Welcome to the 13th lecture in the course design and engineering of computer systems. In this lecture we are going to continue our discussion on memory management and paging and we will study a topic called demand paging in this lecture. So let us get started. So the mental model we have so far the story we have seen so far is you know every process has a virtual address space that is divided into fixed size chunks called pages and for every page to store the contents of this page to store the contents of these virtual addresses the OS will allocate a physical frame for every page of the process and this mapping is kept track of in the page table that is what we have seen so far. But the actual truth is what we have seen so far is only an approximation it is not exactly correct the truth is that the operating system does not allocate memory for every page of the process it only allocates memory on demand that is the operating systems provide you with what is called virtual memory. So you can say that okay I have these addresses at this page there is code data stack heap everything you can say that all of these addresses are assigned to you assigned to your program but until you use them the OS may not allocate actual physical memory for you until the CPU is running that code you may not actually get physical memory allocated. So the OS allocates physical frames to pages only on demand when you access that memory contents until then you may not be given a physical frame right and also if you are not using some physical memory the OS can also take it away from you even though you think there is code data stack heap something stored in that page actual physical memory may not be given to you it can be taken away even after giving it to you right. So this concept is called virtual memory okay and therefore in your page table some for some pages even though the page is valid and there is valid data the programmer thinks there is valid data stored in that page the physical frame number may not be allocated and the page can be marked as not present in RAM until you use it of course if you use it once you begin using it CPU says get me this data then of course it has to be in RAM but until then it may not be in RAM and the page table entry can be marked as not present right. So when such pages are accessed the MMU will trap to the OS because there is no physical frame number MMU cannot translate there will be a page fault this particular trap is called a page fault and then the OS will allocate a page suppose you think you have your some data stored in this page over here right your page table entry will mark this page as valid you think these virtual addresses you can use but there will be no physical memory allocated corresponding to this when you access this page when the CPU accesses some virtual address here it will trap to the OS then the OS will say okay if you are using it fine I will give you the physical memory you can put the contents inside it and then the translation can happen right. So this memory allocation is done on demand because of this that some of the virtual memories of all the processes in the system can actually be more than the physical RAM you have the OS over commits memory this allows the OS to run many more processes then there is actual memory in the system and this is because every process is only using small amount of memory at a time right you are executing some code over here then all of these other physical frames you do not need them if you are not using them. So this is an optimization that modern operating systems do in order to support many more processes over a limited amount of RAM. So how is this memory allocation done on demand let us understand that in more detail. So before that to understand that we need to classify the pages in the memory image of a process into two types right if you look at all your pages in the memory image they are of one of two types one set of pages are what are called file backed pages that is these pages contain data from files on disk for example if you have a page containing your code of the executable right. So this data that is there in this page is already also there on disk right you will simply copy the disk contents into this page and on the other hand there are some pages which do not have any copy on disk for example the pages of your stack right the stack you are using at runtime as you are running your pushing arguments your popping arguments right it does not correspond to any file on disk such pages are called anonymous pages. So in your memory image some pages are file backed pages which is your executable code your language library code operating system code right there are many such pages that can be file backed and there are some pages that are anonymous that are not file backed. Now for these two kinds of pages the on demand allocation will be different. So for file backed pages right how can on demand allocation happen suppose you have created a process and there is some you know this page of the process is file backed it actually corresponds to the code in the executable. So when the process is created the OS will create this virtual address space it will create a page table entry saying okay from this address 0 to some 4kb this is your code the OS will tell you that and the CPU will start to execute this code program counter points to some address over here all of that will happen but until the CPU says give me the instruction at this location you will not actually allocate a physical memory frame for this page. So when the CPU says give me this code then you will copy from disk into some free physical frame and then you will add a page table entry from this page number to this frame number right. So you will fetch from disk only when that code is accessed for the first time not when the process is created when the process is created itself you do not give it a bunch of physical frames and copy all the code and data into it only when the CPU starts to run it it says give me an instruction at this address then you will quickly find a free physical frame copy the instructions into that frame add this page table entry and then the CPU will access it. So file backed pages can be fetched from this on demand and if the OS is running out of memory it wants you know to reclaim some memory take away some physical memory from you then what is there it can simply take away this physical frame the contents are there on disk anyways right it will remove this page table mapping it will mark this pages not present in RAM and you are done the physical frame can be reclaimed easily when it is not in use by the process and the next time the process wants to run this code again once again you will allocate a physical frame create this page table mapping right. So that is on demand allocation for file backed pages. Now what about anonymous pages suppose you have a stack or something here right it has some data on it that is not there on disk. Now when you access the stack for the first time then you will allocate an empty page right you will not give an empty page for the stack when the process is created instead when it starts to actually use the stack then you will give it a empty page. Now once later on once you have given the stack you have given a physical frame to the stack the some contents are stored here now if you want to reclaim this physical frame OS wants to take away this physical memory then you cannot simply take it away right there is some data in this RAM it will be lost what do you do. So once you have a modified or also called a dirty anonymous page it cannot simply be reclaimed OS cannot take away the memory then you will lose the data. So in such cases if the OS wants to take away some of the physical memory given to you it can store a copy of your memory frame on a special area of disk called the swap space that is you have certain physical frames assigned to you that are storing some anonymous pages contents of some anonymous pages that are not there anywhere else on disk and but the OS wants to free up this physical memory in such cases this content in this memory physical frame will be written to disk into the swap space and now this memory frame is free right it can be raised this content can be raised given to store some other content given to some other process and so on right. So dirty anonymous pages are written to the swap space when the OS wants to reclaim the memory and when again when the process accesses the stack again you want the contents here then the OS will give it back to you again it will read from swap space and give you your memory page again right in this way on demand allocation is done. So now we have to keep track of all of this right we have to know that is this page does this have corresponding physical memory or not has the OS yet done the allocation or not you have to keep track of all this information. So you have some extra bits in your page table entry that will help you keep track of all of these things. So the page table entry if you look at the page table entry right one single page table entry or page table has many such page table entries in an array if you look at one page table entry it will have the it will have some space for the physical frame number and it will also have a few extra bits of information what are these bits one bit is the valid bit which indicates if this virtual addresses in this page are in use by the process or not right if the process is storing anything code data stack heap anything in those virtual addresses then those virtual addresses are in use the valid bit is set otherwise the valid bit is not set. Then there is the other bit which is the present bit that is even for pages that are assigned valid data even for valid pages you may not actually assign a free physical frame yet. So the present bit indicates if a physical frame number is assigned to the page or not note that these are two different things. So if a process accesses a page where the valid bit itself is not set this means that you know you have some say you have your heap all of these addresses are there in your heap and this is the end of the heap and you have accessed an address here right beyond your array you have accessed for such pages the valid bit itself is not set that is an illegal memory access like a segmentation fault. On the other hand for some valid pages there may not be any physical memory allocated yet. So for such pages the valid bit is set but the present bit is not set in such cases also the memory address translation cannot be done MMU traps to the OS in such cases this is not the fault of the programmer right the programmer is accessing correct memory but the OS has not yet allocated physical memory here in such cases the OS will allocate memory on demand. So such pages when they are accessed the OS has not yet allocated memory and it will allocate memory on demand. So these two are different understand the difference between a valid bit which indicates all the virtual addresses that the process thinks it can access and the present bit which indicates if actual physical memory is there for these valid addresses or not. So with demand paging these two are different the set of valid pages and the present pages are different. So there are also other bits in the page table in every page table entry that are set by the MMU which indicate how the page is being used to the OS right because the OS does not know whenever a any time a memory page is accessed. So the MMU will tell some extra information to the OS for example if a page has been written to the MMU sets a dirty bit. If the page has just been accessed read or write the MMU sets the access bit. With this the OS will know oh this is you know an anonymous page this is a dirty anonymous page this is a unmodified page all of this information the OS can know right so which is why these bits are set by the MMU. So these is all the extra information in addition to the frame number that is present in the page table entry. Now let us see what happens on a page fault right. So what is a page fault anytime the MMU cannot translate an address it raises a trap the CPU executes the int n or the trap instruction jumps to OS code we have seen this before. So when the MMU cannot translate a virtual address to a physical address then it raises a page fault it traps to the OS with a page fault. And this can happen for many reasons and what are those reasons one could be some kind of illegal access the process is accessing memory it should not be accessing for example in user mode you are trying to access a kernel OS virtual address you are trying to write to a read only page any such cases there will be illegal accesses. There could also be invalid accesses right the MMU looks at a page table entry and it finds that the valid bit is not set this virtual address is not even in use by the process but somehow the CPU is requesting that virtual address then that is an invalid access. Then sometimes the address is you know valid the program thinks it has put some code data something in that memory address but the OS has not yet allocated a free physical frame has not yet copied that content into memory from disk or wherever in such cases MMU when it is translating the address it will find that the valid bit is set but the present bit is not set right because the memory allocation non-demand allocation is not yet done by the OS. These are all the possible reasons why MMU's address translation can fail when it is walking the page table and it can trap to the OS for a page fault. So, how does the OS handle these cases if the OS is if the program is doing any illegal or invalid access then the OS can simply terminate the process it can say you know if there is a segmentation fault your program crashes right so the OS can terminate the process. But in this case in this case when it is not the fault of the programmer a valid bit is set but the present bit is not set then the OS will service this page fault and try to allocate a free physical frame to the process on demand. So, now let us understand this case in a little bit more detail. So, you have your virtual address space of a process and for some CPU has requested some virtual address and this virtual address is not yet assigned any memory frame by the OS. So, this is a valid virtual address you know the program thinks it has some code or data or stack something over here. But actually no memory has been allocated or maybe memory was allocated by the OS in the past but when it needed to free up some memory it copied it into disk into the swap space and now there is no memory corresponding to this virtual address. In such cases what the OS will do is when this page fault happens it will find a free physical frame and it will give it to this particular page. It will find a free physical frame to assign to this page. So, where will you get a free physical frame from the OS usually maintains a list of free physical frames you know RAM there are some empty locations in RAM that nobody is using it will have a free list from that it will find some frame number and give it to this page. Sometimes all of your memory is full there is no free physical page at all. Then what do you do? Suppose there is this physical frame that is in use by some other process then the OS will take away a physical frame from some other processes logical page and give it to this process that is called evicting a victim page. So, now some other process its page contents its logical page certain virtual addresses are stored in this physical frame right in this frame. This frame number is there in the page table of some other process the contents of some other process are stored in this physical frame. The OS can take this away from that process say you know if this page is has some modified modified anonymous data then it can write it to the swap space or if it is file back data it can simply erase the data whatever it is it will take away this physical frame from some other page of some other process and give it to this process to handle the page fault. So, how do you pick this frame which poor guy will you make your victim there will be a policy every OS has a page replacement policy that tells the OS which is the best page to pick we will see what these are in a little bit. So, the OS will run this look up this page replacement policy find a victim page and free up this physical frame you know it may have to write it to swap space if some other process has stored some anonymous modified anonymous content over here and then now that this frame is free the OS will fill it with whatever data suppose this has to have the code of this process then you will get it either from the file or from swap space right if this page if it is an empty page well and good you will just clean it up and give it to this process otherwise if it had some content beforehand then you may have to read it from disk right read from disk and initially you may have to first write to the disk right you will have to write this victim page contents either to swap space or somewhere and read some extra content into this physical frame and then add a page table entry from this virtual address to this physical address once the frame is ready with content you update the page table mapping and you tell the MMU hey look now please try this address translation again it will work because I have added this address translation in your page table it will work now right and you will restart the process execution. So, this is called servicing a page fault right it involves identifying a free frame probably by evicting its contents today reading the contents of this page from disk if required updating the page table mapping and restarting the process. Some page faults so all of this is a what is called a major page fault right so this is a major page fault in contrast sometimes you will have minor page faults which is this frame is already there in memory maybe it is a shared library frame or a frame having OS content it is already there in memory all you have to do is just add a new page table mapping to it that is all right you do not have to do anything like reading it from disk or something you just the content is there you just have to add a page table mapping. So, such page faults are easier to fix they are called minor page faults otherwise if it is the page is not there in memory already then it is a major page fault. So, now we have seen a page replacement policy right it should make this difficult decision of if this process this page these virtual addresses need to be put into RAM which other process which other page should I evict out of RAM in order to make space of course if you have free memory well and good but if you do not have free memory you have to pick some other victim page to evict. So, which one will you pick these policies have to pick pages such that in the future immediately there would not be another page fault suppose if you pick a very popular page to evict immediately that other process whose page you evicted will again have a page fault again you have to bring back that contents right. So, you do not want to do that you want to evict pages that will not result in page faults again in the immediate future you want to reduce the number of page faults. So, there are many page replacement policies for example, again a very simple policy is the 5-4 policy right you see whichever page was assigned a frame in the past in the order in which it was assigned in that order I will evict. So, this process for this page it started long back it took a frame long back hey you had enough of this frame give it back to me you can do that. But this may be suboptimal because that process could actually be a very active process that page could be very heavily used. So, if you take away its memory and put it in swap space immediately it will have a page fault right you do not want that. So, a better a more sensible policy is what is called LRU policy or least recently used policy that is if a process is you know has been assigned some memory and it has not used that memory has not touched that code or data for a long time then you can say that there is a lesser likelihood that it would not be used in the near future of course we do not know it could be that immediately it might need it in the future we do not know. But the probability is that if you have not used it for a long time maybe you will not need it again in the near future either. So, such least recently used pages will be evicted that is the LRU policy and this is what most operating systems use some version of this LRU policy because this is a sensible policy. So, how does the OS know which page is LRU now in your page table you have all the list of all the pages of a process. But how do you know which page has been least recently used note that the OS is not informed every time there is a memory access right the MMU is translating the addresses the CPU is accessing the memory the OS is not involved. So, how does the OS know which page is LRU there is no like you know the OS is not putting a timestamp on every page whenever it is being accessed right. So, OS has to make this difficult decision of finding the least recently used page and there is no easy way to do it. So, most modern operating systems implement only an approximate version of LRU how they do it is as follows in your page table in your page table array there is a accessed bit ok. So, every time the MMU looks up a page table entry walks the page table finds a page table entry whenever it touches this page table entry it will set an accessed bit ok. I access this page therefore, I set the access bit I access this page I access this page MMU will keep setting these accessed bits right. And periodically what the OS will do is it look at all these accessed bits in the page table oh these pages have been recently accessed therefore, they are active pages I will find one of these pages that are not recently accessed and pick them for eviction right. So, using so this is only an approximate LRU right it is not exact LRU policy, but this is the best that modern operating systems can do. And of course, you can periodically reset these bits look at you know in the past few intervals when all bits have been set access bits have been set you can do many improvements on this. But in the end it will only be an approximate LRU policy that operating systems will use. So, you can pick pages that have do not have this accessed bit set that are inactive or you can also use other heuristics ok. If the page is dirty then I do not want to evict it because after once again write it to disk. So, some combination of looking at this dirty bit an accessed bit modern operating systems make this decision for approximate LRU. So, now we can put everything together and let us see what happens on a memory access. We have seen this before also now we have even more information about you know page faults and non-demand memory allocation. So, let us revisit this story again you know the CPU is executing the code of a process it periodically requests for either an instruction or some piece of data some variable at some memory location you know either instruction or data the CPU requests. Now what happens when that happens? So, the CPU has made a request using some virtual address. Of course, you will first check in the CPU caches if it is a cache hit your data is available you go back to the CPU. Now it is a cache miss. So, then what do you do? You will go to the MMU right. So, the MMU will check the TLB to get a physical address corresponding to this virtual address. If the physical address is there well and good you will take that physical address go to RAM. You will go to main memory access that memory contents put back the contents in the cache and return the data to CPU right. If this is not there the physical address is not there in the TLB then the MMU will walk the page table go to RAM fetch the page table multiple levels of the page tables it will access it will find the page table entry translate the address put a copy of the translation in TLB and then access the memory contents. While doing this while walking the page table sometimes there could be an error. If the address is valid and present in page table well and good you have translated the address put it in TLB all done. But if there is an error if the address is either invalid or you know valid but it is not present some permissions do not match in case of any error the MMU will trap to the OS for a page fault. And if it is due to the on-demand memory allocation not being done by the OS then the OS will have to you know service the page fault we have seen right it will have to find the free frame may have to evict the contents of that frame to disk may have to read the contents of again from disk from swap space do all of this fix the page fault and restart right. So, there are many overheads in this memory access you have CPU cache misses TLB misses and finally page faults right page faults involve multiple disk accesses. So, imagine the CPU can actually access can run instructions very fast at like nanosecond time scales and if you know data is available in cache in a few nanoseconds things go very fast otherwise you have to do multiple accesses to RAM which is once again hundreds of nanoseconds you might have to waste. And not even that if there is a page fault you have to waste several milliseconds possibly to do various disk accesses back and forth from swap space right. So, now the CPU that can operate at nanosecond time scale is actually waiting for so long for this memory access to happen for it to proceed right.  So, later on when we study performance engineering we are going to revisit this topic as to how you can reduce all of this right and a very common thing that you notice when a lot of page faults happen that state is called thrashing right. So, what is thrashing? Thrashing is when a system spends too much time servicing page faults right you there is very little memory in the system and you do not have enough physical memory frames and every time you access something there is a page fault you have to go to disk go back and forth from disk swap this output that and it is like musical shares right. You are spending a lot of time just moving things back and forth from disk and not doing any work at all that is called thrashing and sometimes when that happens your application performance will slow down a lot. So, when does this thrashing happen normally every process has a working set of you know some small number of pages that it is frequently using. So, you have to give every process at least as many frames as to store its working set right if your working set is say 4 pages you have to give the process at least 4 physical frames the OS has to do that otherwise if you only give it 3 frames what will happen it lacks as the fourth frame there is a page fault you take out one of those frames and it lacks as this frame there is a page fault again page fault you will have frequent page faults right and frequent interruptions to the process execution. So, that is why it is a good idea for operating systems to estimate what is the working site of a working set of a process and give at least as many pages are there as is there in the working set as the working set size of a process that much memory at least OS has to give processes otherwise you are going to have this issue of too many page faults and this thrashing is not just for memory it can happen for CPU caches or TLB also if you have many a lot of memory that is beyond the CPU cache size or you know many address translations beyond the TLB size also you can have frequent cache evictions but the term is most commonly used for memory and when this thrashing happens your system slows down a lot in such cases what you should do is the users the application can reduce its working set size try to operate with lesser amount of memory OS can terminate a few processes reclaim memory right you have to do something you have to fix so that the performance of your system improves. So, that is all for today's lecture in this lecture we have studied the concept of demand paging and virtual memory how page faults are handled what are page replacement policies and now with this over the last three lectures we have an end to end view of memory access when the CPU accesses a certain code or instruction or data at a virtual address what are all the things that can happen in this process what are all the overheads and how do you go about fixing this overheads right later on in the course when we study performance engineering we are going to revisit this topic and come up with certain helpful tips to fix these overheads in real applications. So, that is all for today's lecture a small exercise for you is you can actually look at pick any process in your system look at how much virtual memory it thinks it has and how much physical memory the OS has actually allocated to it. So, this information if you are on a Linux machine you know an output of a command like PS can actually give you this information please dig around it a little bit more to understand the concepts of this lecture better. Thank you all and see you in the next lecture.


Next, we'll explore how to create a topic and manage access control. Topics are a logical grouping for messages in an Apache Kafka instance. Topics are subdivided into partitions that are replicated across the broker nodes in the instance to provide high availability guarantees. To configure topics in OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka, first select your Kafka instance. From the Topics tab, click Create Topic. Enter the topic name, prices, and click Next. For this exercise, use the default value for partitions and use the default settings for message retention. Review the number of replicas and click Finish. Next, you'll configure access controls, commonly referred to as ACLs. Red Hat OpenShift Streams is secured by default. Only authorized service accounts can produce or consume data to and from your Kafka topics. Click the Manage Access button and select your service account. Review the list of existing permissions for the selected account. To assign a new permission, select the resource as topic. Choose Is. Enter the topic name, prices, and allow access to all. Then click Save. Next, assign permission to the resource consumer group. Enter the consumer group name as the asterisk symbol and allow access to all. Add permissions for transactional ID and the Kafka instance as shown. Then click Save. At this point, you've created a Kafka instance and a prices topic, and you've configured access for the service account you created. Now you're ready to run the Java Prices application.


Hello everyone and welcome back to our Meet the Author series and I'm so happy as you will see a big smile on my face to welcome Jason Farman who's a professor at the University of Maryland and also director of the Design Cultures and Creativity program there and he's the author and that's the reason of his visit of a absolutely amazing book that I cannot recommend highly enough. The book title is Delayed the Art of Waiting from the ancient to the instant world delayed response. My friends actually are already annoyed because I talked so much about this book among friends and I also shared a bunch of copies so I need some royalties from you I guess as a gift. It's such a pleasure to have you here and when I read this book late last year I was reflecting on all the books I've read in 2018 and I have to say this is the book that had the deepest impact on my thinking last year so thank you for that and congratulations. So this book for those of you who haven't read it I recommend it there are copies out there to buy is a book that is some sort of counterintuitive. We all live in a time of real-time communication of instant communication and just looking at my own behavior if I have to wait somewhere let's say I want to cross Massaf and red is light I would immediately pick up my phone and try to you know check emails or do something because the waiting feels like a waste of time and yet here is Chasen and this book a complete eye-opener to take a different alternative look at waiting at the thing in between messages but also in between action and so we will talk more about this idea that waiting actually becomes meaningful is a message in itself that we generate and that you beat meaning to how it is shaped by context and cultures but of course also by technology importantly and but to start with I was just wondering how did you become interested in waiting something that most people try to avoid get annoyed by or otherwise try to hack how did come about yeah so most of my scholarship prior to this was in mobile technologies my first book was about mobile media and when I first started as a professor teaching undergraduate students I began to notice that even with their standard feature phones they were sending up to a couple of hundred text messages each day which to me was really this mind-blowing choice and I would talk to them why don't you just simply pick up the phone and call the person you're trying to get in touch with why do you send so many text messages in a given day it's about 13 years ago or so and the thing that stood out to me was the power of the message in our lives and the choice to engage in medium that made us wait it really fit with contemporary society at the time and in our own moment as well where a phone call that you place to someone especially over a mobile device is no longer calling to a place it's calling to a person and when you're calling to that person you don't know what their context is you might be interrupting some important meeting therein or they might be lecturing in a class or you don't really know what the context is so mobile messages allow us to connect with people throughout the day and they can respond when they get a chance but the end result is that it makes us wait messages the choice of messages is the choice of a medium that inserts waiting into our social lives and it has been predominantly that way since 2009 2007 in the US in 2009 globally where we're using our mobile devices more for messages and data exchange than we are for voice communication so this is the insertion of wait times into our lives so this began sort of this fascination with asynchronous communication rather than synchronous communication the power of that and then the ultimate impact of those wait times our lives how the question really for me began with how do these wait times shape who we are as social beings if we're choosing a medium that makes us wait how does that shape our intimate lives how does that shape our social interactions with people and who we are and then how do we occupy those times if all of a sudden here we are in our contemporary moment spending much of the day waiting for the people we're closest with to respond to us what do we do with those times and how do we imagine the use of wait times or even imagine it as potentially wasted time and and maybe how to recuperate that how to think differently about wait times when they become such a dominant experience for us in our instant age and we will drill deeper on all of these topics of course to start with maybe as you suggested and you started with like the cell phone instant culture texting generation but in the book you actually take the reader on a journey you go back all the way to the first set of mobile technologies which were messaging sticks used by Australian aborigines you walk us through letters and the different response times during the Revolutionary War you cover all sorts of technologies but also cultural context you travel to Japan you went to Paris but also traveled across the US and as you were some sort of exploring different technologies and cultural contexts and contexts of waiting what's that what are some of the lessons learned from that journey what stood out to you as of you know both some sort of the evolution nature of waiting and and how it interacts with people yeah the the follow-up to even the first answer ties in with this where the book process began researching this book it was actually here in Cambridge when I was interacting with a scholar at MIT who studies Japanese popular culture and he made an off hand remark to me about an emerging practice among teens in the country he said the the thing that's happening now is that teens in romantic relationships especially are sending each other blank text messages so the idea is that if you're in a relationship with someone you send them just a blank text no words no messages or videos or anything along those lines you just send them a blank message and their response as your partner was to respond with another blank text message with as little time elapsed as possible reminds me of my balls but yes so the the wait time here is actually the content of the message and that's one of the things that echoes throughout the book and across all of these examples is that wait times are not an in-between time they are content in and of themselves we give them meeting their moments of interpretation so the messages between these teens and then another example is throughout the world and I focus specifically on Italy where people in the late 1990s and early 2000s would ring each other where you would just ring and hang up your phone and your caller ID would pop up on the person's phone and then that person was then supposed to ring you back with as little time left as possible something that happened throughout the world these these rings or beeps or flash messages and it's the thing that these represent is that wait times are meaningful that we give them meaning we interpret these these times and for me I came at this project thinking about waiting as an in-between time something between moments something between messages something between the content that we're exchanging and I walked away realizing that wait times are meaningful in and of themselves they are content in and of themselves silence is content we we fill it with meaning so from the very first messages humans ever exchanged it with Aboriginal message sticks which were exchanged as far back as 40 to 55,000 years ago as humans began to migrate on to the continent of Australia they use these communication technologies as a means of sharing information but also as establishing a temporal rhythm to life that's based on the journey across the land how long does it take to get between places and how long do messages take is a way of connecting the human body with its time as it moves and as it delivers message as messages are exchanged all the way up until our contemporary moment we're constantly filling these gaps with meaning so they're they're not really gaps they're moments of analysis for me they're moments to understand our personal lives our intimate lives our social lives how we build knowledge and exchange knowledge wait times are not in between they're actually content in and of themselves so that I think resonates across all of these technologies and eras and there are a lot of other things that fit with that as well thinking about the value we give time and the synchronicity that we develop with people in different eras technologies synchronize us with people especially as we're exchanging messages across geographic distances we build in temporalities of connection depending on how our media connect us and the paces of those media shape the human experience of time in a given era and we we wrap ourselves around those times in a sense where the expectations of social life are they fit with the technologies of an era and are shaped by that and we realize within that context you know what it means to wait and the delays that kind of emerge based on our expectations and and how we respond to those is really similar across eras and cultures as well sort of the disdain of waiting and in particular moments as we are wondering when the message will arrive when when will I be able to hear from this person in my archival work that something emerged that emerged over and over again people wondering what's happening on the other side of that communication gap and filling that gap with meaning and setting their their synchronization and temporality around the ways that media connect people so how we use media how they shape the human experience of time and then how we respond to that I think is something that is interesting to study across eras and it's intriguing as you describe it that there is some universality to it across cultures but at the same time as you described in the book but as I also mentioned what value or what meaning we attribute to to waiting is highly contextual I would like to stick a little bit with with the situation where we're waiting may not be appreciated many situations come to mind right one of the stories you tell in the book is actually when you have to upgrade your operating system or download something and it takes forever or if you have to wait for an elevator and can you share with us a little bit what some sort of cultural techniques and societal techniques have evolved around making us be willing to wait longer maybe or some sort of to cope with the waiting itself yeah yeah absolutely and in computing culture especially it's fascinating to see how wait times are handled on the design side of things and imagining how designers are confronting wait times we have to confront wait times we will always be waiting in some fashion or another with our technologies in the early days of computing with the Xerox star being one of the first computers that was networked and also provided a graphical user interface so people could connect with each other exchange files and how do you communicate with your user that something's happening behind the scenes so this is something that actually resonates across life and the design of everyday life we are waiting and there's complexity behind the waiting that we're not always privy to your waiting at a red light but you don't necessarily know how your wait time fits in with a larger structure of how a city functions similarly with networked computers the files how they're exchanged how that computer interacts with that file these are complex systems that designers have to put us at ease about and so you have wait cursors emerge with the Xerox star was hourglass then you eventually have Susan care the graphic designer designing for Macintosh the wristwatch wait cursor and what's fascinating is that these things that that lead up to our own buffering icons on our browsers get us to stick around about three times as long as a system that doesn't give us any kind of feedback so we need some kind of feedback to interact with which does connect to the story of the elevators as well post World War two in New York City as skyscrapers began to go up in mass around the city there were so many complaints about these wait times where we're having to sit down here in this lobby waiting for the elevators is too long there was one building where people complain to the building's manager about it and he brought in some engineers to say please solve this problem these people are waiting too long and they came back to him and said it's an unsolvable problem we just can't make things go faster it's it's complex people are stopping at different floors there's no way to speed the system up there was a psychologist in the building who said he got permission from the building's manager for a bit of an experiment and with permission the psychologist had mirrors put up all around the lobby so people while they waited for the elevator could look at themselves and look at the other people waiting and the complaints disappeared completely and some people actually applauded the building's manager for solving the problem so as we wait to give some kind of feedback something to look at something to occupy our attention gets us to be a bit more patient about three times as long as systems where we are we don't know what to do with our attention we don't know where to pull our attention and cognitively it's very interesting to think about how our brain adapts to these wait times that are introduced with different technologies a colleague of mine at the University of Maryland Ben Schneiderman has done some studies on the cognitive experience of waiting for these technologies and if there's nothing that pulls our attention back in nothing to stare at a buffering icon or to look at myself in the mirror our brains move on pretty quickly at about the two second mark we're off to something else unless something calls us back in so designers realize this that if you're waiting for that content to load on your browser you're going to be gone five seconds later about 20% of your users are gone and that number just continues to change as as bandwidth speeds change as well so what are the designs are going to keep your customers around so waiting for me is that really interesting contradiction for the computing industry and business writ large where compete waiting is a thing that's a bug in the system that needs to be eliminated it's going to drive your customers away but then also waiting is that opportune moment to seize on your attention while you're waiting to cross the street or waiting at the red light or waiting for this event to start how do you occupy occupy your time it's a great opportunity for people to pull your attention toward their products so the contradiction in that is really interesting and how designers deal with it was really fascinating study that's a perfect segue from some sort of strategies of avoidance or coping towards the benefits of waiting and some sort of changing our own mindset as as we look at these between times and how we create meaning out of it you have a whole series of examples and stories in the book where you where you demonstrate how waiting has some sort of a constitutive role to play for knowledge creation for learning but also for empathy so it has a very productive function if if looked at it the other way around as opposed to it's just a waste or or an audience I was wondering could you share a few of these stories and maybe it's the NASA example right yeah yeah and for me those two points are really key toward recuperating wait times as beneficial rather than our predisposition toward waiting as something that's wasting our time especially when we're so there's so much time poverty we feel you know I I don't have very much time to offer you so when you're when I'm waiting or someone is wasting my time we feel that we're losing that valuable resource and I notice this in I'll begin with one anecdote that's at the very end of the book of me waiting in line at the grocery store for me waiting has become this analytic where I kind of am trying to understand society and those moments of waiting where I can study things a bit bit more I was in my hometown in Maryland at the grocery store on a Saturday morning and there was a woman who was checking out in front of me and she was paying half with cash and half with food stamps and she had a toddler in the cart and she had a bunch of coupons and they had called the manager over to kind of make sure all of these deals were being met and she went through kind of each item to make sure that she was spending her money while that you know there was a deal that didn't come up and it had to be scanned there's a affluent woman in front of me who turns around and looks at me and just like rolls her eyes like can you believe this woman and then things kind of continue and she's continuing to use her time on a very busy morning and there are two men behind me who verbalize their discontent with this situation that this woman's wasting her time and for me these wait times can potentially be a moment of us building radical empathy for others circumstances where waiting can be an investment in the social fabric of how time is unevenly distributed to people that to me was something I learned in the process of the book there's a meme that has been going around with a picture of Beyonce and says something along the lines of remember you have the same 24 hours as Beyonce does kind of like how are you spending your time while Beyonce is using those same 24 hours to be wildly successful and by the end of working on this book I realize how untrue that is that people don't have the same access to time they are asked to use their time in very distinct in different ways than I am whether that be working two jobs and having to take public transportation between those jobs and having to devote their time to having to wait in different ways being asked to wait in different ways and if in our own wait times we can imagine investing those wait times into the social fabric and I think that has the potential to build some radical empathy and that to me is has been one of the personal ways that I have taken this annoying time and tried to recuperate it and to encourage others to think about wait times as investments in the social fabric and trying to find ways of identifying injustice and power structures looking at Puerto Rico being without power being waiting for power how wait times are opportunities to identify power structures within a society how people are then asked to wait in different ways is one way that I find waiting to be deeply beneficial in my own life and knowledge exchange is another one which I think we can get into but I think focusing on the empathy is a big factor for me anyway and since you are describing this situation and also in the grocery store and already alluding to some sort of the relation between power and time and also the social justice aspects of the work and theory or developing here perhaps you can spend some more time on this topic which I know is close to our hearts particularly here and in 2019 and what was really interesting to me in the book is the way you basically complexify the power implications of time that is it looks almost as some sort of a paradoxical situation that on the one hand you have some sort of check-ins fast check-ins for frequent fliers right where that clearly signal well my time is more valuable than yours who has to queue over there which is some sort of an expression of status and privilege and some sort of the currency of the time units as you made the example before that my time is just something different from your time economically speaking even but then you also told the story or kind of introduced the theme that there is now a new trend where we slow down and the we being privileged people who can afford to slow down and to take offline time and things like that and so suddenly you start to understand as I was reading this book or look at it in different ways what what my own some sort of signaling is about my time so for instance I start to realize if I show up late to a meeting that may be unintentional because you know I'm running from across the campus let's say but there is also a signal effect if you know whoever the boss is in a given situation in terms of seniority or hierarchy shows up late and everyone is waiting for you that this is some sort of signaling again that yeah you can wait for me because you know my time is more valuable and so I was wondering whether you could expand a little bit on these themes and maybe also this paradox that that time becomes a privilege and you know whatever we do signals already yeah I was just talking to a professor who taught in Italy and he said in my own practice and also my mentors practice you as a professor never walk into the room first it's it's it doesn't signal correctly to the students you let people wait for you that's what I would do I would I would make my students wait for me as a reiteration of my position within this power structure between student and professor and I found that really fascinating and and you see in these moments where we are waiting for other people how power is communicated how it's exercised by making others wait and I think that's also true in our intimate lives as well as you are in a particular relationship whether it be a romantic relationship or a friendship the one who makes the other person wait is is signaling a a priority of time in that in that relationship and creating a power asymmetry over who gets to wait in and who or who has to wait in who forces others to wait and at the same time yeah there is this interesting contradiction with these movements that are asking us to pause to slow down and asking us to be more deliberate with our time whether it be slow food movement there's there's a movement within the academy for so slow research which is a resisted yeah and you know the the idea of being that in the academy especially with the tenure track there are expectations about publishing and about the pace of life and that people are trying to resist that produce certain kinds of knowledges and don't feed into other forms of knowledge production so people are trying to slow down but you know if you're an assistant professor in the room it can you slow down you know that is very unlikely within the structure as it exists slowing down as an assistant professor who's on the tenure track is not really an option you have to use your time in very specific ways and that's what the book asks ultimately is who is allowed to slow down who are those people whose time is able to pause and to to reflect in ways that others are unable to because of the pace of life so in my moments of busyness as well which I think since the book has come out has have been extreme you know busyness has been extraordinary which is this very odd experience for me as someone who's writing about the appreciation of waiting and taking these moments of wait I haven't really been able to slow down very much but in reflecting on my own busyness trying to ask who benefits from that experience of busyness why do I feel so busy and how does it feed into particular structures that ask us to use our time in specific ways and particular relationships between people who are asking me to use my time in very particular ways there's a fantastic book from a communication scholar Sarah Sharma called in the meantime where she studies the laborer kind of behind the scenes whether that be the taxi driver or the person who's cleaning up the plates from the slow food movement you know you have affluent people kind of gathering around and pausing and and being very deliberate with their food who are the people behind the scenes who are cleaning up the plates for that event are they able to pause and slow down in the same kind of way so again I think that time is distributed unevenly and we're asked to use that time in very particular ways that that both feed into the power structures in relationships and also ask us to you know and within the academy anyway produce knowledge in specific ways as well so synchronization again is a theme that emerges who are we synchronized with how are we asked to synchronize our time whether that be with the technology that synchronizes us all in this room or within relationships that ask us to synchronize our time within those structures I think are compelling questions okay taking that too hard I think the waiting is over for our audience here I would like to open it up for for questions and comments in the on and reflections you can tell this gets very philosophical and very deep quite quickly which makes it so exciting but of course has also a deep technology narrative and many other faces so wherever you would like to start and please introduce yourself I should also say that we are recording the session and we'll later pop put it online so my name is Ron I wanted to ask if you've talked in your book about waiting as a social activity meaning things like waiting in line yeah for a ticket that's not to be available until a particular time so it's also a big queue forms or waiting for a I don't know people do this anymore waiting for a CD to release probably not but that that kind of thing where people deliberately get into long lines and it becomes a social event to be waiting in this line yes absolutely yeah anticipation is something that emerges a lot in the book and whether you think about the launch of the next Apple device Apple taps into this so precisely yes yeah exactly the anticipation of the launch of something is very much about how we produce our relationship with it so the leaks of the the next Apple device and then eventually the launch you know the Apple event this thing will be coming out in these months and then the waiting in line the camping out overnight the wait itself becomes an event that links us to that product and and signals our identities as particular kinds of consumers so that romantic ethic around this product that I'm going to get is going to fulfill me in these particular kinds of ways and the wait times are a way of building that relationship with it and I link that actually in interesting kinds of ways with Roland Barthes has a book called lovers lovers discourse where he talks about waiting as kind of an erotic experience as we're waiting for the people we love that act of waiting builds desire for the people that we long for but also for the products that we long for if you've ever been to sort of a massive concert as well it's also really good example of this where the you're waiting you show up early everyone's kind of mingling around and then the lights drop and then people begin to get excited and anticipate and then somebody walks on stage all of that those moments of waiting where it builds anticipation then you hear a note you know all of that is about wait times as building desire and connection and the way that I personalize this as well is to say in those moments of waiting and anticipation what do I hope comes on the other side of my waiting what will arrive what do I hope will arrive and I use this as an analytic for my own life to understand my desires a bit better what do I hope comes on the other side of my waiting what do I hope will be fulfilled how will it satiate some of those needs in my life and to understand how those desires shape who I am and who I think I am and also help kind of steer me in particular kinds of directions I think we are very much steered in directions by these kinds of anticipatory moments and connections and longings for things so yeah absolutely is a great question since we are here at Harvard Law School yeah one of the also as you mentioned before how open we are some sort of to be notched into different directions right time notches seem to play play into this quite a bit as you described yeah absolutely great this piece so I was reading something yesterday that said if you really want to know how a person is at their worst put them in front of a really slow computer yes I was wondering if you did any research or wrote anything in your book about like the type of person who is like more predicated to be patient in a situation where they feel like they shouldn't have to be waiting right yeah yeah probably the person who has very little experience with the system so doesn't already establish norms for that there's a lot of research in the field of human computer interaction or HCI around user for user frustration and it usually centers around expectations and how those expectations aren't met so I talked with an early interaction designer who popularized the percent done progress bar or the little bar that shows you how much is loaded as opposed to just the opaque spinning buffering icon and he was talking to me about this Xerox star computer that first kind of gave that feedback that things are loading with his hourglass and he said overwhelmingly people felt it was slow and it actually did things faster than we'd ever done it before it allowed us to connect and to do work at a pace that was unprecedented but we overwhelmingly had the human experience of frustration with it because in part that we set expectations for it and then when those expectations weren't met based on sort of network volatility and sort of the shifts of how the internet fluctuates then we get frustrated with it so across the board and this I saw throughout history which is so interesting to me I imagined that the human experience of time as it gets compressed in the digital age and in this mobile age where we have technologies on us at all times that we would be less patient that time would be so compressed in our moment that we would have a radically different experience of time and duration and delay but you see this across all accounts of media throughout history that as people have to wait at a pace that was not matching their expectation they're frustrated they're writing about their hostility toward the wait times that the ship took too long to arrive you know it should have arrived here instead it's quarantined in harbor and I'm not getting my mail so we as humans set expectations very early on and when those expectations aren't met that's when user frustration emerges so one of the students in my graduate seminar right now interviewed her grandparents who adopted the internet very early on and became early users and they are very impatient which humors her she's like you guys what else do you have to do you know why are you you're retired you're sitting at home it's it's a couple of seconds wait for the video to load but they get very frustrated with with slow download speeds and you know so for her you know interviewing them she's she noticed that trend of here are early adopters kind of regardless of age or demographic they said they're setting their expectations and when those aren't met user frustration emerges yeah so it's fascinating kind of tracking that across history as well there is also great story in the book where you basically bring an argument where the expectations are the other way around that it's right yes longer to be credible yeah and I think the example is price comparison sites yep yeah yeah and this first emerged for me with Facebook in 2016 they launched a security scan of your profile to kind of let you know the vulnerabilities of your profile you know who can see what what sort of permissions you're giving to other outside websites and apps and what happened was it was very lean code it did its job very very quickly so you would have it scan your profile would spit back the results instantly and Facebook noticed that people weren't changing any of their settings and this why aren't they changing their settings we've just told them that there's a vulnerability here in your profile you've got all of these apps using your Facebook site and you're not changing anything and they realize that people didn't trust it so what they did is they took the code it did the scan but then they told the code to build in a delay so pause just wait a second okay now give the results to the users and people overwhelmingly began to change the results because they thought it was thorough so we have this certain cultural notion of thoroughness the technology is faster than that but culturally the the people designing it had to go in and build latency so that we trust it and this is true yeah when you're on different websites finding the best deals we expect a certain level of thoroughness and it very very slight we're talking very small time scales but it's enough for us on a sort of embodied level to to build in trust based on those delays I think of waiting in the extreme I think of checkpoints waiting check at checkpoints waiting for occupations to be over and so forth yes so I'm wondering how far you can take this notion of connecting your brief way period right in the advanced societies in an international dimension or even applies you seem to have a very active imagination which is really good but I don't know how ordinary people can relate to that and hopefully they can but maybe right go into that yeah I think I was on a panel there was a conference on social life of time and it was really interesting pairing I was talking about buffering icons and my fellow panels were talking about South African apartheid and wait times you know what was parallel in those things was talking about how time is exercises power and how we are ultimately imagining something coming on the other side of our waiting what comes on the other side of waiting is where the imagination does it work it's work for thinking about different futures so it's both about identifying issues of power who is controlling my time who is asking me to wait who is forcing me to wait but also how can I imagine a different future wait times are essential toward thinking of futures that don't yet exist the cognitively where we have what's called the the default network of the brain often called the imagination network that only kicks in when you're waiting and when you're daydreaming and the the imagination network requires pauses to imagine this things that couldn't have been accessed if you searched for them wait times for me are the possibility of thinking about these two things side by side who is controlling my time who's in power of my time and how can I imagine a different way of doing things how can I imagine an alternative future and begin to imagine ways of doing that so I think your example of these longer durations of occupation of wait times of being forced to wait accomplish those two things get us to hope for different futures but also identify how structures are inhibiting those why are we delayed in infinitely here it seems like how do we get past this delay how do we get past wait times that may seem to just continue to go on and my fellow panelists that was the their takeaway about what's happening in South Africa right now how do you imagine a different future that's something you can accomplish and for them there's a bit of pessimism there as well is that it for many they're so discouraged with that future never arriving that they've begun to sort of abandon that hope that the wait time doesn't signal hope any longer it signals despair so it taps into the existential crisis that's also around waiting is that we often fear wait times are all that life is you know if you think about Samuel Beckett's waiting for God oh that's sort of the thing we wait for the thing that never arrives and life is about occupying that in-between time and how do we occupy that that in-between time so our disdain for the wait times often signal that existential crisis of what time actually means in our lives and and that it might just be waiting is at the core of it related question to that as I was reading the book one version of this question could also be that some sort of the theory that comes together in the book that you present and develop is strongest where it's it where the waiting is some sort of between messages right yeah and I was wondering as we expand some sort of the context of waiting into areas where it's it's less mediated but more other actions and behaviors that may or may not be facilitated by technology how far we can go to to take insights from you know the mediated yeah communication context towards all sorts of acts now of course you can always argue well every act is also communication act or a speech act but what have you how have you navigated this some sort of spectrum yeah so I begin with messages as a media studies scholar thinking about these wait times between the ways that we connect each other with each other and sort of exploded out into everyday life and all the ways that we're asked to wait and how we can use this this small everyday moment to understand larger issues in life and for me I think that's sort of the larger trajectory and aims of my work is to take something that's mundane and and let it represent these larger questions so the wait times for a text message is is something that's often not really studied it's felt especially if we're forced to wait if you express yourself in a very intimate way over a text message with someone and you're waiting for their response you that's significant but you can use these often overlooked moments to identify the ways that these larger issues get embedded into life there's a cultural geographer Raymond Craig who does Latin American geography and an article of his he had this line that I just use over and over again he's talking about the role of maps in our lives and he says you know sometimes the most dangerous and influential things in our lives are the things that are so common sense that they go unquestioned and for me that's where wait times sit is that it's so common sense to wait it's just so mundane and that is where power resides in the things that you're not coerced to do but you accept as common sense this is just the way things are these are the ways I am supposed to use my time this is a common sense I'm supposed to wait here I'm supposed to wait like this and if you then pull back from the common sense and then begin to critique so much of life gets uncovered I think it and you do see it everywhere after you after you uncover that one moment then it's hard to not notice in every little aspect of life from a romantic relationship to waiting at the DMV to looking at the design of computers and how your mobile device loads particular kinds of things all the way back through historical examples and you just end up seeing it everywhere as soon as you take something as mundane as waiting and say it's not as common sense as we're led to believe there's a lot to unpack within this mundane example that we can use across life and think about time and synchronicity and power and it's certainly my experience and you should have put a warning to once you read the book you will see the wait times everywhere and you start to think more about these issues you have a lot to come to So you very eloquently describe the strong neuro-psychological effect of waiting and the phone essentially gives us a whole menu of waiting points whether it's email or text or news picking up on news and my own experience of being disappointed when I go on and it's the same pieces of news and the horrible speeding up of the news cycle yes would you actually link it to this neuro-psychological effect on our phones Yeah linking yeah I think part of it is cultural and the other part is cognitive and the cultural aspect is very fascinating though alongside that that we do have a technology that connects us in such instant ways that we then anticipate that so we build that into the cognitive experience of of wanting news and yeah when you refresh it and nothing comes that to me is why I think we're half in love with the buffering icon because it represents the promise of something that might be there and then when it's not nope same same thing I was hoping for something new but even in my own practices of turning toward instant social media feeds like Twitter for my news instead of the local news channel because it will be there faster and that expectation of pace has deep ramifications for knowledge exchange some are even pushing for pauses in the news cycle like a design that privileges the pause instead of the instant and I was listening to a scholar present on this and talk about the the desire to value pause within the news cycle and imagine how we could socially look at silences as benefits to this context and everyone in the room said nope it's just not going to happen we we're never going to go there but it's really fascinating to begin to think well what sort of social context would privilege that it's a really good question if the news cycle privileged pauses and silences instead of speed what would that look like and what would society look like how could you build in the desire for that instead of the desire for the instant is a really fundamental question I think at this juncture in history we're going to have to ask those kinds of questions so yes yeah and just as a as a quick follow-up on on this notion of potential benefits and and understanding it almost as a design challenge what meaning we we construct and attach to to waiting in in you mentioned empathy already in the conversation you mentioned some sort of the knowledge generation opportunity the imagination opportunity that it may provide one of the additional components you describe in the book or benefits is is more around problem-solving and not getting a response immediately yeah may actually may may help almost as a constraint or drive I should say right problem solving yeah you want to maybe add yeah so that I write about in the context of our communication with deep space and the spacecraft like New Horizons where delays are built into the knowledge production of this spacecraft that goes out to places we've never been before and the way times are built into how knowledge gets produced but as soon as you launch that thing into space there are constraints around the communication and how you interact with it so if you're a scientist and you're doing experiments there's one thing if you can do that in real time okay we're going to change this this part of the experiment and see the results but when you're dealing with nine hours of lag time between sending and receiving messages to a spacecraft that's three billion miles away you don't get the opportunity to be like okay let's try this thing so on the fourth of July right as New Horizons is about to do its closest flyby it's about 10 days out from doing closest approach to Pluto they lost connection with it it stopped responding they lost telemetry and so how do you respond to that so this is what I talk about in the chapter is an enabling constraint for these scientists to imagine these moments where you're going to have to create a contingency list based on the delays and those delays allow you to build and innovate in new ways that you wouldn't have you wouldn't be forced to otherwise and it's transformed the space space program in dramatic ways what it even means to measure space and to locate spacecraft are all built around delays and using those delays in productive kinds of ways and in our own lives I think the same is true where productivity innovation is not about the pace at which we can produce things and do it at a particular kind of speed it's often about the pauses that we take it's about taking the constraint of delay and using it as an enabling feature to try to build in delays in our own processes to to capitalize on creativity and innovation we can't innovate without delays and actually again this is a cognitive process too you can't move things from short-term memory to long-term memory without pause you know the the synthesis of proteins in the brain requires delays in order to move something from short-term memory to working memory to long-term memory and if you expect to innovate on knowledge you need to build in the times for that to happen and a google search and move on does not accomplish that if you are going to build knowledge and innovate on it it requires building in a structure of delay that is an enabling constraint in your own life and I think the space program is a real great symbol of that because that's sort of the essence of it these long delays that are built into space exploration have I think direct ramifications for our own lives and how we innovate on knowledge thank you maybe one more question so I wanted to ask about the boundaries of the category of waiting yeah great I'm thinking in part about there used to be an undergraduate course here called loitering and it was like the goal was to go out and loiter great this would make you a better person and more creative and thoughtful and and so how is that different from waiting right how do some of the benefits that you describe also apply to idleness or loitering or those things but then also like what isn't waiting like you know once the concert starts you're sort of waiting for it to end you know right so I'm also curious like where when when does the waiting ender is waiting just like are you just defining like life and we're just waiting to die right yeah yes yeah that's sort of a question of the boundaries on either side yeah I think that's a line in the book we're just waiting to die actually you know but it's a great question there are many different forms that waiting takes but there are experiences of time that sit alongside waiting like the pauses like being mindful taking pauses being silent loitering I think fits within that and I think one of the differentiating features is our level of agency over those times often waiting is so frustrating because we feel powerless in it we don't feel like we own our own time while if I'm loitering I might be loitering because of the ways that someone is asking me to exercise my time in particular ways or it might be my own agency over my time I'm not supposed to wait out here but I'm going to and this is my action of of resisting being commodified in this space you're asking me to spend money I'm gonna wait I'm gonna not spend money out here I'm gonna resist that structure but that you have agency over that the mindfulness movement that's really arisen within businesses to slow ourselves down again has you have agency over that ideally you know you you may be so busy that you can't be mindful and there becomes that that tension and that contradiction in your own life over how you get to exercise your time but for the most part these are centered around how you decide to exercise your time in contrast you have something like waiting rooms at welfare offices in South America that are designed to be uncomfortable spaces with too few seats with very little feedback to emphasize your powerlessness within that society you don't have agency over how your time is being used you are forced to wait someone else is controlling your time so that's where I find a real interesting distinction between waiting and those sort of companion experiences of time that look like waiting and I think you can analyze them all together but I think there's that that distinction and I think what is not waiting is often the time that is not noticeable the time that goes by so fast the fluid time how when we feel we're productive when we feel that we're enjoying things and time flies waiting in contrast is slow and opaque we kind of trudge through it we slog through it we we feel it in a very embodied way and in contrast to what might be like productive or fun time that that just sails by and we rarely notice it while waiting we're watching the second hand slowly tick by so I think those are the contrasts you have this wonderful line and you mentioned it during our conversation already but I want to read it anyway in the act of waiting we become who we are waiting points to our desires and hopes for the future in our conversation it's also become clear that this opportunity to envision the future and what we can hope for is unequally distributed you talked extensively about the power issues to conclude what will be your recommendation what can we do as individuals some sort of yeah to make this positive view and this positive experience of waiting and it's opportunity into the future more equally distributed great yeah for me the first step is moving past the emotions of waiting which can be raw and reactive where we despise it in visceral kinds of ways and instead in those moments I encourage people to ask who benefits from you waiting asking about the benefits of waiting I think are really interesting in part you might benefit from your own waiting you have a retirement plan you've decided not to take out that money you are going to accrue that money and you are the beneficiary of your wait time on the other hand someone might benefit from forcing you to wait like in the example of the welfare office in South America the beneficiaries of those people waiting are those in power they get to reiterate that power structure so in my moments of waiting by saying who is benefiting from the fact that I'm waiting right now often if I'm at a red light it's that person who gets to go and I am again feeding into the social fabric of life allowing people to move but then again someone in a position of power might benefit from my wait times in ways that where I can identify again how time is unevenly distributed how people are put at a disadvantage and by asking the question who benefits from people waiting we can imagine ways to unearth those power structures and the social structures that do force us to use our time in uneven kinds of ways and then finally I think getting us to think about time as collective instead of individual is fundamental here where instead of you imagining your time as your resources some people can use well or misuse and rob you of instead if we imagine that time is collective and we are experiencing time in collective week in collective ways we can invest time in one another and hopefully get to the place where we have a more just use of time and just more just structures where time can be distributed more evenly to people so then they can use that time to imagine new futures and innovate and and imagine ways of doing things different that might benefit broader population thank you so much for a great conversation and for a great book thank you thank you so much appreciate it


The Best Government Programs for Teaching English Abroad Teaching English Abroad is now a popular career option for many people of all ages. While there is a strong demand for TEFL certified teachers in many different regions of the world, there are certain countries who have implemented government-funded programs to attract foreign English teachers. Through these programs, qualified English teachers are placed into schools around their countries where they are employed for a set period of time. Here is a list of the best government programs for teaching English abroad. EPIC for Teaching English in South Korea The EPIC program in South Korea is one of the largest and most popular teaching programs and stands for English program in Korea. This scheme is run by the South Korean government and places foreign teachers into schools across the country to work as English language instructors. The program offers competitive salaries, attractive extra benefits and the chance to live and work in a unique cultural environment in East Asia. Requirements and more information about the program Teachers sign a one-year contract that runs from one of two start dates, either the end of February or the end of August. Salary based on qualifications and experience, ranging from 1.8 to 2.7 million Korean won, currently 1,500 to 2,300 US dollars per month. Fully furnished accommodation, not including utilities. Paid airfare in and out of the country, 300,000 Korean won settlement allowance, 18 days paid leave plus all national holidays. One month salary bonus on completion of the contract. You must be a native English speaker with a passport from one of the following countries, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK or the US. You must hold a university degree and be able to prove a clean criminal record. In addition, you also require at least one of the following. A Tefal TISO certification of 100 hours or more, reference is given to those with a teaching practice component. Bachelor's or master's degree in education with a major in teaching, TISOL, Second Language Studies or Education. Teaching license gained in your home country. One year of full-time teaching experience. How to apply? To apply for the scheme, please visit the official Epic website. Talk for Teaching English in South Korea. Talk stands for Teaching Learning Korea, which is a government-sponsored program that places foreign nationals into elementary schools across South Korea. Talk is a similar program to the much larger Epic. However, the talk program differs by focusing on placements in underprivileged areas that might otherwise struggle to attract foreign teachers. Requirements and more information about the program. Open to college graduates or current undergraduate students who have completed at least two years of a degree course. Applicants must also hold a passport from the United States to United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa or Ireland. The minimum age requirement is 19, but no official upper age limit. Although these over 35 are typically encouraged to join the Epic program instead. A national criminal record check must be submitted during the application process. Participants sign a one-year contract that starts in either February or August. Prior to the start date, there is a one-month orientation program. A monthly stipend of 1.5 million Korean Won, currently $1,300 US dollars per month. Furnished accommodation, typically a studio apartment, not including utilities. Flight allowance of 2.6 million Korean Won to cover transport in and out of the country. Settlement allowance of 300,000 Korean Won. Seven vacation days per semester. Medical insurance coverage. How to apply? To apply, please visit the official talk program website. Jet for Teaching English in Japan. The Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, Jet, is a government-backed scheme that has been operating for more than 30 years. Through this scheme, around 5,000 foreign nationals are placed into schools right across Japan with the intention of raising the language skills of young people. Unlike many similar programs in other countries, the Jet program also has a strong focus on cultural exchange between participants and the local population. There are three types of positions available through the program. The most common at over 90% of applicants is working as an assistant language teacher, ALT. Duties of an ALT include assisting a Japanese teacher in the classroom, preparing teaching materials and participating in extracurricular activities such as sports or language clubs. If you have a good standard of Japanese language skills, then you can also apply as a coordinator of international relations, CIR, while sports professionals can apply for the role of sports exchange advisor, SEA. Requirements and more information about the program. Open to college graduates up to the age of 40. A minimum of a bachelor's degree or alternatively a three-year teaching qualification at either primary or secondary level. Strong emphasis on youthful energy and a desire to fully embrace the Japanese culture, language and overall way of life. Pre-tax salary of 280,000 Japanese yen, currently 25,000 US dollars in your first year, plus air fares for travel to Japan and homeward flight on completion of the contract. Paid holiday time between 10 and 20 days, plus all national holidays. Working hours are approximately 35 per week, from 8.30 to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday. How to apply. Visit the official JET program website to apply for the JET program. Taepiff for teaching English in France. The Taepiff program, short for teaching assistant program in France, is a government initiative that places applicants into French state schools to work as teaching assistants. The program provides a great opportunity to live and work in a country where long-stay visas can be difficult to secure for non-EU citizens. For those who meet the necessary criteria, the Taepiff program could be the perfect way to fulfill your dream of living and working in France. Requirements and more information about the program. Open to those aged between 20 and 35. Participants work 12 hours per week in up to 3 different elementary or secondary schools for a period of 7 months, running from October 1st to April 30th. Each position comes with a work visa that is valid for the length of the contract, plus health insurance and a monthly stipend of 790 euros. Each applicant's suitability is evaluated via the following criteria. Language skills. A level equivalent to B1 on the common European framework of reference for languages is required. Level of university education. Previous teaching experience. Experience working with children. Experience living abroad. Teflor TESOL qualification. Not compulsory, but highly beneficial. How to apply. As the requirements are subject to change, you should visit the Taepiff program website for the most up-to-date information. As well as being evaluated on the criteria stated above, applicants are also required to submit the following. 500 words statement of purpose in French. Scan of valid passport. Scan of university transcripts. Language evaluation from university French professor. Letter of recommendation from academic or professional. 60 US dollar application fee. Cultural ambassadors program for teaching English in Spain. The cultural ambassadors program, also known as the North American Language and Culture Assistance Program, is run by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. The program places 2,500 North Americans into elementary or secondary schools across Spain to work as assistant language teachers. Due to the difficulties for non-Europeans to secure a work visa in Spain, this program is very popular among Americans and Canadians looking to live and work legally as an EFL teacher in Spain. As this is a very competitive program, there is no guarantee of acceptance. Requirements and more information about the program. Open to American and Canadian citizens aged between 21 and 60. The upper age limit for placement in the Madrid region is 35. Contracts last from early October until May 31st, June 30th in the Madrid region. Teachers work a set number of classes per week in return for a stipend of 700 euros per month plus health insurance coverage and a long-stay work visa. Airfares and accommodation costs are not included. An applicant's suitability is also evaluated on the following criteria. A practical demonstration of Spanish language skills. College transcripts, high school records and Spanish language certificates can be submitted to provide extra proof. Physical and psychological suitability. A medical form is required. Academic achievement, a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science is a minimum. University junior, senior or graduate. Previous teaching experience. Experience working with children. Experience living abroad. A TEFL or TESOL qualification. Not compulsory but highly beneficial. How to apply. For the most up-to-date information regarding the application process, you should visit the official website of the Cultural Ambassadors program. To complete the application, you will need to supply the following documents. 250 to 300 words statement of purpose in English. Copy of a reference letter from your employer or university. Copy of your degree or diploma or an official academic record. Copy of valid US or Canadian passport. CETP for teaching English in Hungary. If you're looking for something a little different that is slightly off the beaten path, then the Central European Teaching Program CETP in Hungary may be worth a look. The CETP is a long-running program that places applicants into schools in Hungary to work as English language teachers. Requirements and more information about the program. Open to native English speakers from the US, Canada, the UK or any other EU country. No official upper age limit. This is a particularly good option for older teachers who might find it difficult to secure jobs in some other European countries. The standard program runs for 10 months from September to mid-June with an orientation week prior to the start. There are also six month positions available from January to June. Teachers receive a regular salary that is equal to local co-workers. No income tax is required, plus national health insurance and paid holidays. The work visa also allows you to travel across Europe. Teachers also receive a private furnished apartment with all utilities covered for the duration of their contract. Partners, friends or families can often be placed together. How to apply. If you are interested in the program and would like further details, you should visit the CETP website. In order to be accepted on the program, applicants must submit the following documents. A TEFL or TESOL certification that includes at least 20 hours of practical classroom teaching. Letter from a doctor confirming your good health, work visa requirement. Notarized copy of your university diploma. Background check. NET Scheme for Teaching English in Hong Kong. The NET Scheme is a recruitment program initiated by the Hong Kong Education Bureau that places qualified teachers from overseas countries into state-run schools. The Scheme recruits hundreds of teachers every year to work in either primary or secondary level schools across the territory. Requirements and more information about the program. You must be a native English speaker or possess an exceptionally high standard of English language competence. Applicants must be less than 58 years of age at the contract start date. Monthly salary of between 25 and 60,000 Hong Kong dollars, currently 3,200 to 7,700 US dollars, dependent upon relevant experience. Assistance finding suitable accommodation plus a housing allowance of 20,000 Hong Kong dollars per month. Paid round-trip airfare from your home country including up to four family members. Relocation allowance to assist with the transport cost of personal belongings. Stipend for medical insurance coverage. The Scheme is split into two separate areas for primary level teachers and secondary level teachers known as PNET and SNET. Applicants for the PNET Scheme work with primary students aged from 6 to 12 with a typical class size of 30 to 37. The qualifications required for these positions are a degree in English, a teacher training qualification in primary education, and a TEFL or TESOL certification. In the event that not enough teachers meet these requirements, those with a lower level of qualifications are considered. If accepted on the SNET Scheme, you will work with secondary students in an average class size of 40 to 45. The stated criteria for these positions are a degree in English or education, a postgraduate diploma in education, a TEFL or TESOL diploma, and at least one year of teaching experience at secondary level. Once again, if recruitment numbers are not met, then applicants with fewer qualifications are considered. How to apply? Please visit the official SNET Scheme website to apply. English Open Stores program for teaching English in Chile. Chile is one of the most stable and prosperous countries in Latin America and has long been a popular destination for ESL teachers. The popular English Open Stores program, EODP, is sponsored by the Chilean Ministry of Education and the United Nations Development Program and places foreign teachers into schools across Chile on a volunteer basis. Participants on the scheme work as teaching assistants with the aim of improving the English language skills of children ranging from 10 to 18 years old. Requirements and more information about the program are open to native or near-native English speakers between the ages of 21 and 35. Applicants outside this range are assessed on an individual basis. You must possess a bachelor's degree. You require sufficient finances to pay for transportation to and from Chile, as well as living expenses during your stay. Any teaching qualifications or experience of international travel will also be taken into consideration when applying for the program. All housing costs and meals are covered if you choose the homestay option. A monthly stipend of 7,000 Chilean pesos, currently 110 US dollars, plus free visa, free health insurance and free online Spanish lessons. Week-long orientation course in Santiago. Free transport within Chile. How to apply? To apply for the scheme, please visit the official EODP website. Are you ready for teaching English abroad? Apply now for your TEFL or TSOL certification course and start teaching in a matter of months. Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad. Send us an email or call us toll-free at 1-800-490-0531 to speak with an ITTT advisor today.