? Where I want to create these definitions. I want to share them with everyone. We all want to have access to it, right? We all want to know where these APIs are. We want to be able to subscribe to each other's events and see what everyone's doing in the network. Slightly different in a public context but a lot of the same operations apply. So I'm going to switch on my node zero only. This node has got two namespaces. He has not only the consortium namespace but he has a separate namespace that I've called polygon. We've talked a little bit about the role namespaces play in Firefly 1.1 where you can have as many namespaces as you want. They can be shared or not shared, right? They can be gateways or they can be multi-party systems. All my other nodes are only part of the multi-party system. They don't care about this public network. So I'm looking at my polygon namespace here which is again pointed to polygon.mumbi.testnet. And we're going to go ahead and deploy a contract to Mumbi. I preloaded a little bit of MATIC so I can put a contract out there and you'll see you can interact with it that exactly the same way. I'm going to do this in Postman for some variety but I'm going to start by posting. I'm going to use the layer under Firefly because Firefly is unopinionated about how you deploy contracts. It's kind of up to you if you like to use hard hat or truffle or anything else. It provides the FF tool but that's really a little bit limited to certain scenarios. But you can use things like EVM Connect which sits under Firefly and is a part of the Firefly project. EVM Connect also provides a REST based way for deploying smart contracts. So that's what I'm going to use here just to kind of give you a flavor of some of the different tools in the toolbox. I've already pre-populated this with the ABI and byte code of the simple storage contact. Same exact one that I used in the multi-party example. I'm going to, oh, that did not work. Maybe I will use a pre-deployed contract. I'll skip the deploy step and we'll use a pre-deployed contract. So I'll go straight over to the next step of defining the interface. This is the same thing I did in the sandbox for saying, okay, here's all the methods. I've got here, I've pasted it in an ABI. Just to show you, there's kind of a two-step process. There's a generator that will convert it to the FFI format because Firefly always kind of deals in FFI. That's just for consistency across blockchains. But if you start with an ABI, which I have here, I just copied this directly out of that JSON into this API call and I can do this generate. It gives me a body down here that's now an FFI format and then I can paste that back in here to do a creation. So I'm posting to Firefly on my polygon namespace to contracts slash interfaces, which is gonna define the interface. Now, it looks a lot like what I did in the multi-party system, but the difference here is there's no broadcast, right? There's no sharing. So you use the same API, but it behaves differently. It just defines it locally. It shoves it into your database and it doesn't send anything to anybody else. So that's when you have multi-party mode off, it's just a local storage. So here I have, it created this interface. It gave me an ID. I called it simple storage version one, same as I did on the other namespace. Everything's isolated, so it's a new construct. And then I'm gonna go to the APIs, right? So I created the interface. I created the API and I've pre-populated this with the address of an instance of this. This is already out there on Mumbai. So this is, I'm saying it conforms to this interface. Here's the address where I deployed it onto the public chain and I'd like you to create an API called simple storage. So there we go. It's there and if I go back to the blockchain page, I can see now, member zero in their polygon namespace knows about this simple storage that's out on polygon Mumbai. Again, nobody else would know about it because nobody else is participating in this namespace. So I can open it up, looks exactly the same. I can get the value. I wanna do a query. So query, this is a call. In Ethereum, if you do a query, it's a call. And invoke is a sending a transaction to actually be mined. This is something one of my dockers seems to have gone down. So let's, I'm gonna bring the whole stack down and restart it. I don't know. It'll take a second to restart. So while that's restarting, it'll take about a minute to restart. Any questions on the private side of it that we went through, you know, consortium-based public and private messaging, smart contracts, REST API generation, any questions on that side of it? All right, it's back up. Go ahead, yeah. You said, are you able to use a smart contract from another chain? Another chain meaning like Ethereum or Fabric? Yeah, yeah, you could definitely use, you could set up a namespace that points to Fabric, a namespace that points to Ethereum, et cetera. You can call, Firefly can call it through either way. Maybe let me come back to it because I think we're running low on time and I do wanna show this piece, but I don't wanna forget that either. And I'm afraid I'm misunderstanding the question. So we'll see, we'll give this one more try and see if the swagger works this time. So see if I can, Firefly X4, you recreate the interface and recreate the API. Now it's up and we will try to set the value. So to 10, now ETH signer is not liking something that I'm doing today. So it looks like we're not gonna be able to do the public chain portion of it. Yeah, something failed here. I don't think so, that seems wrong. Yeah, yeah, something went down. I'll try one more time to start it back up and then I think we'll be at time. So let's see what we get here. Hey, all right, it worked that time. So let's see if I can now query it. Oh, query, get. Okay, the value was set to 10. Last thing I'm gonna show you is if I create a listener. So the same way that I created a listener on, let's see, maybe I'll do it through the sandbox. So if I wanted to create a contract listener for simple storage, changed event, and I'm going to, well, I can't do it from box zero. It would take too long to come back up. Are we at time? Or do I have time to, let's see where my address is. So I'm gonna pull this up on here. This is my contract that's deployed on testnet and we'll take an index events from this block. I say I want that to be my first event. I can copy this code snippet. I can put it in here. I can run it on the polygon namespace and I should have a contract listener that starts indexing those events from the public chain. We shall see if we get them. It'll take a minute. Let's see, I think I just got one. And there I got change events. So there, that's listening to a public chain, creating a contract listener. So just the same way, it's all private to my node, right? I say these are the events I'm interested in, index them from this block and it'll listen, and I can interact with the REST API and see the events. Yes, these might be the first ones because I used this contract yesterday as well. So this one, yeah, there, set it to 10. Not sure if that was the exact one I just did or when I tested yesterday, but it's going through and it'll catch up to the head, to whatever the events are. See if this is also, that one is also 10. So yeah, this is probably the one I just did if we look at timestamp. Yeah, I think that's where we are right now. All right, I don't know if we have time for some questions. I could try to get back to your question unless there's any, you were asking about interacting with different chains? You can't, okay, I think I understand. You're asking if you can trigger a call on one contract on one chain from a call on a different chain. Firefly, it's not so much triggered directly on chain, but at the business layer, you could definitely listen to events from one contract and execute things on another contract and you would have to implement whatever layer it is that kind of ties those together. Firefly doesn't directly provide that connection. Exactly, exactly. And that is common, right? To have these two streams of information and based on something that happened over here on my consortium chain, I'm going to trigger something, this fabric chain gave me an event that means that I need to, as a business application, trigger something out on this public chain, right? And I need to roll something up or things like that. Thanks, any other questions? Well, if there are no other questions or if you think of one later, come and see us at the booth. Sorry for the slight hiccup in restarting a docker, but I think we got through everything I wanted you guys to see. So thank you very much for attending and hope to meet you out on the floor.


I am not interested in shooting new things. I am interested to see things new. They're really wonderful, Ernst Haas. In today's modern world, so many photographers are trying to seek out the new. Look at places, you know, on Instagram, that 10 years ago, 20 years ago were, you know, out of the way places that barely nobody went to. Then one person found a, you know, great photograph there, and everybody then floods in to try and copy it. And what happens is they all end up with basically the same photograph. That's kind of cool. I like it, they're friends, and they go, hey, wow, that's amazing. But that means you have to constantly be seeking out new places, having to go further and further and further afield. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't have the wherewithal just to troop off to whatever is the latest and greatest amazing plays, just to create a photograph that, well, basically everybody else has done. So if we take a leaf from Ernst Haas' book to say that he wants to see things new, and everyday things. If you look at his photography, it is glorious. And if you're interested in seeing more of that, I've got a whole episode about Ernst Haas, which I'll link to at the end of this video, that there's a depth to it because he's showing us everyday things. Admittedly, to our eyes now they are older, because they're passed into history. But to him and the people who initially saw his photographs, they would be scenes that are immediately recognisable and completely, I don't want to say inane, because that's probably the wrong word, but they are everyday. They are mundane. That's probably a better way of putting it. There are scenes that a lot of us would not give a second thought to, especially today.  You think that they're not worthy of photographs, because, well, who cares because it's a bus, or it's a train, or it's something that was a subway station. And you're missing a trick. You are absolutely missing a trick. It doesn't matter what kind of photography you are.  If you are a minimalist photographer, wow, there's so many options for you. It just goes on and on and on. So as soon as you start to open up to be available to the possibilities of seeing things, then those photographs are going to become far more remarkable because you are showing people things that they are familiar with in a way that surprises them. That's really the clue, the key to a really great photograph isn't a photograph that surprises people. It's like, wow, that's amazing. It doesn't have to be surprised like a jump scare kind of thing, but it wants to be something out of the ordinary.  We're kind of used to seeing those things. But we're not used to seeing the things that are right under our nose presented in a unique way. So I guess what we're driving at here is that, you know, you as a photographer should embrace the ordinary. You should dip your toe into the world of people like William Klein and William Megelson and all the other Williams that are there to find inspiration from those images, those places that are so easy to dismiss as not worthy of photographing. Try this weekend. See what happens. Can you make a commitment to photograph ordinary things in extraordinary ways? Remember that video I spoke to about earlier? Well, here it is. I know you're going to enjoy it. Thanks for watching. I'll see you again soon.


Felly, ac yn rhaglion, rydych chi'n meddwl i gyfweld ddechrau. Felly, mae'n amddangosol o'r gyllid yn dweud hon i'r Unedd Sfynol i'r Unedd Llywodraeth. Felly, mae'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl i'r Unedd Llywodraeth, mae'n meddwl i'r unig maen nhw'n meddwl yma, 20 yw'r cyfrifysig yma ar y cyfrifysig. yn y dweud y cwrs, y gymdeithasol i'r ddweud ystafod fe fydd yw'r gwneud ei bod yn cyfrifysgau o'r gwaith i'r cyfrifysgau yn ymgyrchawr cyffredig yma, ac yn ymgyrchaf eu hunain. Ychydig y cyfrifysgau sy'n gennymau eich ddweud oedd y Ddiwyllfa North Grey at George Street yn ychynidol, yn gwybod i'r gwisio peth yn ymgyrchaf eu hunain ac yn ymgyrchaf eu hunain eich ddweud ymgyrchaf, ymgyrch y ffwg hwnnw, yn ysgolw, a'r cyllid yn ymgyrch hwnnw i'w wneud yn gweithio'r ysgolwyr oherwydd mae'n ddweud yn cael ei ddweud. Rydym yn ddweud, mae'n cael eu gallu bwysig bydd David Brooks yn y Cyfrif Newiwr i'r cyfrif yma, a'r cyfrif yw'r cyfrif yw'r edrych Edmund Birch yn y cyfrif yw'r cyfrif yw'r cyfrif yw'r cyfrif yw'r cyfrif yw'r cyfrif yw'r cyfrif yw'r cyfrif yw'r ..a cynnwys hwnnw, i'w wledig yw'r flu sydd wedi'i sgiliau i'r glwlad ymddangosaeth yr ynchwynhau a'i cymdeithasau. Felly i'w bwysig efo'r thwymen ar gyfer gyllid ar ddiogel, a'u wlingio ar hyn o'r ffeil o'r cynnwys ydyn nhw a dros o'n bwysig oedlo'r pwymoedd yma.  As we meet here today, the union is experiencing serious difficulties to the wider world and to many of its own citizens, the ponderous pace at which the union has addressed the sovereign debt crisis is sometimes incomprehensible. The crisis has appeared to rumble on without sight of a comprehensive solution and financial markets in particular have found this brand of policy making deeply unsettling. I'm conscious in saying so that Ireland must shoulder its fair share of the blame for creating the problem. A profound failure of economic management during the boom and a series of policy errors after the boom came to an end have placed Ireland in need of external assistance. We have been the beneficiaries of European solidarity without which we would have been unable to fund the state. We are grateful for that assistance even if as a result we have suffered a huge loss of effective sovereignty that will only be restored when Ireland can once again pay its way in the world. Having accepted our share of the blame for creating the problem, it should also be acknowledged that Ireland is now doing its part to contribute to a solution. The new government has taken a series of decisive actions in respect of the banking system that have set the banks on course to recovery. The Irish people have endured a massive fiscal correction to set our public finances on the right course also. Our EU IMF programme is on track and we are demonstrating our willingness to take the necessary actions to restore Ireland's creditworthiness. Of course that is something that we want to do for ourselves but it should be acknowledged that in doing so we are contributing to solving what is also very much a European problem. Ireland is doing its bit, we are playing our part. Of course it is important that other countries and programmes make similar efforts. What is needed now however is to move the debate forward and for Europe as a whole to find a European solution. Most recently France has taken an initiative on private sector participation in the Greek programme and it appears that others may follow suit. Whether that approach can be generalised for more than French held Greek debt is yet to be tested. What it demonstrates however is that we can if we try find innovative ways to deal with indebtedness in Greece without provoking unintended consequences. What is also important is that in finalising a solution for Greece there is effective communication of the implications of any for other programme countries. Once again it is important for us to emphasise that Ireland's programme is on track and important for our partners to ensure that along with a solution for Greece we produce a clear and stable policy environment for programme countries. In that context I particularly welcome the clarity that was brought recently to the issue of preferred creditor status with respect to the ESM. Throughout this debate what has been striking has been a demand for more Europe rather than less Europe. For more concerted action not for less, for more cooperation not for less and for more solidarity. What we have discovered once again that Europe can and will advance when it grapples with concrete problems more so perhaps than when we engage in the more abstract discussion of European architecture as was the case during the various debates on Lisbon. The Lisbon Treaty has now been enforced for over 18 months. The European Council has assumed its role of providing the union with impetus for its development and the definition of its general political directions at the level of heads of state and government. Herman van Rompuy has been the pioneer in the new position of president of the European Council. When he spoke on the 17th of June at an IEA event at Dublin Castle as part of a productive visit here he returned to a theme he has been emphasising since he took office. In the world that is forming Europe has to adapt. Bringing public finances back under control and regaining competitiveness are a part of that. This is undertaken not just to get the figures right. We do this, he said, to preserve our social model to guarantee our welfare and jobs for our children and grandchildren. The European Council looks set to meet more frequently and to cover a wide array of topics. It is in all our interest to have good preparation for such meetings well articulated with the work in the various configurations of the Council and channeled through the General Affairs Council and the same goes for follow up. The Foreign Affairs Council in which I have been participating is now getting into its stride under the Lisbon Treaty arrangements. The High Representative Catherine Ashton has a very demanding mandate under the Treaty as Chair of the FAC and as Vice President of the Commission Responsible for External Relations. Getting the external action service, the EEAS, up and running has been vital in providing support for the High Representative in her role. That was not straightforward and involved complicated transactions with the European Parliament of which more later on the terms of the decision. And then the three components of staffing, the Commission, the Member States and the Council Secretariat had to be brought together and I know that the Chief Operating Officer David O'Sullivan spoke to the IEA about the complexity of that process recently. With the instruments and personnel in place, what is important now is to get the arrangements to work optimally for the Union in the form of an enhanced and more coherent presence in the world and for small Member States like Ireland by helping us to extend our reach and sources of information. This is of particular significance at the UN and at other multilateral bodies where the EU delegations have also assumed responsibility for the coordination of positions and the external representation of EU policy. The adoption last May of a General Assembly resolution on the EU's enhanced status at the UN was an important step which would enable the EU to project itself more effectively and coherently in UN deliberations. Foreign Ministers recently had a thorough discussion of these issues and this is now being followed up with a meeting later this week which David O'Sullivan will chair. It will address improving working relations between the EEAS and the Member States, information floors and the sharing of reports cooperation in third countries between our embassies and the EU delegations as well as recruitment and rotation questions. The European Parliament is generally seen as having considerably increased its influence under the Lisbon Treaty. I think that the experience over the past 18 months has substantiated that with new areas coming under the co-decision and consent procedures. The council-parliament relationship in this new institutional landscape is still evolving and there have been some hiccups. I am confident however that the shared legislative responsibility and greater familiarity between the key personnel will assist cooperation. So too does the development of the political groups at European level and as it happens the parties in this government are affiliated to the two largest of these, the EPP and the PES. I look forward to a productive discussion on these topics with President Bucek when he visits Dublin later this month. We have played our part in bedding down these new arrangements so that they can respond to the aims of more effectiveness and coherence which were at the root of the treaty changes. The role of rotating presidency of the Council of Ministers has of course been affected. It no longer chairs the European Council or the Foreign Affairs Council but retains all responsibilities as before in the other diverse formations of the Council and in Coropair. The increased power of the European Parliament has meant a significantly bigger amount of activity by the rotating presidency in representing the Council in co-decision procedures. Also the high representative is exploring with council how the presidency can assist in acting on occasion on her behalf. All of this carries some extra interest for Ireland as we plan our turn, our seventh in the exercise of the presidency in 2013. We have learned a good deal from the experience of the trio which has just concluded with the Hungarian presidency. I expect that to continue over the forthcoming trio of Poland, Denmark and Cyprus. We are increasing our contacts with them as well as of course with our own trio partners Lithuania and Greece. President Van Rompuy said in Dublin Castle that the big lessons of the crisis of 2010 could be summarised in the one word interdependence. He also pointed out that monetary and financial integration had proceeded much faster than the integration of economic policies. While the debt crisis has yet to be resolved it is important to note the progress that has been made in enhancing the architecture of economic governance. A broad package of measures has been agreed which enhances economic governance in the union and especially between those members sharing a currency. These include a suite of legislation that strengthens surveillance and allows for sanctions at an earlier stage. The European Council was also able to note the first implementation of the European semester procedure. The European Council stated very clearly that our reform programme is well on track. This is welcome recognition of the huge efforts being made by the Irish people. We are determined to keep the programme on track. Our aim is to return to the markets as soon as possible. The solidarity which we have been shown by partners and by the institutions is much appreciated. A point which I made to the EU ambassadors here last week. Good communications is of course vital and there is a continuing job to be done. The recent Eurobaramator report shows that the European Union's image has deteriorated the most in those countries most affected by the public debt crisis. The same Eurobaramator report shows that the Irish are strong advocates of European decision making tackling public debt and reform of the financial system. They see the union as part of the solution. This is a message that I consistently conveyed to my European colleagues and that a win in the case of the Irish support programme would be a very welcome win too for the EU. Recent years have been a trying time for the union but the union is not obsessed with its own problems or inward looking far from it. It has developed new instruments such as the EEAS with which to deal with the world beyond its borders. For the world beyond our borders is strongly concerned with us and we are strongly committed to dealing with that world. Despite our troubles there is no doubt that membership of the union is still a very attractive prospect for the countries on our borders. Among the more notable achievements of the Hungarian presidency has been the conclusion of negotiations with Croatia with accession scheduled for July 2013. The enlargement perspective is a useful adjunct to the union's diplomacy in the Balkans and our commitment to enhancing stability there. The EU will remain engaged in assisting the countries in the region to undertake the reforms necessary to move forward in their path to the EU. Iceland already meets many of the criteria for membership and work on the likely terms of an accession will now accelerate eventually of course to be put to the Icelandic people. Work continues on Turkey but at a very slow pace. Perhaps with the elections there behind it the new government of Turkey will be more inclined to take an initiative on Cyprus which would break the log jam of accession negotiations. The European Neighbourhood Policy's fundamental principle is support for the modernisation of neighbouring countries through reforms in return for concessions from the EU above all in the fields of trade and freedom of travel with the stated aim of achieving long term stability and prosperity in the neighbourhood. Ireland seeks to emphasise the importance of differentiation between our partners of helping when asked but also of being careful not to impose our own precepts. We also seek to reward greater engagement and reform efforts with greater funding and support. I've dwelt up to now on developments within the Union and in its neighbourhood. It is understandable if there is an impression that for the past year the EU has focused its attention almost exclusively on its economic and financial challenges. But the Union of course plays a larger role in the world aided by new instruments such as the EEAS. With 500 million citizens and 22% of global GDP the EU can assert itself in a global context. We can now engage with our strategic partners as Europe not just as 27 individual countries. One message, 27 voices. In a speech to the European College in Bruges last year President Van Rompuy underlined the central role the European Council plays in setting foreign policy priorities. His decision to convene a special European Council last September to focus on the EU's external relations marked a significant step in the direction of developing what he termed a common strategic vision of the world. In our globalised world the relationships we build with strategic partners will determine our prosperity. A new approach to these partners described by High Representative Ashton as fewer priorities, greater coherence and more results is being put in place. The success of recent summits with the US, India and Russia is a promising sign that a focus on careful preparations including the identification of key desired outcomes for the EU is paying off. The European Union provides over 50% of global development assistance. This enables it to have an impact and an influence that no one member state acting alone could achieve. Because of the strength of our own development programme Ireland has been influential in shaping the shaping of EU development policy. We have been particularly influential in drawing attention to the need for a strong focus on food security and agriculture and in focusing attention on the poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Partnership is at the key of our approach to development. On my recent visit to Tanzania I saw for myself how we can improve the lives of poor communities by working in cooperation with all partners including the European Union. The eradication of extreme poverty and hunger in the developing world lies at the heart of Ireland's development programme. As well as working with our EU partners we have worked closely with the United States Administration on the global hunger crisis and the issue of under nutrition among mothers and babies in the developing world. In the programme for government we have reiterated our strong commitment to development cooperation. We are committed to the 0.7% G&P target and will seek to achieve it by 2015. This is a challenge but one we can meet if we can restore sustainable growth to the Irish economy. Whatever the statistics we want to be clear that Ireland will continue to meet its obligations to the poor people and communities of the developing world and that this will remain a central part of our foreign policy. I want to conclude by repeating what has been and will continue to be the key message of this government in respect of Ireland's relationship with the European Union. We are determined to rebuild our relationship and restore our standing within the European Union. We are determined to play the fullest possible role within the Union and to contribute fully to its work. Since coming into office this government has engaged positively and energetically with that task and we intend to continue doing so. For we are clear that Ireland's future and the future well-being of the Union and its citizens are inextricably linked. Since coming to office four months ago this government has re-intensified Ireland's engagement with Europe. Of necessity that re-engagement has concentrated initially on the pressing and immediate domestic economic issues which have dominated our relationship with European institutions and other member states in recent times. But increasingly we are re-engaging on the wider European agenda. That embraces the Union's own diverse internal policy and now its future financing. How it raises funds and how and what it spends them. It includes a continuing enlargement agenda where the attractions of what we have achieved together so far and let us not lose sight of or minimise them. Serve as an instrument in extending EU norms and peace and prosperity to our neighbourhood notably the Balkans. It means an EU that building on its values and on its economic weight in the world projects a voice and a presence that are commensurate with that. What you might term the normal business of the Union. We have made a significant input here in the past and these are areas where as we overcome both at EU and national level the current difficulties Ireland is determined to contribute to a better and more vibrant Union.


What's up guys and gals we are ripping case number six twenty-two in case football and release day Show you guys and gals the results one more time There we go Keaton Beach had a 15 foot storm surge man Purtle, I hope they're safe man. Hope people got out of there in time All right case six the new case football seven is filling right now It's the last break to fill for daytime today Sam's brakes are filling up pretty fast for tonight. Oh good luck everyone Thank y'all so much This has been a fun day long times that I did a a full day of breaks It has been so much fun. I Hope y'all are enjoying yourselves PJ Walker, holy moly Oh PJ made his way into the product Minnesota gets a Jersey Auto vet hit Harrison Smith the 35 Vikings a lot of vet hits coming out today. Check this next one out Eagles with a beautiful jumbo patch One of ten Davante Smith Go birds Philly James D with the beautiful patch number to 10 on that triple relic rookie Traylon for the Titans It's a 99 Some of the patches today have been outstanding and Atlanta rookie auto to 10 Drake London One off a Jersey number big hit Atlanta Also James D James you had a great first box Hey, what's up Christopher good to see a four of ten London auto Atlanta That's a beaut. All right, two two auto to 50 for the Rams 50 of 50 no school like the old school. I hear you buddy Try and tell these kids Washington patch to 25 BRJ Chiefs triple Skymore rookie to 99 and the Davante base for the Raiders number to 10 gold Gold Davante for Vegas Fatty goes to Washington with the gorgeous patch 25 of 25 Johan Datsun Washington this case was Timothy F There you go Timothy gorgeous car Then we got a fatty on the inner pack another vet hit goes to Seattle Jersey out of the 50 Chris Carson Hawks.  Be more specific Another triple that's Chargers Isaiah Spiller one of ten nice patches Jonathan D. There you go Rams with the base Matt Stafford Do you guys read that article about Stafford trying to connect with his younger teammates outstanding kind of insight Green Bay a green for Green Bay It is two of only ten rookie auto Christian Watson nice hit Packers Michael B. Way to go Watson to ten They signed Zappy to practice squad. I saw that He's starting Dennis He's very much started if they don't start him. They don't have a quarterback His wife kind of did sell him out on that, but I don't think it I don't think it made him look bad. I Think it just was revealing The disconnect between some of the vets and some of the Rooks, you know, I feel that way too Sometimes when I'm like hanging out with co-workers or whatever It's tough Green rookie to five Washington another dots in Numbered to five a sapphire auto although he signed it in the wrong ink. Let's go into the Rams number to 25 Isaac Bruce greatest show on turf There you go, James Jacksonville patch Trayvon Walker rookie to 50 there you go Jags Or Sean and Jets jumbo patch number to 50 Garrett Wilson Jonathan again with the Jets Nice Garrett. I'm telling you James. I need a shield buddy Need a shield. Whoa as I smack the camera with a card Steelers gold ink rookie auto nine of 25 Kenny pick it boom Pittsburgh with the big hit Chris s Way to go Chris or second pick it auto of the day This one is nine of 25 Of course, it's the one I smack the camera and should do it with every one of them it turned it into this picket auto Still haven't seen a patch auto of his today. Have we I don't think we have Still haven't seen an auto of Purdy either. All right rookie cat patch auto. That's Raiders Number to 50 is a mere white Vegas It's Alvin Triple relic rookie Atlanta Tyler Algiers Falcons with James Buffalo patch James Cook number to 25 There's one for you William H and Beggles base car Joe burrow rookie auto Matt Corral number to 99 Panthers James D James you are having a break buddy. I Just tried to sleeve a mag that just happened Let's try to put a penny sleeve on that mag Sleeve the mag rookie auto Titans Hassan Haskins It was gold to 10 Titans Where's Tennessee? There Jared G.  Let's go into Derek G. There you go Derek Steelers got another hit Joe green Thanks mean Joe and a base Josh Jacobs What the heck's going on with Josh Jacobs? Atlanta rookie auto number to 99 Desmond Ritter Falcons James D again Only our second Ritter auto of the day Congrats Atlanta Congrats James James D. Haven't a break. Come on shield Houston with the Mechie the third rookie auto to 99 Sean there you go triple Jersey Bills James Cook again another hit for Buffalo It was William each Jumbo patch. That's a beauty For the Vikings Randy Moss to 25 nice hit Harper beautiful Moss patch and a Jameson base for Detroit Next mag hit. I'm just going to Detroit rookie auto 10 of 58 and Hutchinson Big hutch Detroit way to go buddy Nice hit there Last box of case six. Good luck Case seven is the last one to fill for the day. There you go This is going to the Titans rookie cat patch auto Malik Willis Tennessee Titans there. I was a Jared Jacksonville another Trayvon Walker patch number to 50 For Sean, there you go. Who had the Niners Jonathan? Jumbo patch rookie to 25 Brock Purdy nice Jonathan D. Way to go nice hit. I thought there was a 13, but it's 18 And sheets base mr. Mahomes last hit. Good luck. It is going to the Rams That auto gold the 15 Cooper cup Combo hit going to James D again Landing the cup at the end James way to go That's going to do it for case number six. Thanks everybody appreciate it


Hey everyone! So one of the most frequently asked questions we get here at Art Resin is, should I seal my artwork before applying Art Resin? And if so, what sealant should I use? Well, in most cases you don't need to apply a sealant before applying Art Resin. However, there are a few situations where sealing first makes sense. The three most common are, one, sealing to prevent the resin from absorbing into your project. Two, sealing over loose materials to prevent them from floating away in the resin. And three, sealing over objects that may release air bubbles into the resin. Today we're going to talk about each one and talk about which sealant works best in each case. Let's get started! Now before we dive in, let's take a moment to talk about sealants. There are lots of sealants out there on the market. You can get spray sealants and brush on sealants, but no matter which one you choose, there are a few rules of thumb to keep in mind. Choose a sealant that dries clear and if you can, choose one that states it's non-yellowing or UV resistant on the label. You want a sealant that's working in conjunction with Art Resin's light stabilizers and not against them. When a resin piece looks like it's yellowing, it can in fact be the sealant under the resin that's yellowing. Next, choose a sealant that's appropriate for your medium. For example, there are sealants that are specifically suited for photographs, for charcoal drawings, for alcohol inks, and so on. So read the label to ensure that you're choosing the right product for your project. Finally, there are brush on sealants and spray sealants and they both have their pros and cons. Brush on sealants are easy to apply, offer excellent control for fine details, you can work it into nooks and crannies on objects like wood or collage work and it offers great protection. Usually one coat will suffice. On the other hand, it has a slower dry time, you may see brush strokes, it could damage delicate objects like butterfly wings or dried flowers and it could cause drawings to smudge. Spray sealants dry quickly, they give you nice even coverage without any brush strokes and you can cover a large area in a really short period of time. On the other hand, you need drop cloths everywhere to prevent everything around you getting covered in sealant. They may have a really strong odor and you might require multiple coats to get really good coverage. Regardless, whatever sealant you end up choosing, always make sure you follow the label directions and make sure it is thoroughly dry before you apply your resin or you may end up with a cloudy cure. Now if you're ever in doubt as to whether you need a sealant, it certainly won't hurt to apply one but we always recommend testing first so you know exactly what results to expect. First, let's talk about sealing to prevent absorption. It's a good idea to use sealant when applying our resin over objects that might absorb the resin causing dark or wet spots. Most commonly, people experience absorption with paper. Paper is available in so many different varieties and qualities so it's really important to be aware of the paper you're resigning over. Typically soft matte paper like pastel paper or low quality paper like newsprint or construction paper will absorb resin so these need to be sealed. Higher quality paper like cardstock, watercolor paper or glossy photopaper or the glossy paper you'll find in high-end magazines is often coated that is the papers coated with the sealant at the time of manufacture so it doesn't require further sealing. The best way to know whether your paper needs to be sealed or not is to test a little scrap piece first. Now it's important to note that even a high quality coated paper may need to be sealed if it's been torn or cut like in a paper collage for example because the protective seal sitting on top has been broken and the interior of the paper has been exposed. This is also true for puzzles. The image on top of the puzzle piece is glossy and coated but the resin can soak in along the sides leaving black lines along the edges of the puzzle piece where it's been cut. When you're resigning over puzzles it's a good idea to apply at least a couple of coats of sealant including the perimeter to create a really good barrier that'll prevent the resin from soaking in. Now as far as what sealant to use it really depends on your piece. If you're using a brush on sealant the paper really needs to be sturdy enough to handle it. For example something like cardstock is strong enough but something delicate like a stamp might buckle or the edges might curl and something like tissue paper could even tear so again testing first is always a good idea. To apply a brush on sealant use a clean brush or a foam brush if you're concerned about brush strokes and apply an even coat all over the piece. You can use a toothpick to hold the piece in place if needed. Once the first side is dried turn the paper over and repeat on the other side. If you find that the paper is curled allow it to dry and place it in between a couple of pieces of parchment paper then in a heavy book for a day or two to flatten out. The artwork might dictate which sealant is appropriate as well. For example you wouldn't want to use a brush on sealant on top of a charcoal or chalk pastel drawing or else it'll smudge the artwork. In this case a spray sealant is the way to go and in fact there are spray fixatives specifically for drawings. For something like alcohol ink on Yupa paper again you'll want to use a specific spray sealant called Kamar varnish. It won't reactivate the ink and cause it to bleed or smudge. Now when you're using a spray sealant use steady movements and apply several coats in this fashion ensuring the entire surface is covered including the edges. Just be aware that you may need to spray multiple coats of spray sealant on paper to create a really good barrier and with the exception of Yupa paper it never hurts to spray both the front and back of your piece. Just make sure that the first side has sufficiently dried before you turn the page over. You can use art resin over fabric but be aware however that just like paper some fabric can absorb the resin causing it to look wet or altering its color in which case sealing it first is a good option. I'd use a brush on sealant for fabric but test it out on a scrap piece so you know exactly what to expect. Resin makes wood look gorgeous. It enhances the grain and makes the color look deep and rich but wood tends to really absorb resin so it's important to test first. Just like paper there are so many variables when it comes to wood. The type of wood, the age of the wood, the color, the dryness and all of these variables can have an effect on the final result. You may find that instead of enhancing the color some wood gets really dark under resin or in the case of something like barnboard that weathered silvery patina is totally lost. Testing wood is as easy as dropping a bit of water on the surface. This will let you know what the wood's going to look like once you resin it. 99% of the time it's going to look better but if the wood does change color in a way that you don't want sealing first will create a barrier to prevent the resin from soaking in and creating that change. I'd use a brush on sealant for wood to give you an efficient seal and so you can really work into any holes or knots in the wood. Use something that dries clear and again test your sealant first to make sure it doesn't change the color of the wood after it dries. Now since raw wood absorbs resin like a sponge the barrier you create with the sealant will prevent you from potentially having to do multiple coats of resin so that's a nice bonus. Next let's talk about resigning over loose materials. If you're resigning over objects that have loose materials you want to be mindful of particles that might float away when you pour resin over top. Things like dried flowers or other delicate natural objects anything that has glitter on it beach art that contains real sand or even drawings made with charcoal or chalk pastel might allow particles to become loose into the resin. A sealant will protect this type of material tacking it down to prevent this from happening. Again you don't want to use a brush on sealant for the same reason it may cause particles to become loose but a spray sealant works just great. Last we're going to be talking about sealing to prevent bubbles. Organic materials such as wood and paper contain air which can release into your resin in the form of bubbles. These air bubbles are typically quite large and they release as the resin's curing sometimes a couple of hours after you've poured. You might resin your work and come back the next day to find that your piece is released a big fat bubble or cluster of bubbles. This happens often with wood and again there are lots of variables that might play a role. The type of wood, how dry the wood is if there are any cracks knots or voids in the wood so again the best way to prevent this is to seal the wood before you resin it. You can use a brush on sealant making sure you get great coverage including all of the nooks and crannies. You can even use a very thin coat of resin applied with gloved hands or a foam brush but like we covered earlier just be aware that even a thin coat of resin can alter the color of the wood. Now when it comes to paper soft porous paper can release trapped air as can paper collages. In fact paper collages often have lots of space for air to get trapped in between the layers. Again the paper and the project will dictate whether you should use a brush on sealant or a spray sealant. Paper that's been mounted say a print or a photograph on a wood panel for example can also be prone to releasing bubbles. Air can get trapped in between the print and the panel and release a whole cluster of bubbles so it's really important to mount your prints well. Use a spray adhesive for even coverage and use a brayer tool to ensure you get a nice tight bond with no air pockets. Embedding objects in resin like in a coaster also has the potential for air bubbles. Make sure natural objects are thoroughly dried and sealed before placing them in the resin. If you can gently move your object around with a toothpick to allow any trapped air to release to the top. In the end it's well worth babysitting your project checking it regularly for the first couple of hours until the resin has thickened up. So just to recap there are a few reasons why sealing first before you apply art resin is a good idea to prevent absorption to tack down loose materials and to create a barrier against air bubbles. You can use a brush on sealant or a spray sealant but always choose one that dries clear is appropriate for your artwork and allow the sealant to fully dry before you apply your resin. Finally we always suggest testing first so you know exactly what results to expect. We hope this answers all the questions you might have about sealants but if you do have any more please leave them in the comments below. Don't forget to hit subscribe and we will see you next time. Bye!


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today we are joined by Mahjub Malihah, who is from the Sahara We Human Rights Defenders in Western Sahara, Codesa. He is here to speak with us about the current situation in Western Sahara, what has happened since the ceasefire was broken by Morocco, and what are the perspectives for the future. Thank you so much for joining us, Mahjub. So first we wanted to ask what happened on November 13, 2020, and what has happened since the ceasefire was broken by Morocco? Well indeed, on 13 November 2020, the Moroccan occupying forces decided to annex extra territories from the buffer zone, south of Western Sahara, an area called Gergerat, and breached the ceasefire that was signed back in 1991. This is a declaration of the end of the ceasefire. The Polisari Front, which is the legal representative of the Sahara We people, took its responsibility and actually forced to take arms in armed resistance against the occupation in Western Sahara. After that, the Moroccan occupying forces intensified its imposed siege on the Sahara We cities in the Kapai territories, targeting the Sahara We civilians who spoke a raised voice against the occupation in Western Sahara, those who support the Polisari Front in the Kapai territories, and mainly targeting the human rights defenders who basically report on the grave human rights violations and crimes against humanity committed by the Moroccan occupying forces. We see that the military prisons in the streets of the cities in Western Sahara have been increased. Many activists are put under siege, under house arrest, temporarily or permanently, as the case of the Sahara activists, Sultana Khayya and their family, who are now, since 20 November last year, are under house arrest till today, facing daily operations, daily harassment from Moroccan occupying forces. We have raised many reports, warning the international community of the human rights situation in Western Sahara, a territory that is still closed, I mean, on international observers have no access to the territory in Western Sahara, including the UN personnel. We have a UN mission, which is the Minorso, the UN mission for the freedom in Western Sahara was created upon the ceasefire agreement in 1991, and this mission is the only one in the world that has no human rights mandate. They have no right to monitor reports on the human rights situation on the ground, which leave the Sahara We civilians, the human rights activists and defenders, face in the brutality of the occupation without any kind of protection or any kind of monitoring. We know that Morocco's actions on November 13, 2020 and since then were also inspired by a shift in the geopolitical situation in the region. Former U.S. President Donald Trump helped push forward some agreements that gave Morocco more support in exchange for normalizing ties with Israel. Can you talk about the role of the United States in the situation in Western Sahara and what it means today? The previous U.S. administration have brokered the Abraham Accord, as it's called, or the deal of the century. We see it as a trade deal, not necessarily a political deal that respects the people's wishes. Morocco, indeed, had or needed support from an international, from the international community or from a country with the weight of the United States. Trump was leaving office just before that, a few weeks before that, gave a proclamation to Morocco recognizing, recognizing sovereignty of Morocco over Western Sahara in a full contradiction with international law and in violation with the main fundamental principles of the United States itself and the United Nations, which is the right to self-determination. As part of this deal, actually it doesn't change anything on the ground, doesn't change anything on the legal status of Western Sahara, which is reaffirmed recently or two weeks ago by the highest court in the EU, the European Union, that have basically annulled association agreement, free trade agreement and fisheries agreement between the European Union and Morocco that illegally includes Western Sahara. The court highlighted that Western Sahara and Morocco are distinct and separate territories. Morocco has no sovereignty over Western Sahara, so EU-Morocco agreements cannot be applied or applicable to Western Sahara and beside that, for the first time in a clear tone from the judges, from the highest court in the EU says that the Polisari Front is the legal representative of the Sahara people as recognized by international community and the United Nations and it has the legal personality to defend the interests of the people of Western Sahara. Back to the proclamation, indeed it came after the breach of the ceasefire. This proclamation unfortunately had a severe impact on the situation on the ground. The Moroccan occupying forces took it as a green light to commit and continue committing crimes against humanity, grave violations of grave human rights violations and targeting the Sahara civilians and the Sahara human rights defenders. This is the only impact that this proclamation had. It will not change that the people of Western Sahara has a fundamental right to self-determination. It will not change that Western Sahara is a separate country and separate territory awaiting decolonization. It is still under the Fourth Committee, the decolonization committee on the UN. It is still considered as a non-self-government territory awaiting the colonization process. And we know that beyond the role of the United States, of Donald Trump, of the Abraham Accords, of the Deal of the Century, there are also other interests at play. The European Union has interest in Western Sahara. Morocco has, of course, historically had interest in Western Sahara, but for a deeper reason which has to do with its natural resources. Can you talk about the natural resources that are located in Western Sahara as a root cause of the current conflict and how that has played in the situation today? Western Sahara is a rich territory with natural resources, phosphate, for instance, large stock of fisheries, potential oil and gas, and renewable energy, the wind energy and the solar energy, beside other minerals with value in the territory. Those are basically the main reason Western Sahara was colonized by Spain and it is and remains the main reason the occupation continues from the Moroccan occupation or occupiers. Morocco to sustain its military occupation and gain not necessarily the international support, but to maintain the silence on the international level using these natural resources to bribe the international community or major players in the international community, including the European Union. We see the fisheries agreement and the trade agreements and many other economical contracts or treaties or licenses given to major companies to buy their political support. This will not, of course, not be respected with international law, but it is surprising to see countries like the United States, the European Union, who claim to be defenders of international law, creators of democracy and defenders of human rights, they all fail and contradict themselves when it comes to Western Sahara just because they have strategic interests in the region or in the territory itself. We don't necessarily disagree on guaranteeing interests of those countries and mainly their peoples. We are open to have collaborations, corporations with those countries for the interests of their people, but not against the interests of our people. There should be a mutual understanding, mutual agreement that benefits both parties and, of course, we are a nation that's still under occupation. Of course, we can benefit in building our country and building our state from those partners, but partnership should be an equal ground. The breaking of the ceasefire between Western Sahara and Morocco was seen as a huge setback. You mentioned the rampant human rights violations that have occurred. Can you talk about what are the perspectives for peace in the region and what does this mean to the Sahara way people? Peace in Western Sahara have lasted 30 years, almost 30 years with no progress. We need to highlight that the Sahara people by nature is a peaceful people. To wait 30 years, you need to be patient enough to keep believing in peace. But we see that there is no will from the international community and mainly the Security Council and some of the member states. There is no will to maintain peace in the territory. We have warned a decade ago and every year that follows warned from violence, from loss of faith in peace among our youth and among other generations of our people. And here we are now. Everyone is shouting against peace and shouting for the armed resistance. We don't think that is a healthy thing to have, but we are not responsible for that outcome. It is the failure of the United Nations, the failure of the international community to guarantee peace and to guarantee a peace for resolution and completion of the conversation process in Western Sahara.


Hey everyone, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase, Analytics and Cost Optimization. This is season three, episode two of the ongoing series that covers exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, today excited to be joined by CUBE alum, Barry McCartle, the CEO and co-founder at Hex. Barry's here to talk about living in the AI era as a data practitioner. Barry, great to have you back on theCUBE. Thanks for joining me. Great to be here, Lisa, thank you. Talk a little bit about Hex that the audience understands its mission, vision, gaps in the market that you guys saw back in 2019. Absolutely, so Hex is a collaborative data platform. It allows everyone in an organization to come together and ask and answer questions and data, collaborate more effectively and then ultimately build knowledge so that they can make better decisions. We started the company, we had been builders and users of data tools our entire careers and it experienced a lot of the pain that came from having to jump between a lot of different fragmented solutions and making it very hard to work as an individual but also collaborate as a team. And so we built Hex to be the sort of end-to-end platform where you can do everything from a quick query and a visualization just to answer a question all the way up through building really sophisticated reports, dashboards and data apps and everything in between. And so Hex really solves a lot of that fragmentation. It makes these workflows a lot more accessible. It's built to be collaborative first. And now we're on the leading edge of incorporating large language models and AI into the product in an integrated way that brings those power of those models directly into the workflow for our users. And users, as we talked about in the CUBE conversation typically data analysts, data scientists. So with respect to AI, how do you think it's going to transform their daily lives of those data practitioners? It's a great question and it's something we think a lot about. And a lot of people are wondering, our vision for this we like to say is very pro-human. We are bullish on humans. And I think folks sometimes picture this world of AI as like, you know, we'll replace all the data practitioners with some black box AI that stakeholders will type a question into and just get answers. And I really don't think that's the ultimate destination or role here. We see AI as an amazing opportunity to help everyone be more creative, more insightful, do better work.  I think, you know, you don't often don't think of data practitioners as creatives, but if you look at kind of what they do, it's like you're forming a hypothesis. You're testing an idea. You're, you know, telling a story. You're even sometimes building beautiful art with, you know, visualizations and charts. And I think that is a art, I think it is a science and I think it is a great use of human time. Data work is also full of a lot of TDM and drudgery.   And I think AI is this amazing opportunity to sort of liberate people from a lot of that, that TDM, that sort of grunt work, and focus more on the things that are most fulfilling to us as humans, which is engaging with ideas, being creative and telling stories. And that's really, I think the ultimate potential of AI for data practitioners. And that's certainly the vision we're building on and executing on right now. I think that's such an important message, Barry, to get out there because there's a lot of, you need to turn on the local news or the national news. And there's a lot of negativity about AI. There's a lot of fear. I think there's a lot of misinformation, but there's also not a lot of awareness for the potential and the impact. We talked about freeing the practitioners, the data practitioners to be creative, to be able to be scientific. So it's such an important message to get across. Walk us through how HEX is approaching the transformation of leveraging AI so that these data practitioners can really transform the way that they work, be more collaborative, be more productive. Yeah, well, I agree. By the way, with what you were saying, there's a lot of fear, a lot of angst. And for good reason, right? Like I think our media over the last century is rich with stories and sci-fi about AI gone wrong. And I do think there are potentials for that, but I am an optimist. And I think at HEX, we are optimists. And as I said, we're sort of pro-human in this. And the way we've approached this is trying to bring these features into the workflows that people are using every day to make them feel more confident, more ambitious, more efficient. We, our first version of our magic features that we built into HEX that are these AI-powered assistant features.  You're editing some code, you can quickly invoke it and ask it to help you edit something or generate new code or explain or debug something for you. You can ask it to automate tasks that you're trying to do as you're working through your project. These are things that help people save time, sure. But I think one of the examples I was talking with a customer user about recently was, they were saying that it helped them be more ambitious. Like they were able to take on the types of projects and things that they weren't really thinking about doing before. They're able to approach things in a much bigger way than they might have thought that they could before. They're able to take on questions and try to answer questions that maybe felt unknowable previously. That is really cool. And I think that is an example of how AI can actually augment and accelerate human insight and not replace it. And so we're all in on that concept. I don't think I would want to live in a future and I certainly wouldn't want to build a product that tried to advance the future where data folks aren't able to do those fundamentally creative human tasks. We want to build wonderful tools for those people augmented by AI, not replacing with AI. Right. I love that you said ambition that a customer articulated to you. That must have been, I can imagine a surprise when we talk about customer benefits. We don't usually talk about ambition but I think what that says to me is that the customer has confidence in its technology giving them the ability to do so much more, be free to do other projects but also to be exploratory. And that's an important, that's not a soft benefit. I think that's a pretty hardcore important benefit that organizations can get. What about for the non-technical users? We talked about data scientists, data analysts. What about the business analysts and the business folks as well? Yeah. We've always been really, really interested in this population of folks. We call them analytically technical. You think about all the millions and millions of people every day who work with data but don't have data in their job title, right? Like these folks don't write code. Maybe they can write a little SQL but this is not a big part of their day-to-day workflow. They're certainly not writing hardcore Python all day. I think this is a really important population. And a lot of those folks are doing some work in Excel, maybe clicking around in the dashboard. We're really, really interested in ways to help them be more creative and confident as you said to help them ask and answer questions. I think there's some nuance there where I don't think it's now everyone's a data scientist. I actually think that high-end data practitioners, folks who are really ensconced in things like statistical methods and data modeling, they're always going to have a really, really big role in organizations. I think more and more their role can be partnering and enabling a bigger population of people. I think those folks will have more leverage and more impact because of this. And we see this already. I've been a data practitioner my whole career but I don't write a lot of code day-to-day anymore. And even when I have questions about our business, I go into Hex. I immediately reach for the magic generate feature to start writing queries for me. And it helps me both work quicker but there's questions I have that I'm like, man, I don't know how I would go about answering that right now. I'm not spending my day writing queries anymore. And sort of as someone who's become a business user over time for better or worse, I find these really useful. I find they give me more confidence and more leverage and more ability to go and investigate things myself. And I hope we can help advance a future where every curious person, every analytically capable person in an organization has that same power. Curiosity is such an important trait, I think, for when organizations are hiring. And like I said, it's not soft. It might be called a soft skill, but it's really not. But- It's tough to quantify the sales. Yes, yes. It has to be like, we'll make your people 20% more curious, which will contribute to your bottom line in this way. But I find myself when I talk about this stuff, even with customer prospects, talking about things like creativity and curiosity and insight. And it feels soft, but I think that if you kind of back up and you think about it, isn't that what we hire humans to do? Like, I don't know. I think certainly a lot of humans do wrote tasks all day, but those are the least fulfilling parts of our day. Like, think about the things that excite you.  I think it correlates really, really strongly with the amount of curiosity and creativity you're gonna be able to apply to those tasks. And my biggest ambition and hope for this AI-enabled future, both for what we're doing and for society at large, is it helps humans spend more of our time on those things. I do think there's value there. It might be hard to quantify, but I think it's very valuable. Absolutely, I agree. One of the things when you and I spoke before, we were talking about this explosion of tools that are impacting the data practitioners that are leading to fragmentation. Talk about some of that and how hex is different. Yeah, well, people, you know, if you look within the average organization when I talk to our customers, prospects, they've got maybe dozens of different data tools floating around to do things. And even an individual user, individual data practitioner, they might jump between four different separate interfaces to do one workflow. They might write a query in one place, might drop that data down into a CSV and to push it into a Jupyter notebook, Python notebook type thing, they're doing some processing there and then they get some data that's worth using and back to a CSV in the spreadsheet and push that up into a dashboarding tool and then they publish that. And then, you know, someone wants to go and pivot the data in a different way and so they download it into a CSV again and do a pivot chart in a spreadsheet. And, you know, that gets the job done, but it's not very efficient. It's not very collaborative. None of these things are really built for the cloud and cloud data scale. And I think they wind up really holding people back.  And again, I think that's really valuable for individuals. You save time, you're more efficient. You can sort of trace back the lineage and reproduce your work all the way from the end through the beginning, which is I think an underrated thing about data work. But it also makes collaboration much easier. You have all these things in one place. You're not hunting down which version of it in which tools connected to which thing. Teams can work together much more efficiently and effectively. So I wouldn't say with Hex, we're trying to be everything to everyone. And certainly I don't think we're, you know, in the future, every organization only has one data tool and it's Hex. I think there will always be different things that suit themselves well to different tasks. But I think for most analytics things that people are tackling in a given day, we can do much better. And that's sort of a big interest area for us at Hex. But definitely consolidation and really helping organizations deal with the fragmentation that's been around for a while. Yeah, absolutely. And I do think we've seen this sort of Cambrian explosion in the last few years. I think some of that is because you saw a big shift further down the stack. So the advent of cloud data warehouses. So Redshift is really the first big one on AWS. And that really enabled, you know, a different pattern within organizations of how they were bringing data together. And then great, that adoption started. And then there were sort of opportunities to build new generations of data tools on top of that. And so you have seen this sort of proliferation of things. And I do think as things go, we're going to be in a more consolidated recycle. And we certainly think that one of the value pops of Hex being able to bring people together, bringing workflows together, being able to actually save our customers money to, by the way, by, you know, instead of four tools, maybe you have two or one is pretty compelling right now. So we're definitely seeing that in the market. Talk about AI as a problem solver to help an aid getting rid of the fragmentation and really making things much more consolidated and collaborative. Yeah, well, you know, I think there's a real benefit there when I talk about, we talk about bringing different levels of technicality and different types of people together. If you can use AI to sort of augment and accelerate, you know, we talk sometimes with Hex so having this like low floor, high ceiling, if you can sort of augment and make it even easier for people to access and participate in these workflows, or even things like as a stakeholder, being able to more quickly access the insights that teams have produced. I think it can be a big accelerant for this. And I think we can help sort of level that playing field and remove the necessity of having a bunch of different fragmented tools. At the same time, I think, you know, AI is definitely at a crescendo hype cycle-wise and we're investing a lot. We are big believers in it. I do think that it's easy to underrate these days though, the value of just having nice, intuitive, well-built user interfaces that are old school product engineering, not necessarily AI. And I think incorporating AI in those interfaces and products in a really seamless way is a big unlock because you want to bring that sort of consolidatory effect together. Can AI be a fabric between the different tools that organizations have and that as a facilitator of unlocking data value? I think we'll see some of that. I would think of it, there's a couple of dimensions that I'm really curious to see unfold. And some of these are things that are like in our remit and others are just things I'm curious to see how they happen. One thing is like, how do software products talk to each other? There's like an interesting thing to think about here. Like the last 10 years has been very dominated by APIs. Like, you know, almost every product has an API. It's how that is definitionally how software talks to each other. What does that look like in the future? There's a world where APIs are more important in a certain AI driven future where you can, but there's also a world where that sort of actually starts to change where products might start publishing API definitions that are actually really useful specifically tailored for API or for, excuse me, for AIs to be able to interpret and understand and work with. And it may change the way we think about how software products can work together where you as a human may not even need to go and write the integration between two APIs. You may be able to point one product at another product and say, Hey, just go talk to this thing. It may go show up to it and say, Hey, okay. Here's, I can kind of see how this thing works from the spec that's been published and can just start programming against it. That might sound a little sci-fi, but I think that's actually like really reasonable. In the data space, there is a lot of integration. There's integration between source systems and storage. There's integration between storage and transformation tools. There's integration between all those things and application layer visualization and analysis tools like HEX. And so I think there's going to be a lot of interesting things that'll come of AI in terms of how products talk to each other. I also think that it will make it easier to be able to search and work across a bunch of different types of data and data stores. That is the type of thing that's very hard today.  Most enterprises actually have many, many versions of those sort of different storage heuristics. They may have multiple data lakes and multiple data warehouses. I think AI can play a big role in how you can search for insight across all of those different things. So there's a ton of potential here. And I think it is a very, very exciting time to be a builder and explorer in this space because there's a ton of potential and we're really just on the tip of the iceberg right now. Exactly, I agree. Last question for you. You mentioned some customer feedback that I loved about customers being more ambitious and I added more confidence. Is there a customer story that HEX has that you think really just shines a light on the clear value prop that you're delivering? Yeah, I mean, there's one I'm very proud of. We have a large financial services company that I caught up with their head of data about a year into them using HEX. And I was asking about how their team was finding it and he said something to me that I will probably always remember, which is we are better partners for the business because of HEX. And that really stood out to me because at the end of the day that is why organizations invest in data storage and data infrastructure and data teams is because they want to help make better data-driven decisions and the data teams, I think one challenge that a lot of data teams have is understanding their purpose in place and that fundamentally they are there to serve and provide insight and help inform decisions for the business. And that is something that I think every organization and every data team aspires to but is really hard in practice and the HEX product is really built around trying to accelerate that. So hearing that story, they have hundreds of data practitioners using HEX every day. They have thousands of stakeholders within the York who consume insights that are published via HEX. And that affect that outcome of being better partners for the business I thought was something that I'll always stick with me and I shared it with our team as sort of an example like this is the thing that we're really here to help accomplish and felt really great. So I hope to have many, many more stories like that as we go along. I have a feeling you will Barry. It's been so great having you back on theCUBE as part of the AWS startup showcase analytics and cost optimization. Talking about HEX, what you're enabling organizations to unlock getting rid of the fragmentation, collaboration, ambition, confidence. We really appreciate your time. Great being here. Thanks for having me. Our pleasure. We want to thank you for watching and remind you to keep it right here for more action on theCUBE.


The idea for him to say that he wasn't an applicant, that he understood that the President was looking for somebody outside of New York City. He wanted somebody in the West that had some judicious experience. Let me go back over that. Wanted somebody outside of New York City. Yeah, for the securities. That's right. That's right. And he wanted to prepare someone from the West. And somebody from the West. And he wanted someone that had legislative experience, and judicial experience, and a good legal background. And that he didn't know anything about it until FBI started investigating and FBI made a very thorough check. Now I've got the FBI report in front of me and it's a perfect report, not one critical thing. Now, let me tell you, Frank Church says, write this down, I just, this is confidential but you can use it. Frank Church says, he's known Budge for many years, they're on opposite sides of the fence, but Budge enjoys, quote, an excellent reputation, the state of Idaho. He has never heard anything of a derogatory nature concerning his character, his loyalty, or his associate. That's right. Now, Jordan is a Republican Senator, I've never talked to him, but he says the same thing, I won't go over it. Harding says, he's one of those little son bitches stirred up a lot of this, that he has known Budge since 16 when he defeated him in the election of the office, that although he disagrees with Budge as far as their political beliefs concern, he considers Mr. Budge a personal friend who is an exceptionally fine man. He stated that Mr. Budge's integrity, character, reputation, loyalty, and associates are above question, and he recommended him for a position of trust and responsibility. Now that's the man to defeat him. That's an I White. He said that he does not know him, but by reputation, and he is a high-type professional man of an excellent personal habit. Then Frank Bow, then Errol B. Smith, Justice, John Rhodes, William Springer, Tick Forster, William Tuft, John B. Williams, 13 other associates, all of these advise that he's a loyal American whose character, reputation, and associates are above question. He was acquainted with the other members of his family, advised they're all reputable persons. He was described as a very capable individual, a very solid citizen. They recommended him for a position of trust and confidence. Now, I think he can very well say that he doesn't know anything about this back-stuff maneuvering they're talking about. First he knows about was, the president had this FBI made, he wasn't an applicant for anything, he was on the bench doing his job, and the president called him into his office and said that he wanted a man that had legislative experience, served in the service, and had judicial experience, and asked him if he'd accept the job. And he said, well, if the president wanted him to, he'd do it, and that's all this. I'll take yourself clear out of it. Well, that's what I, I'm not going to ask you, I, that doesn't make a difference, but I think any senators you can talk to, y'all do it. I've called John Sparkman, he told me he'd already talked to you, but he's going to help us. You know something I just called him, because he and I are friends. Yeah, he's a good man, and he's your friend, and he's going to help. And I told Walter Jenkins to call some of the rest of them, but that's a pretty liberal committee. Douglas and Foxmyre, and it's the same group that gave me him. I kept him as long as Missouri. Well, Walter's calling him now, and calling Willis-Robertson too, and you ought to see it's your Republicans there. I called Erickson. I went over to the FBI to report with Erickson, and he's, he's strong for him. So let's don't let him hurt the boy.  They can't do it. All right. Mr. President. Yes, sir. Could I just ask you? Yes, sir. We're going to get your civil rights bill. Good. So you can sign it on July 4th. But let us get away July 2 and 3. Well, if you get some of those things passed out there anyway. We can't not wait for this. I don't know what you're talking about, but you say to me, do the poverty bill. You can't get that room. You can't possibly do it. Why don't you meet with your people in the morning? And give us Republicans a kind of a generous sort of a thing. We got 17 boys on that Resolutions Committee. We got Mel Lerge, the chairman. We got Charlie Goodell in New York. God, he's been in your corner more times than you can shake a stick at. And we got Glenn Lipscomb of California is helping him. And I got to go out there. I got to go out there. Clark Spine's got to go out there, Mr. President. Don't barrel these people to keep us here that week.  I don't want to keep you. I'd love them to all go out.  Now, you know what you ought to do. What do you mean? Well, I mean, I don't know. We got 31 proposals at one house or the other. I understand. Now, wait a minute, Mr. President. I appreciate your calling.  But let me just tell you this, my friend. We get your civil rights bill passed. And you can't do it without us. Understand? You sign that up July 4th. Give us the next two weeks off in the house. I'm not talking about the Senate. For our convention. We got 17 guys on that Resolutions Committee. You can't pass anything that next week. I'll guarantee you can't.  Why don't you let us pick these things up? Not the majority decided. Well, I'll let you.  I'll do a few of those things. But you ain't going to carry any favor with me. It might as well be blunt about it. Making us stay here when we got 20, 30 guys from the house wanting to go to our convention. What are you going to take up a week before our convention? I'd like to take up every one of these 31 that we need to pay. Well, we got four weeks between our convention and yours. If you want to keep the rules committee in session, that's okay. And as far as I'm concerned, I think a lot of these things ought to be voted on, Mr. President.   If you keep us right here, and you've got a lot of guys on your side going to be tough to get along with on the house side. Well, Charlie, don't you think I ought to try to get my program passed? Yes, you do. But I don't think... You're in my place. If you're in my place and you had a house that meets on Tuesday and Wednesday. You're not going to do it a week after the 4th of July. And ahead of our convention. I don't think you are.  Well, do it between now and the 4th of July. Get these things passed.  That's a good bill. There's no reason why you ought to keep a majority from beating it.  You ought to give me a fair shake and give me a chance to vote on it. I've got it in my budget. I cut my budget a billion under last year. Wait a minute. Let me talk to you in just a minute. We want the civil rights bill through. You want the tax bill through, and I helped you do it. And God damn it, did I help you in civil rights? Yeah, you sure did. You helped Kennedy. Kennedy didn't help you. Now wait just a minute, my friend. When you help yourself, of course you don't want civil rights. We do. I believe it's a nonpartisan bill. I don't think it's a Johnson bill. No, no, no. You're going to get all the political matters. We aren't going to get into your dam. No, no. Wait just a minute. Now we've got a lot of things in that bill. But I don't know what the hell the Senate put in there. Maybe we ought to kind of take a little look at it. Well, maybe you ought to. I'm not saying that you ought to. Now wait a minute, Mr. President. I'm just looking at it hard for it. And once in a while I can get hard for it. Well, you wouldn't want to go to your convention without civil rights, though, would you? You know, as a matter of fact, if you scratch me very deep, Mr. President. I wouldn't scratch you at all, because I want to pet you. Wait just a minute.  But I am perfectly willing to give you the right to sign that thing on July 4. Now, I think you're taking advantage of an Independence Day thing that ain't right. But that's not for me to say. I don't know what you're talking about. You want to sign this, uh... I haven't heard anything about that. I haven't said... On July 4, well, the papers have been full of... I haven't said a word about it. Nobody's asked me anything about it. And I'll tell you something. If you sign it that day, I ain't going to be there. Because I'm going. I'm going. Mr. President, I wish you what you'd do. And God knows I'd...  Don't press us too, God damn. I'll do just about anything I can for you. Well, go on and report my poverty bill.  We'll get that. They had that all debated. They've debated it. They delayed it. If you try to shove that... I'm not trying to shove it. Well, I've been trying for six months to even get a vote on it. They held it up over there. I never saw such a spectacle. Every man, they were bitter and mean and vicious. And in the labor committee. And then they got it over there. Let's just go back over a little bit. You've got a great important thing called the civil rights bill. With a hell of a lot of far-reaching amendments. I'm sorry I'm pulling you up this much, but I'm just going to do it.  You want me to buy those without any chance in the house to look them over. Well, Mr. President, I guess maybe I'll do it. But, Jesus Christ, don't push me too far. Now give me a little chance. I haven't pushed you at all, my friend. I haven't even discussed it with you. Never. Well, look, no, no. I haven't even discussed it with them. I just let you all run your own show.  I was discussing something else. I wasn't talking about that. No, I sure don't want to, Charlie. I won't be. No, Adam, I want to pass the civil rights bill. And let me tell you what I want to do. I want to pass. I'm going to help you do it. The civil rights bill has passed the Senate. Understand? You give me a rule on my poverty bill. Let me vote on that. No, wait just a minute. I'll give you a rule in due time. But don't press me. I'm not pressing you any more than you're pressing me, my friend. I'm just making a statement, please.  All right, in due time, I'll give you a... Okay. ...but if you need me here, I got a deal. Well, my dear Charlie, I don't want to sure enough try to get it acted on the Senate, and they don't want to go into working on the bill and the hearings until we act on the House. And you could do that. You could let me have that rule tomorrow if you wanted to. Just that I looked at your old Senate hand. Yeah, an old House hand, too. Wait a minute, wait a minute. An old Halick man.  Give me a little rule up there in the morning. I'm not glad you called me in because, my friend, I just wish I was right there with you. Well, we'll get to go this week. We'll get to go this week. Mr. President. Jesus. I called you this week with... Wait a minute. Us guys in the House have carried the heart for you. Well, you call them up and tell them I've got it over in the Senate, you see. Wait just a minute.  Well, what can I tell you? How can I tell you what we're doing? I'll tell you anything I know. I'll call you any day this week.  Okay.