Hi, I'm Zor. Welcome to a new Zor education. Continue talking about random variables and its characteristics. We have introduced in the previous lecture two new characteristics of the random variable, variance and standard deviation. And I would like to present just a very simple problem where I'm basically calculating these characteristics. Just to make, you know, certain practical maybe usage of these. And our task for today is, we have the following problem which we would like to solve. The random variable we are talking about is a sum of two numbers which we get when rolling two dice. Right? So we have two regular perfect dice and we have a sum of the two numbers which are rolled on these dice. This is a random variable because depending on certain circumstances this sum of two numbers takes different values, obviously. And what I'm interested in is what's my expectation, what's my variance and what's my standard deviation of this random variable. Alright, I think the very convenient way to represent the values of my random variable is in the matrix where I have one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six. So my roll number would be the first dice and my column number would be my second dice. On the crossing I will have the sum, obviously. So it's two, three, four, five, six, seven, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Now, since every dice has six different numbers, it can actually show the two dice which are independently rolled together will have six times six different pairs. So, all these are represented in this square. Now, we are interested in a particular random variable, which is a sum, which is inside of this. So, to represent the variable, we need to know which values it takes, and apparently the values are from 2 to 12, right? And what's the probability of each value? Now, in the previous examples, we usually use something like equal probabilities. In this case, it's not equal. Why? Because every combination of two numbers has the same probability. There are 36 combinations, so we have 136 as a probability of each square, if you wish, in this matrix. Now, the number two occurs only one, which means that the probability of two is equal to 136. The probability of three, there are two different squares in this matrix, which means either the first dice rolls two and the second one, or the first one rolls one and the second two. Each one of these pairs has 136 probability, but we have two pairs. Right? Two one and one two. So, the probability of the number three is 236. Number four occurs in three times. So, the probability of four is 346. Probability of five is equal to one, two, three, four. Four 36. Probability of six is equal to one, two, three, four, five. So, five different combinations, each one of them has 136, so there are five of them, so it's five 36. Probability of seven is equal to one, two, three, four, five, six. Six 36. Probability of eight is equal to five, 36. Probability of nine is equal to four 36. And probability of ten, three 36. Probability of eleven, two 36. Probability of twelve, one 36. There is only one case, six and six, when you can get twelve. So, now this is a full specification for our random variable. It takes the value two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. And these are probabilities with which these values are taken by our random variable. That's all we have to really know about the random variable. Which values it takes and what's the probability of each variable. It's a full description and that's a sufficient description to calculate expectation, variance and standard deviation. Now, if I will tell somebody, okay, this is my random variable. It's a full description. Could you evaluate approximately what you will win or lose and what will be your risk if you play for money some kind of a game? Let's say you have a game that the sum of numbers will be greater than five, for instance. If I will ask the question right now, it will probably be very, very difficult to answer just looking at this picture. And especially difficult will be what's the risk involved, right? However, using the expectation and standard deviation and variance, we can answer these questions in a manner which is sufficient to intuitively feel these particular characteristics of the random variable. And that's what I'm going to do right now. So I don't need this square anymore. And let me just address directly the issue of expectation. So this is my random variable c. So what is its expectation? Well, if it takes value two with a probability of 136 and value three with a probability 236, etc., etc., etc. and value 12 with a probability of 136, that would be my expectation, right? So I have to make a weighted average of these values from 2 to 12, from 2 to 12. And the weights are the corresponding probabilities. For two, the weight is 136. For three is 236. For 10 is 336. It would be somewhere here. And for 12 is 136 again. So this is my expectation. Now, I calculated it, and it's equal to 7, which is kind of intuitively obvious. Why? Because if you remember in the previous lecture, I was using just one dice and I was calculating its expectation of the value from 1 to 6. Remember? Oops. From 1 to 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. No, there is not 7. Only 6. And the expectation in this case was right in the middle, which is 3.5. And if you remember, the mathematical expectation is an additive function. So if you have two random variables, and now we have basically two random variables, one is the result of one dice and another result of another dice. Each one of them has 3.5 as a mathematical expectation, right? So the sum of them, considering the expectation is an additive function, should be 3.5 times true, which is 7. All right. Now I would like to evaluate the variance of this particular random variable. And the way I'm doing it is I'm using the weighted average of a square of a difference between this value and the expectation, which is 7, with weights equal to, again, probability. So it's actually exactly the same thing as with expectation in terms of this is a weighted average, where weights are the probabilities. But in this case, in case of expectation, I'm using directly the values. In case of variance, I'm using squares of a difference between the value and expectation. So it would be 2 minus 7 square times its probability, plus 3 minus 7 square times its probability, plus 4 minus 7 square times its probability, etc. Up to the very last one, 12 minus 7 square times its probability. And I have calculated this. It's equal to 5.8 approximately. So that's my variance. Now finally, my standard deviation is just the square root of variance. Okay, so now we see that our behavior of the random variable can be described in terms of expectation and standard deviation. So the sum would be somewhere around number 7. That's the expectation. That's the weighted average of all the different values of this sum. Or if you wish, that's the approximate frequency the sum will take if you have many, many experiments of rolling a couple of dice. But now I can also say that the diversion around this 7 would be different, obviously. It can be from 2 to 12. But on average, the diversion would be from 7 to minus 2.4, which is what? 4.6 to 9.4, right? So these points represent like grouping, if you wish, of the values to the left or to the right of number 7. So my spread around, if you wish, 7 would be different, obviously, but the average spread would be between these and these. Okay, basically that's it. This is just an example of how in this particular case expectation variance and standard deviation can be calculated. And sort of intuitive understanding how we can use these particular characteristics of the random variable to, well, not really predict, but at least to expect something, some behavior of our random variable as we progress in our experiments with it. So the values would be somewhere around number 7, more or less evenly distributed around it, and the average distance from the 7 should be either to the left or to the right, should be by 2.4. That's the average, weighted average difference. That's it for today. Thanks very much. I recommend you to read the notes for this lecture, and they are obviously Unisor.com. I basically recommend to watch the video also from the Unisor.com website, just because you have basically the whole curriculum over there in front of your eyes, so you can go to some other lecture, etc. If you forgot something, you can go to the previous lecture, and it gives you some nice perspective of everything the whole course. So that's it. Thanks very much, and good luck.


Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you including Norm Physicus, Chris Allen and Chris Smith. Coming up on DTNS, why chip shortages are a good thing for the Xbox, software to ease your back pain and the most important things to know from the avalanche of tech earnings this week. DTNS starts now. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, April 29th, my sister's birthday, 2022. Happy birthday, Meg. In Los Angeles, I'm John Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us, co-host of the Snobo S podcast and the tech, John Terrence Gaines, aka Brother Tech. Welcome back. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you bringing me here and sweating a little bit in the pre-show because I was kind of... No one needs to know. Terrence has always been here. I don't know what y'all are doing. All right, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Arroider sources say that Elon Musk has said to have secured loans for his pending acquisition of Twitter. A little more than half of the offer price is made up of $25.5 billion in loans. Musk supposedly said he would reduce executive and board pay cutting other costs internally. Twitter has relatively large gross margins, leaving potential room to cut. Musk also promised to develop new ways to monetize tweets, such as charging for third parties to embed tweets from verified individuals. The sources also said that Musk has lined up a new CEO for Twitter. Parag Agrawal took over for Jack Dorsey in November of 2021 and will remain a CEO until the acquisition closes later this year. The South China Morning Post sources say China will hold a symposium with the country's largest tech firms after Labor Day to assure executives that the government plans to ease its crackdown on big tech. Prior to the symposium, the government will reportedly hold a joint regulatory meeting to put all regulators on the same page so that they all know they're easing up on big tech. At a meeting of China's Politburo on April 29, the government said it will normalize control over the tech sector and design measures to support it. Short version of this is, oh, this is affecting our economy. Maybe we should ease off. A report by research from the University of Washington, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and Northeastern University claims that Amazon and third parties collect process transcripts from interactions with Amazon's voice assistant to send to advertising partners. This data is used for to infer user interests for ad targeting on Echo devices and also the web. Amazon confirmed that it does serve targeted ads on its smart speakers, but does not share voice recordings with developers. In December, participants in the Pone to Own competition identified several security bugs in Net Talk. That's an open source protocol that can act as Apple share file servers for macOS clients. A lot of software uses it. Net Talk patched the vulnerability in the March 22 version, the 3.1.1 release. And Thursday, Synology warned users that some of its NAS appliances are exposed to multiple Net Talk vulnerabilities. Synology says patches are ongoing and should arrive within 90 days of the advisory at the latest. The vulnerabilities have already been fixed for Synology appliances running disk station manager 7.1 or later. So if you're on that and you're up to date, you should be all right. Earlier this week, QNAP advised its NAS users to turn off Apple file protocol on its devices until patches can be issued. Epic Games acquired Bandcamp just last month. I know it seems like a lifetime ago, but it was a month ago. Now Epic is filing a motion for preliminary injunction to stop Google from removing Bandcamp rather from the Google Play Store. Digital music sales had been exempted from using Google's billing system, but a policy change requires apps to use play billing as of June 1st of this year. All right. Let's talk about game consoles. Protocols. Nick Statt has an article up theorizing that chip shortages are helping Xbox close the gap with the PlayStation. And yet they may not need that help. It's been a good week for Xbox. MPD Group estimates it had its best march in 11 years. MPD Group does console sales monthly. And during Microsoft's earnings call, the company claimed it had taken market share from the PlayStation for two consecutive quarters. They didn't give any numbers to back that up. But you know, that's what they said. And it's in an earnings call. So it's, you know, subject to some regulatory assurances. So it's probably true. Microsoft says the Series S and the Series X have sold faster than any previous Xbox generation and hardware revenue was reported up 14% on the year. If you do some tea leaf reading, estimates are that Microsoft has sold between 10 and 12 million Xbox Series units. Sony last reported its sales in February. And at that point, the PS5 was about 17 million units. Statt points out that those numbers still have Xbox on the same sales pace as the Xbox One. It's just that the PlayStation 5 is selling a little slower than the PlayStation 4 did. However, if Sony is having a harder time getting chips, which it appears it might be, that would mean Microsoft is closing the gap on it because of the chip shortage. Anecdotally, Statt notes that friends, and I've known some friends who say the same thing, have bought an Xbox only because it was easier to find and cheaper on the secondary market. Playstations are still going for about twice what retail is. However, Statt points out that none of this may matter that much for Microsoft, which is less reliant on the console install base than it used to be. Things like cross saves and cross buying mean that players can move between the console and the PC using Xbox Game Pass relatively easily. And with cloud streaming, you can even just play on mobile. Game Pass subscribers increased 45% on the year, so it's booming. Microsoft's future now heavily relies on serving people who might not ever buy a console or even possibly a PC. That leaves the market looking like this. Nintendo is the king of unit sales. So if you just want to count the number of consoles Nintendo wins, but it's often because it's a secondary console. People might buy the PlayStation and the Xbox or one of the other PlayStation or the Xbox and also a Switch. Sony still brings in about half of console consumer spending because even though PS5s may not be selling as fast as they'd like, they have a huge PS4 install base, but Microsoft has the early lead position in a device agnostic world in a world that's switching to subscriptions. Terence, if you were a console maker, who of these three would you rather be right now, do you think? If I was a greedy person, it would be Sony. You could be whoever you want. Yeah, why is that? Because they're harder to get. Therefore, the demand is higher. Therefore, people are going to be scraping and scrounging to get these. So whenever the chip shortage kind of eases up or they get to produce more products, I think those are going to fly off the shelves way faster than an Xbox or a Nintendo Switch. Yeah, but I mean, but if you look at the Xbox Game Pass numbers, clearly people are like, okay, maybe hardware is a little difficult right now. Let's let's do something that's a little bit more platform agnostic and Microsoft is really reaping the rewards. Those camps are pretty tough in the console wars. I don't see that easing up anytime soon. Even if there's more options to go cross platform is something about Xbox versus PlayStation, it keeps these things going. That's just my opinion. Yeah, and I think you're right in the short term for sure. It does look bad for Sony that their unit sales can't catch up because of supplies. And that supply shortage does seem to be dragging on a little longer than people thought of because new problems keep cropping up. We're going to talk about that quite a bit when we talk about earnings later. But even so, eventually the supply shortage will work itself out. And when it does, I think a lot of people will give up their PS4 for the PS5. I don't think there's going to be as many people who are going to give up Sony now because they can get an Xbox. There are a few anecdotally, like stat said. But I think down the road, Microsoft does have the longer term advantage. I will add that Microsoft definitely has a broader advantage because a subscription is something you can get as a Christmas present, but you don't necessarily need to go hunt through every target, Best Buy or eBay sale to get one. And the same thing will apply to people who are just tangentially interested. They don't necessarily want to plunk down four or 500 bucks and then all the associated peripherals, which is what hardcore gamers would do. But I mean, if you're looking at, I want to appeal to a broad base, you're going to have to look outside that core demographic. It's easier to acquire new customers, right? Because they have to fight to get the console. Yeah. For that. And then you just have Mindshare, right? It's a brand name, it's on the tip of your tongue. Sure, sure. I think it is going to be fun to watch. I really do. All right, let's improve our posture, Sarah. Well, let's do it. A company called Zen, you've either heard of it, maybe you even use it uses posture mirroring software to send alerts when it detects that you're not sitting up straight, you're not giving your body a rest so you can correct your posture and avoid physical pain while doing your job as you're hunched over your computer, likely at home. But to do so, it uses your webcam to check on your posture, which might raise some eyebrows from folks who'd like better posture, but don't want to be watched all day. Zen also sells a version of its software to employers and assigned about 30 companies, some of them enterprise. So a lot of employees there since it launched in October of 2020. That might raise even more eyebrows, such as, hmm, is my employer using the tool to check on me to see when I'm at my computer, to see when I'm not to see when I walk around, see how often I'm doing work, etc. Now, Zen says it's taken a privacy-centric approach to building this webcam-based posture correcting tech with its posture correction software being open source, except for exercise and educational content, which is something that Zen says it does customily. Zen's AI also processes data locally, that's on device, meaning that it's not uploading or streaming any data to any cloud. You can test their claim by using it with your Wi-Fi or internet connection disabled, if you don't believe them or feel, you know, paranoid, which many people do, also doesn't record or store any visuals. So employers only receive an aggregated total number of how many employees sign up to the app, how many use it on a weekly basis, not exactly who those employees are or what time of day we're, you know, moving into this. Also, the software is designed so you don't have to keep it on all the time. You can check in just a couple times a day, which may be enough to keep you aware of your posture. Zen says that most users do like a 30 to 60 minute posture session in the morning, maybe another in the afternoon, that's enough to keep people aware of their posture all day. And some say they even think of it at home and at the dinner table and such. So in some ways that's really great, especially those of us who've, you know, had RSI injuries or, you know, other stuff from kind of not having great posture while we're doing our work. When it is running, a stick person icon is displayed in the menu bar, mirroring the user's posture, turning blue when it's good, red when it is correcting. The algorithm uses each user as a baseline, meaning that what you demonstrate as upright will be what it tells you to work for. And that's, that's, that's specific to you. It's not some crowdsourced ideal because everybody's different right now. Zen is $3.99 cents per month or $23.99 per year. Although the company plans to switch to a freemium model when you pay for advanced features. It also plans to get into selling things like ergonomic chairs, keyboards, mice, and things like that for people who care about these things, as well as integrate movement sensors from wearables like headphones and watches. Man, I was watching Nick with a C in our chat room who was like, sounds like spyware. And then Sarah said, like, it's all on device. You can turn off your internet to prove it. And then he's like, I don't know, those alerts sound like they might be annoying.  You don't have to have it constantly alerting you. I feel like this, this company has tried to do everything possible to anticipate what your objection would be to using their software and make it so that it's not annoying, but just helpful. However, one of the people I know has got a keen eye for finding out whether there's loopholes and all that is Terrence Gaines. Terrence, what do you think of this? Well, not necessarily loopholes, but of course, companies are going to want to use this information now. Again, Sarah said, you know, in the, in the, in the breakdown that, you know, they are, it's not saved to the cloud. The only notifications users, employers are getting is how many people use it and maybe how often they use it. But still, that's not going to stop people from thinking or assuming or taking something and putting it over the camera because this thing is installed. I don't see this as being a big deal outside of me being frustrated with myself because I can never get my posture straight. I could see that thing going red all the time. And then in the first couple of times I would try to straighten up and fix myself. But then I would just get annoyed because I can never stay that way. And I know, you know, you're supposed to fight that, but it's just like, I just too much work. Yeah, it depends on the person, right? Because they had interviews with some people in this article that that showed that, you know, if you just had it on for 30 minutes constantly correcting you, you could turn it off, you could cover your camera, and you just sort of get in the habit of doing it anyway. Some people were even saying they were doing it at home. You know, like Sarah said, however, that's not going to work for everybody, right?  I'm just saying one may be the exception to that. But it probably works for enough people to make this worthwhile. And I have a really good chair that's helped my posture, but I do try to remind myself to also straighten up because I somehow have figured out how to slump even in a good chair. Yep. Oh, go ahead, Sarah. No, no, I was just going to say, I kind of mentioned this earlier, but I have definite repetitive stress injury on my right hand. It kind of comes and goes, sometimes it's really bad. Sometimes it's not as bad. And it all has to do with my posture.   And if I do all those things correctly, I'm okay. But if I don't, I'm not okay. So, you know, I understand that there's some privacy implications that people are going to have to, you know, decide if they're comfortable or not, you know, using something like Zen, but this is actually something that I feel like is really important to many of us, especially before you get hurt. Because once you get hurt, it's a lot harder to not be hurt anymore. Right? Yeah, yeah. Now, this is this, let us know if any of you are using this in your workplace, or you just decide to try it out on your own, especially if once it goes freemium, it'll be, you know, low cost to try out. I'm curious what they're going to charge you for. I wonder how useful it is for free, but we'll see, especially because they're not supposedly getting any data, so they can't monetize your data, if that's the case. But if any of you use it, let us know. We'd love to hear from you. We also love to hear from you on our subreddit. The reason we had that Synology story in there was because RW Nash posted it to our subreddit today and folks voted it up. You can help figure out what goes on the show by using our subreddits. Submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechNewsShow.Reddit.com. It was a big week for tech earnings reports, but rather than get lost in all those numbers, we thought we'd dive a little deeper into a few of the bigger implications that came out of them. First, keep in mind the situation these companies are all in. You know all this stuff, but it's worth reminding global inflation, possible interest rate rises to combat that inflation, and thus possibly a recession on the horizon. Consumers know all this, and consumers are therefore being cautious, even if they're not impacted immediately. That's a drag on sales, especially for expensive tech products. There's also the fact that as we venture out more now, we're consuming fewer things online, and there's an inevitable adjustment from the sky-high numbers of 2020 and 2021 for those companies that benefited from lockdowns. Netflix and Amazon, for example. There's also a war in Ukraine, which is impacting supply lines, causing companies to cut business in Russia and be unable to serve customers in Ukraine in some cases, and that introduces more financial uncertainty as well as just financial uncertainty in general in the populace. There are also massive lockdowns in China as COVID-19 surges there, among a population that was not exposed to previous waves and whose vaccinations are proving less effective than one might have hoped. Ad-based businesses are taking some of the biggest hits. YouTube grew 14%, which may sound like a lot, but it's quite a bit lower than they expected, quite a bit lower than usual. Facebook rose its advertising 6.1%, and that is its slowest growth in the 10 years since it went public. In fact, almost all tech companies reported some kind of revenue or profitability hit, sometimes both, even Apple, which reported record numbers didn't have a rosy forecast for the current quarter. Apple CFO Luca Maestri said supply chain issues, mostly related to lockdowns in China, would reduce sales by $4-8 billion in Q2. On the one hand, CEOs Tim Cook said that almost all factories in China that assemble its products are back to work. Wall Street Journal bears that out with reports that several Apple suppliers, including Lux Share and Wistron, were granted COVID-free status by the government in China. That gives them priority to resume production. And Apple did not seem worried about demand for its phones, likely bolstered by the fact that while worldwide smartphone shipments fell 11% last quarter, Apple's phone shipments grew 1%. But still, despite all that, the factories are coming back. We don't expect phone sales to get hit. Apple would not forecast revenue for next quarter or say when it expected its supply chain issues to ease. Intel also forecast a weak Q2 because of supply chain issues. Amazon, on the other hand, had a low forecast, but in their case, it was due to higher costs. Amazon revenue grew at its slowest rate since 2001. You know, 2001, that's when pets.com went bust. Amazon ran on thin margins for most of its history and it's back to that. But this time, it's not caused by spending on expansion, but on increasing costs, particularly fuel costs. They've started to charge shippers who use their service of fuel surcharge. Insider Intelligence estimates Amazon's market share grew 0.2% in 2021. That's its slowest growth rate in years. But let's end on a bright note. Cloud. Look to the clouds. Amazon is powered by AWS, its cloud services division, and cloud services is booming for everybody. Synergy Research figures the total cloud services market rose 34% on the year to reach $53 billion. Amazon has pretty much been at about a third of that market share for years now and it stayed there hovering around 33%. Microsoft inch forward from 20% to 22% of the market followed by Google at 10%. And then everybody else. Cannellus had similar numbers and pretty much identical rankings. So that's the layout. Bad week for big tech, couple bright spots and nothing but cloud on the future. Both good and bad. Terrence, what do you think? I don't know. Am I tripping or are all these companies, I don't know. I'm pretty sure they got forecasters. They've got people that kind of see all these things happening or coming down the pike and but are they really acting on it? Cause it seems like they're just go, go, go. And then when the numbers come out, they're like, are y'all going to hit us hard for revenue and all these profitability and things to go down? It's just like, it just seems like they were just go, go, go. And then now the wall is looking to come to the wall. And I don't see too many companies outside of like you said, going to the cloud, doing other things to kind of prep for that. Or am I, am I making that up? I think that quite a few companies, Amazon is an obvious example of this, but quite a few companies during the pandemic, when a lot of people shifted how we do things day to day globally, enjoyed the repercussions of that, right? That, you know, all of a sudden it's like, wow, look, look, look, look at our numbers. But that wasn't going to last forever.  But there's a little bit more of going back to life that is going on. And all these companies are now feeling that and having to, I don't know, back up their claim that they're going to be okay in the future. I think it's, it's probably if you're, if you're a company of a certain size, and you have, you know, just like exponential growth because of something that is happening that's largely outside of your control, but it's happening in the world, you just kind of hope it's going to stay that way. Yeah, won't. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree. I, these are battleships, right? And they, they're slow to turn. That's always the problem with a big company. The reason people get upset about big companies when they're doing well is their battleships and they're hard to oppose. But as soon as those waters get choppy and they need to turn, they turn slow. So, so you're not wrong, Terrence, they, they, they're all trying new things. But the bigger the company is, the slower those new things are to try. And they're all still trying the new things that they started a couple of years ago before the world got as choppy as it is now. And it's harder for them to innovate. This is something I've been kind of talking about for years, which is, look, these big companies are really big and successful right now, but none of them ever stay that way. The big companies that were successful in 1999 are not the same big companies that are successful now. Or if they're, they are like Microsoft, they had, they went way down and had to come way back with something entirely different going from being an operating system based company to being a cloud services based company in Microsoft's case. So what we're seeing right now is there usually is something unexpected happens in the world that is harder for a big company to adapt to because they're so have so much momentum behind what made them good. And that's where that advertising number starts to look really interesting, which is the problem that a lot of people have with big tech is, well, they get all this ad money and they monetize our data and there's no way to get them off the ad money. Well, if the ad money does start to dry up, it's going to force them to try other things, which then opens up a place in the market for smaller companies to out innovate them, which brings us back to your point, Terrence. This is the time for the small company to jump up and go, we can move faster. Yeah. And I wish I was a battleship when I went to my if I go to my mortgage company and say, Hey, I lost my job. I'm a battleship. Yeah, work with me.  Exactly. Yeah. All right. Let's finish up with some fun stuff. Sarah, what do you got? Let's do it. We talked recently about the subscription based cancellation service for other subscriptions called true bill. And a few of you wrote into us about your experiences with that. So thank you in advance. How good is it at helping you actually cancel things you probably shouldn't be paying for is the big question. Well, now the company is sharing some data on where cancellations do happen the most subscriptions for audible time magazine, Amazon Kindle, the New York times and been verified have cancellation rates above 50% with audible specifically at 18%. True bill chief revenue officer at Yaha Mohtar Zada says that subscriptions with higher cancellation rates tend to be in two categories. The first one, people signed up for an aspirational subscription. Maybe you signed up for a gym. You wanted to, you know, lose weight or get in shape. Maybe you've got an audio book membership. And the second is the sneaky subscription, which might involve, you know, all of a sudden you're now part of a fashion subscription monthly, maybe in-flight wifi, slipped to the cracks, didn't really know you were signing up for it. True bill also found subscriptions that have cancellation rates between one and two percent. So that's quite lower, including productivity services like Wix, Squarespace, Dropbox and Zoom, streaming and entertainment services like Twitch, Xbox Game Pass, Blizzard Entertainment, and also financial subscriptions like Stash and Wealthfront. Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me that the stuff that you use to run your website, keep your files in for work. Yeah, you tend to need to keep that active. Yeah, yeah, those would be the stealthy ones. The thing that just jumped out of me and we like, we've had this in the rundown for hours and it just jumped out of me, Sarah, when you were telling us about this, Time Magazine gets enough subscriptions online that it can have a high cancellation rate. That's interesting. Yeah, apparently a lot of people want it and then they don't. It probably has to do with like, you know, Time Magazine person of the year.  Well, I think it's time.com that's getting the subscriptions, right? Yeah. Probably not the print magazine as much anymore, but that still, I wouldn't have thought that would be high enough to rank with Audible and Kindle because you may say like, well, yeah, but they're canceling Tom. Audible, the high cancellation rates, true Bill explained this in the protocol interview, the high cancellation rates are actually a good sign for companies in a lot of cases because it means they're getting enough people trying the service that they have a high cancellation rate, but they still keep the rest of the people. Yeah, it's high interest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just smiling as soon as Sarah started reading this. Oh, I see where this is going. Ultimately, the stuff like people wanting to read or actually exercise or do better. The aspirational stuff is like high cancellations for that. I mean, that's like the gym membership on January 1st, right? You know, where you go, my intentions are good, but come March 1st, have I really been going? No, don't pay for it. Yeah, it's like a snapshot of real life then. The stuff we need for work and the stuff that lets us sit on the couch. Right. Those are the ones we're not, we're not canceling. That's true. All right, let's check out the mailbag. This one comes in from Comey. Comey says, and this is in response to our Snap Pixie conversation we had yesterday. Comey says, I'm a drone enthusiast. I have seven functioning drones at the moment. Snaps Pixie reminded me of a few drone projects that I backed on Kickstarter and Indiegogo long time ago, including one called Self Fly from 2007 that's similar to Pixie. Comey says, I never received the product and I assume the project was dead, but I have to check. But after five years, I'm glad this type of drone finally became available from a major company. Second note, Comey says is my smallest drone is 105 grams, about the same as Pixie. When I fly indoors for testing, all the napkins on the table fly everywhere, even a small drone can make quite a mess if people decide to fly it indoors, something to consider. The design of Pixie looks safe, says Comey, but one of the disasters that can happen with a drone is long hair sucked into the propeller. It can get tangled badly. I believe Pixie can't prevent that if it only has front and bottom-facing cameras. Well, I don't know that that's true. It does seem that it's able to fly its flight path with those sensors. There may be more going on with those two sensors than it looks like at first. I wouldn't want to say one way or the other, to be honest. But it's no joke that if you get too close to a propeller with long hair, that's not going to be good for you. Listen, I've got a Roomba and the number one thing I do is clear my own long hair out of the Roomba. So I can see where this is. It truly is an issue if you live in a house where you're flying a drone and things are going to get caught inside of it, but it doesn't seem like a deal breaker. It just seems like something you should keep in mind. I was just surprised that people are still using Kickstarter. Are people still using Kickstarter like that? Some people are, Terrence. Some people are. Some people are. Yeah, they still are. I remember that was a big deal back in the day. Now I really don't hear about Kickstarter projects. But again, maybe that's just me. Yeah, because it's not news anymore. It used to be news that somebody did something on Kickstarter. Then it was news that somebody did something weird on Kickstarter. Now it's just like, well, everything's on Kickstarter. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. I feel like that's what's going on there. Honestly, to Komi's point about inside, don't fly your drones inside. I don't think even Snap wants you to fly the Pixie inside. All their demo videos show it outside. So that's a good reminder, Komi. Thanks for that. Well, it depends on how high your ceiling is, but your mileage may vary. Yeah, totally. Get it? Especially your altitude mileage. Yeah. Well, Terrence Gaines, such a pleasure to have you on the show today. You're a friend of the show, so we all know what you're doing, but let folks know that might not know the rest of your work where they can find its. Sure, sure, sure. So me and my co-host, Nika Montford, we host a monthly Apple centric podcast called Snob OS. Get it? Snob and then OS. I don't know. Do people get that? I hope that's okay. I hope people are getting what we're trying to put out, right? So like we said, we do a weekly show where we talk all things Apple and then we have some other things where we split off into social media and just things in general. So in addition to that, myself and Rob Dunwood and Stephanie Humphrey, who are also friends of DTNS, we also host a tech show from a different perspective called the Tech John. So we talk about technology. We talk about how we relate to diversity, things of that nature. So definitely can check us out there if you go to techjohn.com. And then in general, I'm on everything social media at brother tech where I just talk about tech and just anything in general. So definitely reach out to me that way if you want to get me the fastest. Well, thanks so much for being with us today. Also, we want to extend a special thanks to Steve Roger Prigg, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support. Steve is also a longer version of the show. It's called Good Day Internet. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's available at patreon.com slash DTNS. And for live viewers, we roll right into it right after we finish up this show. But just a reminder on DTNS, we're live Monday through Friday for PM Eastern, 200 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. And we hope you all have a great weekend and we'll be back doing it all again on Monday. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and host Rich Strafilino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Koontz, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos, news host writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Deterding, our mods, Speedmaster, W. Scottus 1, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Gadget Virtuoso, Steve Guadirama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens and J.D. Galloway. Modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, Acast and Len Peralta. Live art performed by Len Peralta, Acast ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's shows include Patrick Norton, Justin Robert Young and Terence Gaines. And our guest this week was Dr. Kiki Sanford, thanks to all the patrons who make this show possible.


On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAO is celebrating this year's annual World Food Day. On the theme, grow, nourish, sustain, together, our actions are our future, calls to celebrate our food heroes, including farmers, workers along the food chain, food banks, or others who together are making sure that food continues to make its way from farms to our tables. The COVID-19 global health crisis has also affected small countries like the Lees. It is time to reflect on things that we truly cherish and our most basic needs. Without access to food, there can be no stable democracy, no prosperity, no future. Food is the essence of life and the bedrock of our communities. Los Pequeños Agricultores y Ganaderos de Nago Bank Cooperative have been named food heroes for adapting preventative measures during this world crisis and for supplying the country with basic needs. Los Pequeños Agricultores y Ganaderos de Nago Bank Cooperative is located in Nago Bank, a small community on the northeast of the Belize district facing the beautiful Caribbean Sea. Los Pequeños Agricultores y Ganaderos de Nago Bank Cooperative started as a group in 2010 and was registered as a cooperative in 2013. At the beginning of being registered, we were a total of 22 people, 5 women and 17 men. Los Pequeños Agricultores y Ganaderos de Nago Bank Cooperative is located in Nago Bank, a small community on the northeast of the Belize district facing the beautiful Caribbean Sea. Los Pequeños Agricultores y Ganaderos de Nago Bank Cooperative is located in Nago Bank, here to avoid any contagion. We cannot do it as before as when we went to the market to sell, now we do it differently. We have a special person that we send to the market with the necessary measures so that that person cannot have contagion from the pandemic. For me, being a farmer in these times and as always has been a great responsibility because we farmers have to make an effort every day so that the food reaches especially to our families and then also supply food vegetables to other people in the country. We feel very happy as farmers, very happy to be able to do this important part for the country and for the people. We feel like heroes knowing that in the city for example where you cannot grow tomato, sweet pepper or watermelon that these products can reach them. The situation of this pandemic has affected the whole world at this time. It's difficult for us. For us it has been somewhat a shocking experience because of the pandemic. We have observed that the sales area decreased. Before the pandemic everything was fine. It can be said because we had enough product, enough place to expand it and where to distribute it. It was a radical change for all in the sales area, very low in some areas. Customers argue from us and now we send it directly. We pack it and send it by barge or boat so that the people no longer have the risk of leaving their homes and having direct contact with us. To avoid infecting ourselves or others, we have a specific place where we pack the product. My dream in 5 to 10 years is that this gallery we are in right now is converted into a packing shed facility where we can process our products. The desire of us as a group is that we can form a company and establish the business so that we can have better opportunities not only for the group but also for our children. Our dream in 4 to 5 years is in the area of marketing. Have more access to technology, be able to give better customer service, that the people from different places get to know about us and the quality of product that we handle and increase sales to be able to have more access to finance so we are able to produce more.


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I must also thank UNIWIDER for taking this project to another stage where they're bringing in politics and that's going to be our focus. I think that's an important dimension that has not been brought enough into the literature, the political dimension of the policy. So let me start quickly. I have only 20 minutes and I have a lot to take you all through too. First, let's be clear. When we talk about affirmative action, it's not a policy. It tends to be discussed as a policy in isolation. The reality is affirmative action is part of a cork of a huge range of policies. And it intervenes in all these different policies. And it mixes with them and the outcomes. That's why it becomes difficult to understand the outcomes. So let's go a bit further into affirmative action. It constitutes part of the social policy debate. The social policy debate, widely speaking, it's about whether it's universal or targeted. Within this universal versus targeted type policies, we have two types, vertical inequalities and horizontal inequalities. This is old school. This has just come to the fore. Vertical inequalities are basically talking about class. Horizontal inequalities is changing the focus to groups. We need to have a group-based understanding of conflict to solve real problems. A class-based perspective doesn't allow for it. And interestingly enough, one major horizontal inequalities approach is affirmative action. It is a race-based policy, ostensibly to attain social justice. Let's talk about what we mean by social justice. And also interestingly enough, the focus is on economic rent distribution. I'm happy to see in this conference there was a focus on other things. But generally speaking, most of the focus is on redistribution of economic wealth, equity. Now while this is going on, there are other policies that are also happening simultaneously. We have the developmental state policy, we have neoliberalism. And we also have this relationship between state and business in the implementation of these policies. Now developmental state, I come from Southeast Asia, East Asia. The World Bank called it the East Asian miracle. In the 1970s, 1980s, we saw the phenomenal growth of very poor countries. Malaysia was one of them. And the developmental state works in a manner in which it is highly interventionist. And here it is state-directed development also directing how affirmative action works. By the 1980s, a new model emerged, the rise of Thatcher and Reagan. And they introduced a more market-driven approach, neoliberalism. And this approach interestingly enough, while the developmental state was being implemented, which is interventionist in nature, they also brought in neoliberalism, which is to liberalize the market. So you see here now how complex the mix is. And one example of neoliberal policies is privatization. And privatization was closely linked also again to affirmative action. You can privatize targeting a specific group. And this is part of affirmative action. So you can see here how the mix occurs. So this brings me to my argument I want to discuss here. When we look at the policies, although they may look different, interestingly enough, if you look at affirmative action, it's a social engineering process. Now let me be clear, I'm sure Simone will talk about this. The way affirmative action is understood and implemented in different countries varies. It has many names, positive discrimination, for example. Now here I like to look at America. In America where this process was first started, Darity talks about social engineering. The key focus that Darity says is this. It is to redistribute wealth to the targeted so that the number of people in the class hierarchy between the non-targeted group is almost the same. So this is not, as he puts it, a really progressive policy in that sense. It is a policy to really redistribute wealth, to create an equity among people at the top level of the highest class. The second point I want to make, neoliberalism. Interestingly enough, this also targets the high income bracket. It is not a social policy of progressive in any way. But it's a policy which also tends to favor those among the elite class. So now that I've given you all the different policies, let's now focus on one country, Malaysia. Malaysia is interesting because it was the first country to introduce affirmative action targeting the majority group. And this majority group had political power. When affirmative action was first introduced, it was first in India. And then in the 1960s, following the civil rights movement in the United States. Now here in the United States, it's a policy of desegregation. The issue of desegregation was a real target. In Malaysia, it was not an issue of desegregation. It was about redistribution. So you can see here the first difference and a major difference. In the United States and in India, when they first introduced it, it targeted minorities who had no economic power and no political power. In Malaysia, when they introduced it, they targeted a group that had a lot of political power. And that makes a world of difference when we talk about how you implement the policy. The second point, the triggering event, 1969. We got our independence in 1957. And I must say in that period, and I'll show you also figures on this, in the 12-year period between 1957 and 1969, there was very little change in the economy. And this ultimately triggered a riot. It was unfortunately seen as a race-based riot. But what it meant was very clearly, now we have to change our policies. There was a significant policy shift. And the policy shift was most important in the sense that, from now on, the state was going to intervene directly in the economy. And the aim was to introduce affirmative action to achieve national unity by eradicating poverty and restructuring society. All noble aims. And nobody is going to say, this was bad. Even I, when I look back at that history, I will say, this is a good policy. We needed a policy to do something about the social and economic inequalities in this country at that time. The method, however, target one group. But even the leaders of that time, the Malays, even the leaders at the time knew, if you have a policy that targets only one segment of the population, it can, in the long run, cause a lot of problems. So they discussed how long. First it was 10 years, then it was 15, and finally they said 20. And then we must stop. They said that, we must stop. So it was a 20-year policy to be implemented between the period 1971 to 1990. Now here, at the same time, as I just mentioned, the developmental state idea came up. This was also in the 1970s. How did Japan grow so fast? This was an economy that was wiped out after the Second World War. By the 1960s, it was catching up with the U.S. By 1970s, U.S. was worried it was going to become the second largest economy, even overtaking them, and it happened. And then we have Korea and Taiwan. Korea and Taiwan were dirt poor states. By the 1970s and 1980s, they were highly industrialized nation states. Malaysia followed the developmental state model. Their model was Japan, Korea. Meanwhile, as I said, privatization comes along, Margaret Thatcher comes along, Thatcher and Reagan come along, and they captured imagination of many policy people. And that also comes into the mix. The question is, where does the power lie in decision-making? That is the point. That's why I'm happy with what Rachel said. Let's get to the politics of it. Where does the power lie in decision-making, which then dictates how these policies are done? Now, to understand outcomes, this was our big problem, understanding outcomes. How do you differentiate how the policies were implemented? And here I benefited a lot from the literature on state business relations. And they gave us different hands, the invisible hand. The invisible hand is a state providing public goods. The state provides all the incentives there, especially for foreign firms, take these incentives, use it for economic growth. It worked. It explained the industrialization in Malaysia. Malaysia's industrialization was driven by foreign direct investments, not domestic capital, foreign direct investments. The invisible hand helped a lot. Then we have the helping hand. The state intervenes to help companies, picking winners, and they help nurture domestic firms. That happened in Korea, in Japan, picking winners, as Korea in particular. It happened here in Malaysia too, and we saw this happening, especially through privatization and through affirmative action.  You can't run away from the grabbing hand. A powerful state emerges, and then you see the rise of corruption and cronyism. And these three hands, like these policies, happen simultaneously. But by breaking up the hands and seeing which policy, what are you using, invisible hand or helping hand, grabbing hand, we can see through corruption. We can actually dictate or use the data to understand the outcomes that we're looking at. So here, my main point, the centrality of politics in public policy, planning, implementation, governance. This method helps us a lot to get to the outcomes. But here, let me just talk about just one policy, affirmative action. This is seen as a progressive policy. I do think it's a progressive policy, but there are limitations to it. In most countries, when they introduced it, the target was on education and public sector employment. Malaysia in the first 10 years spent a lot of time on education. And look at what it did. They took poor kids from the villages and send them to good residential schools. Kids from a young age were sent to very good residential schools, got high quality education. The best students among them were then sent to universities abroad and domestically. And from there emerged a new middle class. The greatest success story for Malaysia with affirmative action was the rise of a new Malay middle class within a period of just 20 years. Major success story, which is why many other countries wanted the followers, including South Africa and Fiji. They wanted the followers because this is a clear outcome. In rural areas, where poverty was concentrated, public enterprises were created, sent to the rural areas for agricultural development, land redistribution, and a new landed middle class emerged. How can you complain about this? Aren't these good outcomes? These are fantastic outcomes that you're seeing here. But as time went on, there was a shift. It was a shift from education to business. And I'll come to that. But because of long-term implementation and a shift, poverty was reduced significantly from 65% in 1970 to 3%, according to the government's tabulation, 3%. But whatever it is, it is a fact. Poverty was significantly reduced. I spoke about the presence of new middle class, but here is the case. When you have education, you have education into tertiary institutions, bright students couldn't get into it, minorities. And so you see an outflow of very bright students leaving the country. A major brain loss for the country. And when they tried to have a brain gain program, it didn't work. When young people leave the country at a young age, very seldom do they come back. The second point, public sector employment. This is major. This is the easy part. Just bring them into the government. Give them jobs, which is what they did. And the government, the bureaucracy suddenly bloated. And because it was targeted and not merit based in the bureaucracy, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, when they rapidly industrialized. One of the main reasons was because they had a top notch bureaucracy. The best brains went into the bureaucracy because they were responsible for public policy planning and implementation. It didn't happen here. It became bloated and became one ethnic community contributing to 90% of the public sector employment. How is that even possible? But that's exactly what happened. And the outcomes are, as you see here, serious institutional decline. Our universities used to be very good. They're really down in the doldrums now. If you look at the schools, nobody is interested in public education anymore. It's all private education now. And if you look at the public sector, it is seen to be, as I put here, bloated and inefficient. Hardcore poverty remains because the public delivery system didn't work any longer. If the public delivery system is not efficient, how do you deliver policies to the ground? And that doesn't work. And suddenly now we still have persistent hardcore poverty, selective patronage. The idea is selective patronage targeting to be done by the bureaucrats. They've become entwined with the political system and they become part of the system of selectively deciding who should get the rents on the state. And then you have a serious problem of crudism emerging from this. The other point, which I want to make here is this. And this is crucial. After the first 10 years, the government decided it's not just about education, it's really about business. Creating parity between the richest ethnic members of the ethnic groups. Prime Minister Mahade Muhammad was responsible for this. Said it. If the 20 rich, if the 20 Chinese millionaires, there must be 20 millionaires. And only then can we say parity has been achieved. Now, we're all bald, we laughed. But when I went to the US, I heard a similar argument. They were saying that's exactly what the whole idea, that's the idea behind the policy too. So here, we have to discuss these things. You have to discuss some of these issues about what exactly is the target, what exactly is the outcome of affirmative action. Now here in 1970, state intervened through what is known as state-owned enterprises, we call them government-led companies. They brought about a lot of good things. But what is also interesting is the shift in 1981 from institutions to individuals. Create a group of corporate captains, melee corporate captains, important shifter, institutions to individuals. Targeting within the targeted group. That's exactly what's happening here. Meanwhile, how do you achieve it? Privatization, neoliberal policies fits the bill. Just privatize it to this group. And you create the new rich. And then we have the defining moment, the test. In 1996, President De Klerk from South Africa came to Malaysia, looked upon this model in 1996, said this is the model he wanted and implemented it. I met him at one point and he said that to me. I told him he should have come in 1997. Yes, in 1997, when he came, that's when the Asian financial crisis occurred and everything collapsed. This model was not sustainable. Massive re-nationalization and suddenly the state is again a major player in the economy. Now I wanted to show you this figure. I have only five minutes left, so I'll go through it quickly. The focus is equity redistribution. I can't see it much, but what it's showing here is in 1970, it's true. Malaysia had only 2.4 percent of corporate wealth. The wealth was concentrated in the hands of foreigners, 63 percent. By 1990, significant changes had occurred. And the volume of corporate wealth reduced by 40 percentage points.  And if you look at the minorities, the Chinese and Indians, they too grew. So it's not that minorities didn't grow. They too grew. But the government decided after 1990, carry on. And now it's indefinite. And look at the figures today. All ethnic groups have stagnated or fallen behind. The Malays are far worse than they were in the 1990s. The Chinese and Indians are far worse than they were in 1970 when the policy began. And the group that is on the ascendancy is foreign capital. We are going back to 1970 when the NEP was introduced. That's the outcome of equity redistribution long-term. The figures are here, we all to see, for yourself. Now, actual breakdown, in 1971, Affirmative Action here, very quickly, foreign capital everywhere with few Chinese firms. By 1997, you see the shift. 1997 was a defining year. They had created Malay capitalists. There was a redistribution of wealth. There were new corporate captains. Everyone thought that Malaysia was the great success story for Affirmative Action, creating a corporate class which were in the top 50 in the country. But here, power was concentrated in well-connected businessmen with a powerful state. And then the whole thing collapses. And then the whole thing collapses. Today, what do we have? Basically, re-nationalization. State-owned enterprises or GLCs are the key players in the economy. And if you look at this list, if you won't find any Malay, you'll find one. Two, maybe, and he's selling out. Two Malay corporate captains in the country, after more than 50 years of implementation of the policy. But they still insist on going on. So who's the key player in the economy? Here you are. This figure talks about state capital. In purple is what we call the GLCs, the government-linked companies. Here, we have the ministries, Ministry of Finance, Prime Minister's Department, Ministry of Rural Development. This is just a small segment of the state's involvement in the economy through the GLCs. It's significant. And that means a concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the state. So what are the outcomes? Affirmative action. What have you learned? Duration. Duration. You must have a time limit. The first 10 years were good. But after that, it was downhill all the way. The most important lesson, high quality education is key. When young, in one of the sessions I attended the first day, that was the focus. Primary level education of a high quality is the answer. But it's just one problem. It's so expensive to provide this kind of education at the lowest level. The third issue, very important, access matters. Access is meant for the poor. But access to the rents have been captured by the elites and therein lies the problem. The poor are still left behind. That's why we're still ostensibly, that's the reason for now for the policy. Affirmative action in business, there's no evidence that it works. And finally, the competition. The competition in 1970s was between ethnic groups. Today, it's within ethnic groups. That's a serious change. In terms of neoliberalism and development policies, the focus, individualistic competition, market participation, fine. But the result is a crutch mentality. Prime Minister Mahati, his own words, 22 years as Prime Minister, he said, I have created a crutch mentality. There are no malaise in the top 20 or top 20. There's no one in the industrial sector for highly industrialized country. The SMEs have been undermined. They are hardly involved in industrialization. And we have this process of ethnic bypassing. And meanwhile, ethnic bypassing means you bypass the most entrepreneurial firms. And that's only shooting yourself in the foot and making you more dependent on FDI. And in terms of power in politics, racialized discourses, identity politics is embedded. I have to go through this very quickly. The real feuding now is between elites. I want to conclude with this, the lessons from the policy mix. This is important. Governments are pragmatic and eclectic. You've got to know. You can't just discuss affirmative action, as I said, in isolation. H.I. and neoliberal policies, AA policies and neoliberal policies, you see an interesting convergence going on. Although their aims seem to be different. In terms of property rights, you cannot indefinitely give, take from one ethnic group and give to another. If you do that, you get a huge Malaysian diaspora as we see now. And in terms of issues to debate, this is what I want to leave you all with, affirmative action is a double-edged sword. Let's get to the heart of the matter. Unfortunately, we still haven't got to it yet. And we really need more studies. Hopefully, Rachel will leave this on how do we get to it. Second, and when we talk about affirmative action, must we focus only on asset-based wealth? Can we use other indicators? When I went to Sri Lanka and asked, why didn't you all use wealth to measure the differences between ethnic groups? I was told this was 20 years ago. They said, we dare not go there. Because if we do show how wealth is distributed, that this country is really torn. And I'll leave you with that. We need to find new indicators to discuss how do we do this. Oh, one final word.  Reform the state, break out the hierarchical structure, create a more democratic transparent system of governance. And then we can begin this process of bringing about real change. Thank you.


to the archives for today's Made It Monday. Somehow I have a few garments that I made but never shared with you guys. Blasphemy. I know. So I am writing that wrong by posting them starting with this cowl neck sweater. This is McCalls 7194. It's described as a close-fitting pull-over top with hemline variations and stitched hem on sleeves. It's out of print but there are several listings of it on Etsy. It's really a tried-and-true pattern as it's very versatile and well-drafted right out of the envelope. I didn't even have to shorten it. I made view A with the long sleeves from C. The asymmetrical hem is interesting but A it wasn't right for this fabric and B I'm not sure I'm an asymmetrical hem kind of girl. Maybe in the right fabric I'd make C without the color blocking and as much as I love a ruffle I just don't think the placement of the ruffle right on the hip would look that great on me. Either way, even though I really only like one hem variation of this pattern, the two necklines are great for a one-and-done sweater knit pattern. You can make a chunky cowl like mine, a floppier one like the model, or even a knit band. The fabric I used is a plush sweater knit that I got from fabric.com I think it was a long time ago. To get a similar look to mine, you're gonna be looking for a heftier sweater knit without a lot of drape or fluidity. Instead, search for mid-weight knits with a thick loose weave. You can also try something really unique like a blue clay knit, a novelty knit, or a cable knit. Of course, a wool sweater knit would be amazing too. And if you make the neckband version out of a sweatshirt fleece, you'd have a super comfy but slightly elevated sweatshirt. Styling my sweater is pretty straightforward. I just threw it on with some jeans and booties. It's not the most fashion forward look of all time, but it is super easy to wear, very comfortable, and I think cute. Of course, your fabric choice would significantly impact the finished look here. The pattern design is just so simple, so the fabric really has to carry the style. It's a blank slate for some great fabrics in your stash. 2020 is definitely the year that I started diversifying my makes with more casual and less trendy garments, and this sweater is no exception. Sewing is sewing. And in the end, if you love what you made, who cares if it's the trendiest thing in the world? So I hope you guys like my new sweater. That's going to do it for me today. I will see you all very soon. Bye!


The study aimed to identify the response of melanoccessions and cultivars to salt stress using mixture modeling, which revealed heterogeneity in the dataset. The seedlings of 13 melanogenotypes were harvested two weeks after salt application and nutrient contents, enzyme activities, lipid peroxidation, and photosynthetic pigment contents were measured. Mixture modeling and correlation analysis were used to evaluate the experimental datasets, revealing differences in responses to salt application among genotypes. The YYU-11 and YYU-4 genotypes were found to be the most tolerant to salt stress based on their smallest decreases in K, NaRatios. Enzyme activity decreased in response to salt application with the YYU-29 genotype exhibiting the highest K, NaRatio, and the smallest change in MDA content under salt stress. This article was authored by Sekna's Erting.