2015. This has been amazing, right? So the title of this talk, evidently, is coming soon. And I think that's an apropos because, you know, Tom and Yehuda shouldn't be the only ones who can announce software reports released. But I'll have a little bit more on that later. Again I just wanted to give a big thanks to Leah and Kate and all the volunteers. You guys are amazing and this conference has been really spectacular. Alright, so I wanted to just give you guys a few stories I have thought of while I've been here. The first is that in June 2008 I went to my first conference ever and it was at Rails Conf and it was right here at this convention center in Portland. I had two open source patches accepted at that point to a little tiny project called SAS that some Rails people used here and there. And that conference really inspired me and invigorated me and it left me with this desire to get more involved and more active in my community. And so about a year later after that, one time I was, Yehuda was ranting about something on Twitter. I asked him a question like, I'm not really doing what you said, but I feel like my use case makes sense.  And so it was like 11.15 p.m. and we ended up chatting for about an hour. He helped me with my problem, explained to me his rationale, we sorted it all out. And then we just kept talking and I thought he was a pretty cool guy and that started this ability for us or this internet friendship that we've had for a number of years now. And when we finally said goodbye at about 12.15 p.m. or a.m. there, I went to bed and I shook my wife, oh my God. I just talked to Yehuda Cats and she said, that's nice, dear. That was probably good for you. We have very narrow fame here in the open source world. So then a couple years later, Yehuda sent me a message, she's like, hey, I've got this opportunity. It sounds interesting to me. There's this JavaScript framework. Have you heard of Sprout Core? This guy, Tom, he really wants me to join him on it. What do you think? Should I do it?  I don't know. It's really risky. Like frameworks are hard. Hard to make successful.  But it's going to be hard. It's going to be real hard. But I think I had the call. You guys seem to have pulled it off. All right. So when Yehuda asked me to come speak here, I was actually kind of surprised because I'm not an avid Ember user. That might be changing soon. And, you know, he talks a little bit about kind of I think why he wanted me to come and talk. But I totally get the value of Ember. Like my very first job is writing JavaScript application. It had about 50,000 lines of pure JavaScript. It was my first real job. So it was terrible. And so I definitely saw the value of JavaScript frameworks. Unfortunately, there was no such thing back then. So our app only worked in IE5. So then I started, so I made this thing called SAS. And I figured that they wanted me to come talk a little bit about that. So I have a few things I wanted to say. Just real quick show of hands. You use SAS. Awesome. Okay. So not completely invaluable. I have a great job. I work at LinkedIn. And at LinkedIn, they really do love open source software. We like to use it. We like to contribute to it. And we're hiring. They pay me to do open source development for a good portion of what I do. And it's pretty awesome. So actually one of the things I've been trying to do lately is get Ruby's SAS to work nicely in JavaScript applications of various sorts. And I have not had a good time with this.  And so after trying and spending months and months to try to make it decent, decided to take a little bit different approach. In particular, one of the things that's really been troubling us is the performance of Ruby SAS. And we've worked on it. I've spent months chasing down performance issues there. Natalie is working on some interesting ideas. But I really feel like Lib SAS is where the future is for SAS development. And so I'm putting a lot of my weight behind making that successful right now. So if you go to the SAS organization on GitHub, you'll see Lib SAS there. You'll see Node SAS. These are SAS projects. And we are working really hard to make them successful. For those of you who don't know what Lib SAS is, it's a C++ implementation of the SAS compiler. And so we've made this new project called iGlass. And what it does is it leverages the capabilities of Node SAS and brings this basically NPM and the ecosystem, a lot like what Ember does where you're able to install add-ons and it automatically discovers them. It basically does this for SAS. It'll be able to integrate with a number of different build systems, including Ember CLI. And depending on your style sheets, you will see speed-ups of considerable time. My guess is that we've seen numbers on the order of 5x. We've seen people report numbers of 100x. So you're going to get a big speed-up if you're switching over to Lib SAS. So one of the reasons that I started focusing on iGlass right off the bat is the first thing is that iGlass is really, it's meant to bring community to the Lib SAS ecosystem, and especially to the JavaScript community for the SAS users. And so we've got, that's really the thing that Compass in my mind always was, was an ability to let people share their style sheets with each other. And so I'm not, you know, who is like, Chris is really great at maintaining things. So Compass is kind of end of life at this point. Like iGlass is going to be, iGlass is going to become what Compass was probably for the JavaScript community. I still have to maintain the Ruby side of things for a number of years. So it's not disappearing right away, but that's where the active development is going. What iGlass isn't is a CSS prefixer. It's not a bunch of SAS mix-ins to help you do CSS resets. Like that stuff is handled better by the community. Auto prefixer is awesome, like use that. And so with iGlass we're able to get the extensions in, let them play nicely with each other, and give you access to a community of people who are distributing their style sheets, just like code that you can get access to via nice systems like NPM. I hear some people don't like NPM. So we have a developer preview. We can't actually release it until Node SAS 3.0 comes out. That should be in the next couple of weeks. And if you're interested in helping develop or building extensions on top of it, we would love to have your help. So one of the reasons that I was focusing on this first in terms of bringing SAS to our JavaScript environment was that community is probably the number one factor in the success of frameworks, like Ember frameworks like SAS. You know, people come for the technology. They see the value of it. I think they stay for the love. But community is not an accident. It's something that has to be baked in from the beginning when you're designing your software. It's especially integral to frameworks. And community is how our software is built. It's how it's extended. It's how it's maintained. And it's how it succeeds. The community is people like yourselves. And the Ember core team, they know this. They have focused on community from day one. They develop in the open. They make sure that things like add-ons work great.  So I'm going to let you in on a little secret about how to make a vibrant community just be excellent to each other.  Actually, it's kind of hard. It's super easy to be nice to nice people. It's a little bit harder. If they're naysayers, it's harder. They walk in. There's some entitled jerk posting on your issue tracker.  Things get out of hand pretty fast. And on the internet, our words are cashed indefinitely.  Moms are great. But this is real. If you're sitting around, you're thinking about saying something maybe not super nice. In the SaaS community, we have had a problem with this and it comes from a place of love. We want to share about SaaS. It's so much better than what you do. Whatever it is you do, it's so much better than that. We want to tell you about it. And so I was the first SaaS hole. I would walk around telling everybody how they were doing it wrong. They were using CSS. And if they had just used SaaS, it would have been better. Right. So JavaScript community, something I've noticed. Y'all are kind of jerks to each other sometimes. Open source community, actually, abroad, I would say that we could all be a lot nicer to each other. I'm pretty sure that every conference has at least one of these. So unsurprisingly, there were some replies.  I'm guilty of this, too. Marcellus Wallace actually said it best. So, yeah, we get invested in our open source contributions. We're not getting paid to develop this stuff. We're doing it because we love it. We probably had some really awesome idea. We invested our nights in it and our weekends. But when people attack it, they're not attacking you. They're attacking that idea or whatever it is, and you have to find a way to separate yourself from it. I had a really hard time with this. And at one point in time in my career, I actually got therapy so that I could learn how to not get angry. Not a bad thing to try.  I'm going to get them. Step away from the keyboard for a minute. Right, so I had a few things to say as well. And I think it's important to know that if you stop and you think about these things for a little bit, maybe it's not a competition. Maybe we can just all win. And you know, Jeremy's a pretty cool guy, I guess. He backpedaled a bit. Said nice things. And I agreed. I actually had said this at around the same time. You know, this isn't good UX. This is a benchmark. People would do it to stress test the way our things work. But I think there is a conundrum here, right? Because we're competing with each other. How do we do that without being negative? It's pretty natural. We have to form comparisons. And they're natural, and they're necessary. And it's really easy for them to be harmful to the tone of the conversation. It's super easy to attack their weaknesses and ignore their strengths. I think this was from IE8. Yeah, they have security. But they all have the web standards down. Right, so let's be honest. We're all software engineers here. Your software is making trade-offs. Your job is to make the trade-offs between any number of countless things. You have to make those decisions at an architectural level, at a code level. And if you only attack somebody's weaknesses and you don't recognize their strengths, you're not being fair to your competitor. And you're not going to be respected as a fair evaluator of things. And so I would just encourage everybody, if you're comparing things on the internet, the goal isn't to make your thing better, but to say what your thing is better at. And the other thing is probably good at something else. And everybody's working at their hardest on it to make something great. And to respect our competitors. All right. So I love this quote, because if you have learned to disagree without being disagreeable, then you have discovered the secret of getting along. Whether it be business, family relations, or life itself. And for me, this has really been true. Really been true. So I had an idea. What if Jeremy had said this? I was curious how Backbone would perform using the same performance benchmark as Ember and React. Pretty happy with the results. And just threw that out there. Like how much different of a conversation would that have been? Would people on this side of the equation have responded as adversarial as they did if he had come out with a more diplomatic way of publishing his results? I think it's important to respect our audience enough to let them draw their own conclusions. Furthermore, I think confidence is a lot about knowing that sometimes you don't have to engage. So there was this time when I was younger, I had a sports car. It wasn't out of ETT. It wasn't like the greatest sports car in the world. I was stopped at a stoplight and this guy drove up. I don't even know what he was. It was like a souped-up something or another. And he, like, revved his engine at me. Oh, he wants to race. Interesting. And I revved my engine back at him. But I knew I could beat him. I wasn't interested in racing him. So the light turns green. That guy tears off as fast as he can. And I just kind of took off. Went on my merry way. Why take the risk of me getting a ticket or whatever else? Accident. There was no benefit for me in having that argument, that conversation, that race. But yet, when I was doing open-source software, people started criticizing what I had done or saying that some idea was done.  And I'm like, no, they're not. And finally, a guy on the Internet, his name is Jeff Croft, he pulled me inside. He's like, dude, stop defending what you make so much. Like, it's good. Your work speaks for itself. Just let it go. And so I would just say, guys, like, Ember is really good. Let it go. And you know what? Sass didn't lose when I started ignoring the haters. In fact, we're doing fine. Right. So, hey, Tom. At the speaker dinner, you said something along the lines of, I feel like Ember is beleaguered, like similar to like Apple was in its early days. So I actually want to challenge that perception a little bit. I do think that this idea has actually served you guys really well because I know how motivating it can be. But I just want to ask you a question. Like, why is Ember going to win? There's 625 of you here. You're all betting on Ember. Why is it going to win? I hear it's because of us. Leadership, good leadership. Excellent, backwards compatibility and upgrading. That's super important. Tooling, good. So that was kind of a trick question. What does it mean to win? I don't even know. I don't even know what this means. Like, do you want to have the most users? Do you want to be the fastest?  The easiest to adopt?  So my dad once said something to me that I thought was pretty cool. He's like, find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life. I don't think he made that up. I think he heard it somewhere. I'm going to tell you that if you use a framework that you love, you'll never work a day in your life. And so the question I have for you guys is if you love Ember, raise your hand. For those of you who didn't raise your hand, come on, I know you've wanted to. So congratulations, you may have already won. If winning means being number one, I would just say like be really careful what you asked for because you just may get it. Number one means being the default choice. That means your support is going to be way harder. You're going to be picking up users who are less experienced. Community, good luck. Who here wants to enter a lottery to attend EmberConf 2020? No?  All right, not me. I always, I never get it. I would actually argue that being number two is the sweet spot. And this is actually born out in history time and time again.  You're going to have to do less supports. You're going to be able to spend more time on making quality products, better features. And because you are having a better fit of users, you're going to have a much more awesome community. I wouldn't, I don't think that Apple has actually won now. I think Apple's won at this point. I don't think it was in spite of being beleaguered. I think it was because of it. They were able to take a different approach. They could focus on being good at their niche markets and being really great in quality. And many of you guys may not realize it, but SaaS was actually number two for most of its life. In the beginning there was CSS, and SaaS was just kind of this thing, and CSS was the competitor. Not long after SaaS, it started to break through. Less came along. Less was super easy to pick up. Its syntax was better, and they gained a ton of momentum. And that definitely inspired us to catch up. But actually less ended up growing too fast. They picked up so many users. People, they kind of just collapsed under the weight of their own community. I had heard from the maintainer that it was just so hard for him because he felt like all he ever did was user support and hardly had any time to work on making the quality that he wanted to make. So just like in racing where you let the guy in front do all the hard work, you let him cover all the hard stuff and then you're kind of just drafting behind and then right at the end, then maybe you can win. So I'm not telling you to stop learning from other people, but maybe you don't view it as a competition so much. Do what you do because you love it. Use what you use because you love it. And if you do that, you'll probably just end up being number one anyway. And by then you'll probably be ready for it. Thank you very much. I've loved hanging out with you guys this last couple of days. I hope you'll keep in touch with me on Twitter. I'm super excited to be making SAS easier for you guys to use. And I got to tell you I have some really exciting ideas for how SAS and Ember can work together to make some new innovations beyond where we're even at right now. Thank you.


Residents in the south of the island will call on to play an important role in preventing the breathing of vectors and reducing the threat of vector-borne diseases. Medical Office of Health, Dr. Glensford Joseph says, despite environmental health professionals providing valuable information on vector control, it is also the responsibility of residents to participate in integrated measures to eradicate vectors. Vector control, while we use this opportunity to raise awareness with our engagement in the community, vector control is a daily activity. Each one of us need to play our part in controlling vectors. Each one of us, with the little contribution we make in our homes, in our immediate environment, our yards in the workplaces. Collectively, we can, as a country, reduce the population of vectors, more so mosquitoes and rodents, and as a result, reduce the incidence or the number of new cases of vector-borne diseases that we are having in St. Lucia. Assistant Chief Environmental Health Officer, Cheryl Eugene St. Rumin says, it is important that community members work together to eliminate vector-breeding grounds and protect themselves from vector-borne diseases. I want to continue telling people that we cannot do it alone. That is the Ministry of Health, Wellness, and Elderly Affairs. We need the residents together. We can do it. And as our theme went, some anude to them in Pupli Bonsate, so we need to engage each other. We need to support each other. And that's the only way we can eradicate these vectors. The Environmental Health Division encourages inclusions to continue taking proactive measures to combat the growth of the vector population. Reporting from the Communications Unit of the Ministry of Health, Wellness, and Elderly Affairs, I am Fennel Neptune.


Those are medieval robots. I'm sure you remember those old kaiyu gets grounded go animate videos. You know, the one where everything is pre-animated, everybody speaks in weird little text to speech voices.  It would go from having a temper tantrum, to breaking something for fun, to burning down a denny's and leaving no survivors. Then he would be grounded for a cartoonish amount of time, usually by his dad, Boris. Also the monk was named Doris. For the longest time by the way, I just thought that Boris was the fan-made fandom accepted go animate name for Kaiyu's dad, and that Kaiyu's dad was just named Daddy, or just Kaiyu's dad. Same for Kaiyu's mom being named Doris. I remember being sorta surprised when I realized those were their actual names. Thing is, go animate had to rebrand to Vion on May 6th 2018, because of the ungodly amount of Kaiyu gets grounded videos that became what the platform was at that point.  Something always vaguely unsettled me about these videos. The expressionless text to speech voices, the lack of music, the strange pacing, the pre-animated expressions, and those times where somebody would yell really loud or something loud would happen, and the screen would go entirely red and the audio would be distorted to all hell, which startles me from time to time. Because, you know, that's the basic human response to big scary noise onoes. Recently I decided to re-watch some of these videos. I watched a hefty amount of videos that were created around 2014 to 2017. However, one video I had watched interested me. It was titled, every single one of them. I obviously didn't understand what this meant. The video was uploaded exactly on May 6th 2018. It was also the last video on the uploader's channel. They've not posted anything since. The uploader was TylerSharks38 or something along those lines. I am going to describe the video here. I accidentally deleted it from my watch history, as I was deleting all the Caillou gets grounded stuff from my search and watch history because I did not want my recommendations to be fried beyond belief with all that stuff. So I don't have the video, and I can't find it either. But this is what I remember. Caillou wakes up.  Today is going to be a great day. Caillou just stares into space with the happy expression for a bit before sitting up from his bed. This is when I noticed that the GoAnimate logo was flickering in and out throughout the video. He speaks again. I should go downstairs. Now, he didn't say downstairs. He said downstairs. Caillou's mom was at the bottom of the stairs in the same old living room from all of the videos.  It jump-cuts to a black screen with white text reading at school. Caillou was in class. The teacher was just reading out the Pythagorean theorem. Caillou suddenly screams out, Boring at the top of his lungs. And by screaming, I mean they just typed boring into the TTS and made everything red and really, really loud. Excuse me? Caillou goes to the principal's office and just says, K-Y-S over and over again. Later, Caillou is sent home. Caillou's dad grounds him for a cartoonishly long amount of time. Then, Caillou goes up to his room and cries. And by crying, I mean they typed waw with a random amount of A's into the TTS voice, and it ended up sounding like, Water Common GoAnimate stuff. Here's where the memorable stuff comes in. After Caillou crying for a long time, the GoAnimate logo, which has been flickering in and out for the entire video, finally disappears for good. After a bit of awkward silence after the crying ends, Caillou looks up, still crying. He stops for a bit. Suddenly, his eyes looked down. Wait, where's the watermark? The sky behind the window in the background starts flickering in and out of blindness. We cut to Caillou's parents in the living room, the sky now flickering. Caillou's mom speaks to Caillou's dad. Something feels wrong. Caillou's mom says, Like what? Boris responds, Something should have happened by now. I'm not saying I don't like it, but it seems like nothing has been happening at all today past Caillou, doing that. I'm probably just overthinking things. Probably. Silence in the room until Boris notices the outside.  Boris, what are you? Oh my god.  Their faces changed to the scared expression. I was very interested at this point. I was in no way expecting this from a Caillou gets grounded go animate video out of all things. I also felt a little dumb for being an ironically interested in this. We cut to Caillou in his room again. We see Caillou crouched down, inspecting the space where the watermark used to be. We suddenly hear a loud knock on the door. Caillou instinctively goes back to sitting on the edge of his bed. Caillou's parents burst in. Boris does not look angry, but just concerned. Caillou, something is very wrong. Where's the watermark? Caillou's mom looked down and paused.  The watermark. How does that even happen? Boris looks down as well, and just stares in confusion. The hell? Boris speaks up. We came here because we think something bad is happening. Something is happening outside. Wait, what? What's happening outside? Caillou responds in his high pitched TTS voice. We don't know, just come look outside. Caillou had a concerned look on his face. Cut back to the living room. Everybody walks in, and Caillou looks outside. Oh my god, what's going on? Like we said, we know what's happening just as much as you. Caillou's mom says. What would happen if we went outside while this was happening? I don't think it's safe to go outside now. Boris says. Maybe we could see without going outside. Boris walks out of frame. Boris asks what he's doing, and he reassures her that she doesn't need to worry. Boris comes out with a pin, and opens the door. He carefully drops the pin onto the ground outside, and once it flickers into black, it suddenly disappears. Once everything flickers back to normal, the pin is gone. That can't be good. Says Boris. He crawls backwards and closes the door again. What are we supposed to do now? asks Boris. This stuff has probably gotten on the news by now. Turn on the TV. Replies Boris. The TV turns on, and we see somebody reporting the news. Breaking news. Something is happening outside, and it is currently dangerous to go outside until further notice. Stay inside. We cut to the news reporter, only for them to notice something off in the distance. After a long pause with a confused face, they speak up.  We hear the sound of very loud footsteps, being cut off before we can see whatever is sprinting at the guy. Get away from me. The screen goes too static, then a technical difficulties screen. What just happened? Boris asks. A long pause without any answer is given. Everybody has a concerned and scared look on their faces. Kyu breaks the long silence, and asks. Daddy, what's happening? More silence. I... I don't know. Suddenly, the outside stops flickering, and everything outside of the house goes black. Boris notices this.  What Boris? asks Boris. Everything outside is gone. Another long uncomfortable pause. Oh my god, Rosie. She isn't here. Boris immediately runs away into the distance, and into Rosie's room. Thankfully, she's there. He assures everyone that Rosie is okay. Rosie speaks in a higher-pitched TTS voice, just repeating. With the crying animation on repeat. Thank god. Boris says. A black screen with white text appears, reading, three weeks later. I expected the screen to fade to something horrible or sad, but the family seemed to be in good shape despite the fact their house was in a black inky void. They looked calmer than before, but they still didn't look happy, obviously. Must have had a good amount of food in the pantry, I guess. Kyu is drawing on some leftover paper to cleanse his boredom, and Rosie is sleeping in Boris's arms. Boris speaks up. How long do you suppose this is going to last? Boris asks what he means, and he explains that he feels as though he doesn't know if they are ever gonna get out of the black void. Suddenly, in the middle of the conversation, a loud knock on the door is heard. Everybody stops and looks scared. Kyu stops drawing and looks overconfused.   I'd be too. Probably ain't a person. Doris yells out and attempts to get Boris to stop. Wait. I don't think you should open that door.  I haven't seen another human for a concerning amount of time. I am opening that door. Boris, please. He opened the door.  A beyond character. Not go animate, but a character after the rebrand. You know, the more angular simplistic look. It was three men in white suits, smiling. Boris only responds with...  Other people. Come inside. The suited men don't respond, but they oblige. They simply sit around and wander in random directions. Boris tries to speak to them various times, only for them to just walk past him and have their own conversation. And by that, I mean they just made facial expressions and mouth movements at each other as if talking. Suddenly, Boris looks outside, only to see the various men in suits walking in single file lines. Honey, look. There's more people. Everybody has a joyful expression, but Caillou, also joyful, asks a question. Why are none of them speaking? Boris responds with that he doesn't know. Caillou gets some more paper and asks them to write on them in order to have an actual conversation. Everybody cheers him on. However, despite the idea working, they only wrote simple responses. Even when Doris encouraged them to write a bit more, they simply wrote, We don't feel like it, with a little smiley face. But one of them specifically wrote beyond in big orange letters and would not write anything else. Every time it showed the paper, it just cut to a white screen with the message typed on. However, Boris realized something. Wait, if they were able to walk around out there, we probably can too. Boris was very happy, and I would be too. He does so, and no danger is met. He is perfectly fine. He tells his family this, and they all become happy. They all decide to go for a walk in the void, and the camera angle never changes. We are again met with the suit in beyond guys. One of them passes over piece of paper to the other. It cuts to a white screen to show the paper. The plan is almost complete. They have been fooled. Cut to the rest of the family walking around in the void. As they walked around, they found various things. A lamp, a mug, the pen from earlier, and what seems to be a pool of blood with brain matter. And one eyeball inside of it, in that order. They immediately ran away as soon as the blood was visible. Boris told everybody about the blood stains they found. The beyond guys didn't react. They just walked forward, and didn't stop. The family backed up. Hey, what are you doing? Aren't you concerned about the blood stains we found? Boris asked. The beyond guys closed the door to the house behind them, and kept walking forwards. However, one of the beyond guys caught his attention. Sure caught mine, that's for sure. All of them stopped suddenly.  No, you can't be. Boris said, not getting to finish his sentence. He just stared in horror, for good reason. The middle beyond guys' neck snapped, but he didn't collapse. Film pores from his mouth, and his arms start to stretch out, becoming longer as the sounds of bones cracking are heard.  His smile shifts into a frown. His fingers looked broken and wrong, all pointing in different directions.  The now monstrous beyond guy begins to speak, in a raspy, deep and burbling voice.  He slowly shifts his mutilated hand upwards, before the fingers in that hand all instantly go back to normal. His pointer finger rises, pointing at the family. He says one more thing. The other beyond guys start screaming like hyenas, and charge at the family, one of them grabbing Boris's throat before the screen cuts to black. Suddenly, after a long silent black screened pause, an image began to fade in. An image of Kyu. It didn't look anything like GoAnimate. The uploader probably drew it themselves, possibly in Microsoft Paint. It displayed Kyu on a black background. His whole body looked as though he were standing in the shadows. He had a gaping mouth, and only one eye. The eye was located in a way bigger socket. The eye looked as though it were glowing. It was yellow. His nose was not drawn. The rest of him looked like how it usually does. White text was next to Kyu's ghost-like appearance. Goodbye GoAnimate. Hello, Beyond. After a few moments of the image staying on the screen, the Beyond watermark appeared where the GoAnimate watermark once was. I didn't screenshot it when the Beyond watermark appeared, but I got a screenshot nonetheless. I got a screenshot of the video just for the sake of screenshotting it. Now, this is the only proof that the video exists. If anybody has it, please send it. And don't send a virus. There's an ungodly amount of anti-virus software on my computer, so don't even try. But if anybody has the video and can send it to me, please do. I want to bring attention to this video, because it was very interesting and surprisingly well made. I also just wanted to know why the creator stopped uploading. I don't blame them. I wouldn't want to make Kyu gets grounded videos for my whole life either. But something is telling me it's something else. Something way more than what I can imagine.


My name is Addie my name is Ricky Hi, I'm Jasmine. I mean Shawn. Nice to meet you. Do we just pick one question gonna pick three questions Oh, what are your thoughts on astrology? I think it's actually pretty interesting. I think a red flag is a guy who like shoots down astrology like as soon as he mentioned I do not believe in astrology. I'm a Leo What's yours Odian son, I'm a Leo. Oh, okay. What does that mean? That's a red flag. That's a red flag for you No, why I don't like Leo's. What's your type? My type? I like girls who are not ashamed of their dark circles I guess someone definitely like honestly like smarter than me low-key. I don't really have a type I guess like good personality sense of humor about the personality So what about the personality you build different? Yeah, I'm different too because I'm just your type there. Oh Every guy, what about funny guys who are ugly? Oh Me shoot I might have my Valentine tonight What you doing and now let me take you out Gallantines though after after after I like girls who Have like one eye bigger than the other Kanye or Taylor Swift Taylor Swift, of course for sure I think generally I'd probably gravitate more towards Kanye.  I think it's okay. Okay. I liked a lot of old Kanye.  Oh, no crypto is like love It goes like long. I think crypto is like love so, you know, it goes up when you want it and down when you don't Very insightful. And what's your most unpopular opinion kind of like sardines? I don't know I think this is pretty generic, but just like love Reality TV shows. Why are the bachelor though?  I don't know if it's unpopular. I feel like that's pretty popular Oh, I'm a pretty controversial one. I'm not a big fan of like pet dogs I Definitely I feel like cereal first is the right way to do it. No, but if you put a cereal first, it's gonna get soggy, right? So so like what if you put a milk first, it's more crunchy, right? Okay? I'm sorry I'm gonna have to decline man. Okay. That's a deal breaker. I'm so sorry What's your biggest red flag? Probably the girl is too pretty Yeah, I think my red flag is if she's like a murderer Like if she's like killed someone in the past. Wait, but I feel like that's fine So I'm she gets on my friends. I should ask you listening to the Joe Rogan podcast You can be a serial killer she just can't be a serial killer to me and my friends I understand that that a deal breaker for me is when they talk about factory farming Yeah, I'd have to agree with that too. Yeah, it ruins the whole vibe What is your celebrity crush celebrity crush don't say my will be Jordan probably like Frank Ocean. I Like Frank Ocean. Yeah, I'm gonna fight off a euphoria This is a straight baddie my celebrity crush would probably be Rihanna That's I can I can get behind.     What? Oh, so I will marry Oski.  Are you kidding me, dude? I think your marriage material. Oh, so I'm gonna marry you. Oh, okay. Thank you


one of the things that we can begin to realize that meditation is not just one thing. So those people that say like, or the people that I've encountered that go, oh, I've tried meditation, but didn't really work for me. I kind of question what they mean by work for me. Usually when I hear them, they say, well, I tried meditating and I just kept thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking. And so I felt like I was doing it wrong, right? Or I was meditating and I felt really uncomfortable and so I didn't feel zen-like or peaceful. And those are some of the myths that I break about meditation that meditation is not about feeling calm. It's not about feeling relaxed. Sometimes it's a side benefit through practice over time, but it's not it's not the primary aim. And so when I share meditation or mindfulness, it's really about targeting for processes that that we human beings go through or can skillfully begin to incorporate into our lives. And so one is that there's an opportunity to enhance self-awareness. And the thing that you become self-aware of as a human being through meditation is we only go through a few processes in any given second of our lives. I got the breath, I got the five senses, I got feelings and sensations in my body, and I got thoughts and images going through my head in any given second. And what you first learn when you try to sit with yourself, whether it's the breath or just listening to the sound, is that there's one aspect of your experience that dominates you and that's thinking, that's thought. And thought pulls you away from the present moment and pulls you into an imaginary future that hasn't happened yet or a past that's no longer here. And sometimes that past is not so pretty and can create suffering or that future can create worry and anxiety. And so you can begin to be self-aware of that and then as a skill, you can also learn to contact the present moment. Kind of going back to earlier, the mind has a constructed side and destructed side. So when my mind is not being helpful or useful in creating lies that appear real, we can begin to shift our awareness and attention to the skill in the here and now, come back to the safety of the here and now, which can look as simple as I'm a human being sitting in a chair, I got the breath, there's the ground, there's laptop, there's some sounds and that's way kinder than whatever my mind might be saying about the future. And then we could also, through meditative practice, target these skills of learning as best as we can to be a neutral observer of our sensations in our body, as well as our thoughts. And I'll kind of start with that second part, like why would I want to be a neutral observer of my sensations or enhance that capacity? Well, usually when we're trying to move towards meaningful things in our life, whether it's, oh, I want to talk to that attractive person over there, and I just want to say hello, or I want to ask for a job promotion, or I want to do something new and it's totally unknown. The heart might race a little bit, you know, you might feel a little queasy in your stomach, your chest might tighten, and naturally, because it's almost like even where biological hardwired to move towards pleasure and away from pain, when that occurs in our physical body, we just go, okay, I'm just going to not go in that direction so I can soothe myself and feel okay. But one of the things that you can enhance as an ability is to begin to shift your relationship to those sensations, because all sensations or feelings, they come and go in their nature, you can just check your experience, even intense ones, then you don't want to let them dictate whether you move in that meaningful direction or not. And then secondly, you can enhance this capacity to see, which is the most revolutionary thing I think a human being at any age can discover is seeing thoughts as thoughts. And the more you begin to see thoughts as thoughts, as opposed to thoughts as truth or thoughts as facts, the more you're able to see like, my mind's being helpful here, and my mind's beating me up here, or oh, this is an old thought that I took on because my mom or dad when I was growing up said it a gazillion times, like I'll just make up one, like I'm not good enough just to say, as an example, let's just say, if that thought keeps coming up in different scenarios, like is that really my own thought, or was that handed to me, you know, because of a personal history or some experiences that I had that were challenging, or that's just one way my mind's limiting me, and I need to enhance my ability to go, hey, that's not necessarily me, even though my mind's claiming that's me, but that's actually just a thought amongst other thoughts. And when we're able to build that ability to shift our relationship, not easy, it's a skill, we can discover this capacity to move in more authentic ways. And then lastly, when I'm sharing meditative work with my clients, and meditation, I say, this is kind of the deeper essence of meditation that you could touch into, which is discovering who and what you are beyond your mind. So usually when it comes to our identities, we go, I am my job, I am my relationships, I am the amount of money I have my bank, I am my body, I am, you know, that thing that happened to me in the past, I am the judgy inner critic that comes up and beats me up. And one of the things you can discover in meditation is, oh, wait, that's stuff I took on in my life, it's not my essence, it's not my essential nature. And different traditions use different words for what it is.  Some science people might say, oh, you're consciousness. Other traditions might say, hey, you're awareness, or you're the noticing being. But one of the things that's valuable from a psychotherapeutic standpoint of, or just living life to discover that sense of self that's grander and bigger than any of those other things that we typically identify with is there's a sense of wholeness that could be tapped into. And especially if those things like, hey, I got the body and I don't got the body anymore, I got the relationship and divorce just happened, or I got the money and now I'm broke. Well, if I'm not defining myself by those external things, that's useful because those things are going to come and go at some point in our lives. And so we have this capacity to touch back into a deeper sense of wholeness and then go after all those things. If you're interested in it, if it's coming from a whatever an authentic place might look like for each of us, you know, go for the relationship, go for the money, go for the body, go for all that. But it may come from a different place when you touch back into this deeper sense of wholeness. And so I see meditation as a practicality. There's many other reasons why I share meditation, but those are kind of four primary reasons. It's self awareness, learning to contact the present moment as a skill, helping ourselves become a neutral observer of thoughts and sensations, and then discovering who and what we are beyond our minds. And then through all of that, more clarity, freedom, and inner peace is a possibility.


Friends, the today's topic for discussion is about a very significant aspect of life. It deals with self. All of us have a notion of self and we use that notion to relate to our environment. In fact, we consider ourselves as an agent and we use that notion of agency to organize our behavior. This kind of dialogue which occurs between me and I is a continuous process and throughout the day, we engage with others using self as an anchor. Today's discussion will focus on how culture shapes the notion of self. The agenda for today's discussion is one which deals with the relationship between culture and psychology. What are the cultural roots of self and its psychological implications and the Indian perspective on self? Let us begin with three important submissions. I propose that for any culture, the way we consider a person as an agent and the way we consider a person in relation to other fellow beings in community are two important tasks. They may be considered as the notion of agency and the notion of communion. One has to resolve how we structure the notion of agency and how we structure the notion of communion. I also propose that the notion of self becomes a bridge between self, between the individual and society. Now, individual and society are important components in any kind of conceptualization of social behavior. The notion of individual as a separate entity and the notion of society as a collective are important ingredients in thinking about social behavior. As we will examine the two notions are considered quite differently in different cultural contexts. The third important point that I want to share with you is that emotional experiences and expressions are very intimately related to self and shape our social interaction. In recent developments in the study of self and emotion, it has become quite clear that the way we conceptualize our self is very closely related to the moments in which we are emotionally engaged. We become aware about our self when there is some kind of emotional involvement. It is an important proposition in some form or the other. It has been with us in theorizing about self. If you remember, the psychoanalytic thought very clearly implicates the emotional changes upheavals in relation to thinking about self. The further development that has taken place in humanistic psychology which takes another dimension. They are also self transformation is considered quite relevant, where emotional change is very crucial. Now, we would like to see how self has been treated within the mainstream psychology. I would like to begin with the proposition by William James, who happens to be the senior most psychologist in American tradition. He has treated self as a puzzle of puzzles. According to him, self is the central concern in our behavior. As you can see, he treats self as the center of the psychological universe and it works as a lens through which other aspects of the world are perceived. So, how we organize our self concept? What are its elements? What are the boundaries of this self? All these things are going to shape the way we relate to others, the way we conduct ourselves and treat various aspects of social environment. The notion of self and the division between the individual and society have a tradition in the Euro American thought and the key features include a kind of dualism between mind and body known as Cartesian dualism. There is emphasis on ability to reason and free will and finally, a kind of capitalist spirit, where individual is considered to be an agency to achieve its goals and realize its aspirations as an independent entity is central. If you read the literature, examine the various ways in which self has been conceived, you will see that it has a peculiar structure. It is a unified, causally active, integrated, bounded, autonomous and objective structure. All these terms are very crucial. They tell that self is an integrated structure and it is related to activities in a causal fashion. It has a definite boundary which separates self from other things or the others and it is autonomous in terms of ability to initiate action. You will recollect that self-efficacy appears to be a major concept in social psychological tradition which talks about one's ability to perceive one's capacity. How you think that you can perform in various situations, your perception of self-competence is very crucial in directing your behavior influences your motivation and action. This kind of notion which considers human action as authored by the self is very familiar in the Euro-American thought and it has been considered to be a kind of a prototype to think about self and it has become naturalized that is this is the objective nature of self. We forget that this kind of proposition which is the proposition shared by most of the theories is one which is contributed by a particular kind of cultural discourse. If you go to psychological literature, you will notice that there has been considerable change in interest in the notion of self while William James did talk about self and particularly attended to issues of self esteem and the way we think about different kinds of self all those things are there. But after that we find that with rise of behaviorism self became a theme of very little interest because it did not provide opportunity to examine behavior in objective way and it was more philosophical than psychological. Very recently perhaps in 80s the interest in research the interest in self has revived and today at least there are 40-50 terms where self is used an epithet you have self determination you have self efficacy you have various notions like self esteem. I have checked in American psychological abstract that there are about 50-60 terms where self is used. So, different facets of self are being examined very seriously and people are looking at self as a cognitive structure the way we represent self and the way we organize ourselves usually psychologists ask the question who are you and a person has to respond to that and whatever reflections are given they are used to describe self there are majors of self concept there are also attempts to look at specific aspects of self functioning and as you must have seen the interesting review by Marcus and Kitayama how the notion of self varies across cultures and how the variation in the notion of self relates to cognitive and affect to functioning. When we talk about culture we need to recognize that as Hofstede has mentioned quite interestingly that culture acts like a collective programming of mind how people in a particular culture share certain notions certain ideas certain meaning systems certain practices and according to that we organize our behavior our thoughts perceptions motives emotions are organized according to the notion of self. The systematic investigation of self that has taken place in recent years has shown that there are many more dimensions for instance Marcus and Nureus has talked they have talked about the notion of possible selves that how you think about your future how you organize your thoughts about future and I think the engagement in thinking about your future self becomes a motivating force I just wanted to share that self has returned to the scheme of psychological thinking in a big way and it is now related to almost all cognitive and motivational processes. Self is not a biological phenomenon self is not something which can be reduced to neurological activity self is a phenomenon which is organized around the discourse to which we are exposed in the course of our early life the kind of activities the kind of arrangements the kind of stimuli which are present in our immediate social environment help us to develop a notion of self. I remember an interesting notion which was given by Cooley and that was about the notion of looking glass self we see our self as others tell the significant others informers they tell that who are we so what are the characteristics that are present in us they are identified with the help of this kind of learning so self is something which is acquired from various kinds of experiences that take place in our life. It has been reported that human beings have this peculiar capacity to make the self as an object and this is possible because of the capacity of reflection and this capacity is missing in animals there are some reports about chimpanzees that they do have some kind of notion but the full-fledged notion of self is missing in their behavior it is around one and half years that a child starts recognizing his own body and thinking that he is the self if the child looks into the mirror and recognizes the self accurately before that they do not recognize themselves when they look into the mirror. So the point is that early in during early years children start recognizing themselves as a separate entity and formation of this self in a particular direction is guided by the opportunities for learning which are available in family in school and in community settings. So culture develops through membership in some local cultural community and through a history of symbolically mediated experiences in that context I have already explained this point that you participate in the activities of a group or community and through that you identify yourself with certain features certain characteristics the cultural practices are not only sources of personal and social identity but they also operate as strategies for managing self and its relationship with the rest of the world. The cultural practices not only describe the self and its properties but they also provide certain ways techniques methods to arrange the relationship to regulate the relationship between self and others. Finally our perception and experiences of self are colored by cultures that we inhibit this summarizes the cultural perspective which recognizes the necessity of cultural learning for formation of the notion of self. Let us see cultural variations in self. Now before we come to examine the various types of self construals that are observed in different cultural contexts it is important to realize that cultures help us to organize the world of our experience. We as human beings try to reduce the complexity in our environment. Cognitive psychologists say that we are cognitive misers and in order to reduce the complexity of the world of experience we use categories we make distinctions on the basis of categories. We divide the world between the self and the other and how this partitioning takes place in other words what will be included in the category of self and what will be included in the category of other is provided by the cultural background the cultural experience of a particular individual. So we form boundaries between me and rest of the world in different ways and the boundaries of psychosocial self are functional boundaries. They are functional boundaries in the sense that they allow you to relate to others and they also help you to create a definite structure called self. They are like doors they join and separate it is through self that you relate to others and you also distinguish yourself with others from others. The boundaries that do not act as bridges become barriers there are different ways of creating the boundary. The boundary between self and other may be a permeable boundary where others have this possibility that they can become members of yourself or boundary may be a solid one which maintains a clear separateness and the self and other are put in two distinct categories. I would like to mention here an interesting proposal by professor Arsith R. Patti and professor Sinha. In an interesting analysis they have proposed that here the individual and family they are referring to the Indian context individual and family form a kind of permeable boundary and there is a possibility of exchange the elements within the self can go to the family or the elements in the family can come to the category of self. So, there is a possibility of movement or exchange between these two categories. Now it is very important to recognize that a boundary can become a barrier or it can be a bridge which allows for movement. The barrier like line of control L O C does not allow others to come. Finally it is important to recognize an assumption by the cultural perspective that the notion of self cannot be context free you define self in a particular context. You have various notions of self there is an interesting analysis by Ulrich Nyser who talks of different kinds of self and it is very interesting. He says that there is an ecological self as a physical entity you are a person in flesh in bones and that is an objective reality which can be seen and which can be recognized then there is a self which is available to you only your personal self which is based on your memory. There is a social self which emerges in the context of relationship with others and finally he says that there is a conceptual self that what we mean by self we also learn what is the meaning of self that is conceptual self. So, self can be understood in many ways and there are different contexts in which self can be understood. So, one of the learning that comes from the cultural analysis of self is that the way we consider our selfhood the way of being a person is not a natural category, but depends on cultural models of personhood and person's role in personal and social life. Cultural models are very crucial in the sense that they provide a kind of space to recognize yourself and articulate the notion of self. We will respond to this challenge after a few minutes when we will examine the Indian context of selfhood, but it is important to see that there is a model which consider self in terms of search for a deeper reality like Brahman which is something non-objective in the sense that it can be conceptualized, but it cannot be experienced like a physical entity it is a continuous search for higher reality or consciousness. So, that is one kind of model or when you think of the notion of self and if you use a psychological test of self concept you have a definite set of qualities and you identify that you are high on this quality or low on this quality and the answers that are obtained provide one picture of self fine you may be happy with that. So, there are different kinds of models which are available one which goes beyond the objective reality or one which identifies self with certain features which can be described which can be identified. So, there are different models which are available we also propose that ontologies and ideologies of self vary across cultures we will examine it more seriously in the next few minutes that what constitutes self, what is the reality of self its ontology and the movement of self in terms of certain ideological preferences vary across cultures. The self use that we have they are shared by the culture and they guide the child reading practices we treat children we tell them how to behave how to act how to distinguish how to relate in the Indian context a child has to learn different kinds of brothers and sisters and uncles there are specific names for all the relationships and they have to retain that as compared to many other cultures where such sophisticated relational network in the family is missing. So, the ontologies and ideologies vary and cultures provide certain practices certain kinds of guidelines for child rearing modes of relating to environment and community they are embodied in the practices institutions and public symbols. Now, this point reminds us that the notion of self is reflected at the level of social functioning it is also reflected in terms of various kinds of representations which are found in artifacts. Let me mention that the notion of self which is prevalent in the Euro American context is an individualized self by individualized I want to emphasize the fact that the goal of development is individuation becoming more and more distinct creating an image where self is independent from others and it is unified we have mentioned these terms earlier and it is an indivisible entity. I am reminded of the notion which is contrailed to this individual unit the notion is one given by an anthropologist Maki Mariot who says that Indians are d visuals they consist of different elements they are constituted by various elements it is not individual entity it is divided. So, it is structured by relationships it is a composite of various kinds of inputs objects relationships. Another important feature of this self is that it has capacity to choose an influence choice is a very powerful concept in western psychology. If you have choice then you have control if you have choice then you have freedom and the development of individual growth of an individual is treated in terms of increasing capacity to choose and control the entire system of motivation is rooted in this kind of philosophy choice and control. In fact many studies in the western world indicate that even maintaining an illusion of control is good for health. So, internal control being independent and influencing the environment is a big challenge in this kind of notion. If you look into the literature you will see that the notion of competence is defined in terms of one's ability to influence the environment white who has studied the notion of competence he uses the word effectiveness that if you are able to influence if you are able to change then you have competence. So, this kind of notion which is separate which is independent which is able to influence others which is able to create and which is able to perform things according to one's own characteristics and features is one trend. In the review of Marcus and Kitayama these features are put together under the title of independent self and that independent self is one which is bounded separate and provides different way to look at the reality different way to feel motivated different way to engage in emotional relationships. So, there is emphasis on efficacy self esteem power it is self centric and as one researcher has termed it has a transmitter orientation it goes towards others it goes towards environment and tries to influence. So, this is one model of self which is reflected in most of the prevalent psychological notions in literature to summarize this perspective we find a model of selfhood where individuation is the chief characteristic of maturity if are independent different you do not try to be dependent on others then you have developed there is strong need for internal control choice based on preference experience of influence is beneficial and it is lack is pathological the contrast which is made in various constructs that we have created in social psychology in psychology of motivation provide this kind of perspective self interest is central and emphasis on efficacy and self esteem is something which is central to effective functioning of a person. Now in a simplified manner if we look into many non western settings there are studies from China from Japan from Korea from India from Indonesia which provide a picture which offers a different perspective oneself here we find a kind of group orientation sensitivity to the goals and needs of others readiness to cooperate and maintain permeable boundaries. We also notice that there is more emphasis on duties than rights more emphasis on the roles obligations and adjustment and here there is recognition that there is a social and spiritual or divine component of self and self is located in that context. In contrast to the transmitter orientation that we noted in the independent self here we notice a receiver orientation where the emphasis is more on an inner directed discipline. Let me make it clear that the portrayal of the independent and interdependent self or as I have presented here the notion of self in the two contrasting categories is a kind of statement to recognize cultural differences. It does not imply that everyone who belongs to one kind of cultural setting has the imprint in the same manner and everybody shares all these characteristics in the same way and the same is true about the western notion that I have presented. You will find cultural variations, variations within culture and there is a possibility and yes there are findings where these elements are present in both kinds of cultural settings perhaps the degree of availability of these models is relatively different in the two kinds of cultural settings. A notion which has been popularized by Hofstede and Triandis and several other colleagues in India Professor J. B. P. Sinha has initiated a number of studies in that context and that deals with individualism and collectivism as a cultural dimension and the kind of correspondence between interdependent self and independent self and collectivism and individualism is quite interesting. We find considerable similarity in the characterizations, one follows one method and orientation and the other approach follows a different orientation but they do meet in certain ways. So, the collectivist relational self which is prevalent in the non-western setup is found to share certain features and I think it will be useful to briefly refer to those features. Here self is defined in terms of membership in in groups. So, one person may introduce that I belong to a particular family or a particular community. I remember some researchers have used the phrase indexical self that you have to understand in terms of the features of that group to which you belong. The referential self is one where you tell that I am intelligent, I am bold, I participate in activities that is referential notion of self which comes very close to the independent notion of self often found in the western context and here it is the indexical self which is more prominent. So, sharing of resources within group members, maintaining normative orientation and feeling interdependence and involved in the activities and lives of fellow beings that becomes very central. Achieving the goal of interdependence is something which is very important. We often go together, we try to perform various things. However, it is a complex challenge that in spite of collectivist orientation, team work is quite problematic in the Indian context. Cooperative activity is quite difficult. So, one has to see how this puzzle can be solved, but it is there that on the one hand there is collectivism, there is recognition of others as important component in our life at the same time there are difficulties in relating to others. Control is self directed discipline and tolerance instead of ability to influence others. I think that the kind of cultural learning that takes place has greater emphasis on shaping self, looking into the inner features and doing some activity which deals with self transformation or self realization and movement towards higher goals in the inner journey. This does not mean that the cultures live in separate words. There is cultural cooperation, there is a culture ration and there is influence of different cultures on other cultures and the more recent developments through globalization have brought different cultures closer to each other. So, culture should not be considered at very tightly organized categories. So, there is variation within cultures. In fact, I think I forget the name, but it is interesting work which talks about moving cultures that how people move across cultures and how cultural changes are taking place and shaping themselves in ways which are very different. There is interesting work by Roland which talks of bicultural self. People from India living in United States how they are developing certain features from the other culture and maintaining certain features of their original culture. Such situation is quite common in many countries. Let us examine some of the key distinctions which provide a perspective represented in the Indian context. These include the first is self is inseparable from the surrounding context and people. This has a very interesting kind of backdrop in various kinds of philosophical treatises in folk mind. There is recognition of how one person thinks and how other person thinks. These two can be connected on the assumption that self is one which is shared by both. At one level, people talk that the atman is same for everyone. A ground is created that people share the same atman. The notion of purush or jivatma provide a kind of orientation to recognize similarity across individuals. Then there is another orientation which is very central and that is that the constituents, the elements, the Panchamahabhutas are the same which constitute the external physical environment and the person, the individual. So, there is a kind of continuity between the self and not self or the other. The goal of self development is another important feature and at least ideologically it is considered desirable that one should move towards the notion of self which is increasingly more and more encompassing. So, one has to move forward in the direction of dissolving the boundaries between self and other or increasing the range are becoming one with the entire world. The term Brahman refers to a broader reality which includes everything. So, the goal is to become Brahman. The goal is to recognize the entire world in terms of one entity. So, ideologically particularly the Vedantic thought emphasizes this kind of notion that one should dissolve the boundaries between the limited self and others and move towards a higher inclusive or encompassing self. And individual is an open system which communicates with the other selves. This simply refers to the notion of permeable boundaries that there is an exchange relationship between the individual and the other person. To realize oneself is not to express the internal attributes as we find in the case of independent self. Instead there is emphasis on becoming part of the group or community or divinity. So, the movement of self growth or change or transformation of self is in the direction of moving towards a higher entity, a broader goal is there rather than enhancing the self. In almost all traditions available in the Indian thought, a distinction is made between the bodily self which is often termed as ahankar or ego and a higher self atman. The atman is considered as transpersonal, collective, spiritual and it is often considered that the real self is one which is inherently blissful, conscious, existence or satshit or nand. And the spiritual training is for the purpose of recognizing this kind of self. Now, there is an important commentary on this whole thing from the school of Vedanta. It is proposed that the difficulty in life is because we do not recognize the true nature of self and the true nature is satshit and ananda. We recognize the limited self as the real self and the moment we recognize that that is the false self. When the avidya is gone, when ignorance is gone, then the person will realize his or her true nature which is blissful, conscious, existence. Now, this kind of proposal is not present in the western kind of analysis of self, particularly the way we analyze the notions within the psychological research. Now, the spiritual self, the different layers of self which have been talked about in the Panchakosha idea, provide multiple facets of self and recognize that the element of spirituality is an integral part. So, this provides a challenge before humanity that how one can transform. There are methods and techniques for that. Now, this kind of approach has yet not received attention in psychological literature because of the limitations of the paradigm within which we work. There is another important feature which needs to be recognized that as an individual, we live in a world and we perform different roles like spider's web where the individual has a particular identity and then he belongs to a particular age group or gender or ethnicity and region, social class, the various kinds of socialization practices, the status of that individual. Here, in this pictorial presentation, we see that we are connected with all these. The Vedantic view says that search for individual identity is important and that identity is distinct from the identities which are given, which are available from the social and cultural context. It is important to recognize the difference that these are the identities which are attached. They are not true identities and if you realize that these are the specific roles that we perform. They are not stable. They are not permanent. These are like attachments. We use these. So, the focus remains on understanding and evolving a notion of self which goes to a higher level of self. This kind of emphasis is given in different traditions. So, it is not denial of the social context. It is not denial of the membership of the group, but there is a constant reminder that that is not the true self and one should attain to the higher level of self. So, it may be proposed that spiritual self is one which offers an expanded view of self, where autonomy is available in a different way, where we see a kind of relationship with a very broad range of concerns and in order to organize life, it is crucial that the broader goals, they may be the societal goals, they may be the goals for the ecology. One needs to relate to those goals. Gandhi is one example of such kind of spiritual self, where an individual participates in various social activities, performs individual activities and at the same time maintains a higher goal. So, there should not be a conflict between the pursuit of higher self and performing everyday activities, performing the requirements based on role expectations. Balancing the two is a difficult job. The traditional view of life, if you look at the Ashram system or the different life stages or stations in life, there is a notion that people must move gradually towards renunciation. They should move towards detachment. This kind of arrangement provides a space for spiritual discipline and it helps to get rid of various attachments and obligations. So, the movement in the spiritual sphere of life was given an important space. The Ashram system, where Brahmacharya, Greyasth, Vanprasth and then Sannyas provided gradual change in the degree of attachment, relationship with people, society and environment and gradually people moved across these stages. That system may not be very pertinent in today's life, but to recapitulate the notion of self, we need to recognize the fact that engaging with selfhood is a demand of everyday life. We reflect about self and we develop a notion of self in the social context, but the content of selfhood can vary and the way we organize our self, the way we derive our motives and emotions from the notion of self give different directions. In today's world, the egoic self has become central concern and its problems are also obvious. The kind of conflict, the kind of hatred, the kind of violence that we see in domestic life, in social life demands that we rethink about the notion of self and there is need to expand the notion of self. This is a big demand as a matter of fact, the various kinds of pathologies which are being recognized in life particularly those which deal with depression and anxiety disorders, they really reflect the problems of selfhood.


Hi, my name is Ifesubar. I'm the current CIC manager for International Brewery's POC here in Nigeria. I've just been through the Power, Excel and Power BI training with D Brown Consultant. And I have to say it was an amazing experience. Super professional and engaging facilitators, specifically Adiwali Yusuf and Sam Sinobasi, overall a great experience. I would recommend it to anyone that is looking to improve their skills in Excel or Power BI. Amazing job guys.


In this presentation, we will discuss payroll periods and timeframes. When we consider payroll, we're going to have different types of timeframes, different types of times that people will be paid given different companies. So in other words, it's up to us to make the choice as to how often we pay our employee, when are the employees going to be paid. This is a decision where once made, we then just apply the same principle. We're going to be consistent with that one principle, whatever that pay period is. If we work within a particular company, then we're just going to get used to the payroll cycle once implemented and work with it. If we work as a payroll professional, however, then we may be working with different companies and they may have different needs and may be implementing different types of payroll periods. So it's important to understand payroll periods in general. So when we go from different types of payroll applications, different types of companies, we know that they're going to have different types of payroll periods. And once we do work in the company, we will then of course specialize in some way knowing the system that we are working in. So one would be to be paid monthly. So if we're paid monthly, then we're going to have every month of a payment. And there's going to be 12 pay periods because of course there's 12 months. So monthly is going to be an easier pay rate because there's only 12 pay periods, we can break it up fairly, fairly easily. However, most of the time employees would like to get paid more often than monthly, oftentimes. So we could have weekly, which is kind of the other extreme. And weekly is going to be, of course, every week. And that would mean that there's going to be 52 pay periods because there's 52 weeks in the year. Note that that number is unlike the months of 12, a number that possibly not everybody knows offhand how many weeks are in the year. Something for payroll, probably worth memorizing. So how many weeks are in the year? 52, generally. And then we have the other two, which are usually the more confusing because oftentimes we get paid every other week or so, or biweekly. So biweekly means that we're getting paid every other week. And so that's going to be 26 pay periods. So you might say, hmm, 26. That looks a little funny. Like where does that number come from? 26 pay periods. If we paid because you would think possibly that it would be 12 times two, which would be 24 pay periods because there's 12 months in the year. And we're paying you would you would think about twice a month, right? So be about 24. But it's not, it's 26. And that number comes from saying 52 weeks in a year divided by two. So 26. So what you really want to do is memorize these two or the way I do it is I memorize these two. And then when I get to biweekly, I'd say, well, what does that mean? That's that's in essence going to take the weekly amount and divided by two to get to the 26. Whereas if I pay semi monthly, you can think of something like on the 15th or the 30th of the 31st. So I pay in the middle of the month and the end of the month, in other words, then that's slightly different than paying biweekly. That means you're being paid twice a month, no matter what, which is going to be 24 pay periods. So when we pay, in other words, biweekly, every other week, because there's different amounts of days in each month, then we could have some months that have three pay periods possibly. And that that would line up to having two more pay periods within the year. Whereas semi monthly, we have a significant amount really of less pay periods. So if we paid two times a month, no matter what, in the middle of the month and the end of the month, then I would think of that as really two times a month is of course going to be 12 times two or 24. So the way I would remember this is, you know, monthly is of course 12 pay periods. And this is important by the way, because we will be using these pay periods when we start to calculate things like hourly rate and payroll rates. So so I would think of this as, you know, monthly, of course is 12 months, pretty straightforward, no problem. Weekly, we have to start to memorize that there's 52 weeks in a year, 52 pay periods, if we pay weekly, biweekly then means we're paying every other week. It doesn't necessarily mean we're paying twice a month. What it means is that we're taking the 52 divided by two to get to the 26 pay periods. Whereas if we pay semi monthly, then we're paying two times a month, no matter what. So that means we're going to take the 12 months times two gives us the 24. So just this is where the problem usually lies. Are we doing biweekly, semi monthly, they're not the same. I just and I would use the monthly and weekly as as the check to memorize the two numbers. I don't memorize these two numbers. I say semi monthly is monthly times two, I say biweekly is 52 weeks divided by two. So once we have that some key numbers that you really want to memorize, then as we go through payroll, it's just numbers that you should kind of have in mind is one, there's 365 days in a year. Now, again, note that, you know, there's a leap year and whatnot, but we're going to go with 65 days in a year. And that's different than some of the rounding we've used in in like if we do some type of calculations for interest types of calculations, we may use some estimates. In other words, sometimes there's estimates that we could say 12 months times about 30 days in a month, even though there's 31, there's, there's could be 30, there could be 28. But we that would be about 360. But to be exact, to be more exact, there's there's 365 generally in a year. So we just want to know when doing payroll, we need to be more exact. So we typically would say we want to just know that number 365 days in a year, biweekly pay periods 26. Again, we don't really need to just memorize that. We could take the 52 divided by two to get to the 26 weeks in a year should be weeks and week in a week's in here, it's going to be 52. And that's when you just want to memorize. So you just want you just got to know that 52 weeks in a year might not be as common for a lot of people to know how many weeks are in a year, but 52 52 weeks in a year. And then the semi monthly pay period is 24. Again, I wouldn't just memorize that, but you need to be aware of that number. It's a payroll number, you just got to know semi monthly. Again, how would I get there 12 months times to biweekly 52 weeks divided by two, semi monthly 12 months times to 26 versus 24, very productive payroll paid off. Goodbye.


Hello and welcome to the third lecture of the second week of the course on an introduction to programming through C++ for NPTEL. The topic of this lecture sequence is simple CPP graphics. So in simple CPP graphics a lot more is possible just besides moving turtles. So you can have other shapes also besides turtles. You can change the color and the size. You can have absolute coordinates so related to the canvas and graphical input is also possible. So to start up this more general graphics you have to use init canvas and not turtle sim. So the first form for init canvas is init canvas without any arguments and this will just open a window or the canvas for drawing. In the second form you can give a name to that window and you can also say how wide that window is going to be and how high it is going to be. So the name should be a quoted string and W and H should be numbers. Now the drawing area or the canvas has a coordinate system. So the canvas origin is in the top left corner. The x axis goes rightwards as you are normally accustomed to. The y axis on the other hand goes downward rather than upward as you might be more commonly using in math. Then the commands that you use may not all use the coordinate system but there will be some commands which will use the coordinate system. So how do you create other objects? Well let us start with how do you create many turtles rather than use just the one that is given to us. So the general form is to say something like turtle n1, n2, nk where n1, n2, nk are the names that you are going to give to the turtles that you are going to create. So this is going to create k turtles having names n1 through nk and of course any identifier can be used. See all the turtles are at the center of the canvas and all are facing right like our single turtle. But that single turtle which you got by default is no longer going to be there if you used in it canvas. You can selectively move turtle whose name is ni by writing ni.forward 50 or whatever rather than just forward 50. So since you have several turtles you have to say which turtle you are talking to. And other commands like left, right can also be used instead of forward. So just to give you a sense of what we can do here is the program and in it we have the first statement is just this in it canvas statement so that canvas is created then we are going to create three turtles and as I said they are going to be at the center and facing right. But now we are going to tell different things to the turtles. So the first T1 will leave as it is turtle T2 will ask to turn left by 120 degrees, T3 will ask to turn left by 240 degrees. And now we are going to get the turtles to move. So all of them are going to move forward and all of them are going to turn left by 365 degrees. So each one of them is going to be drawing an octagon. So let us see what happens. So this is the program that we wrote and let us now execute it. So we will compile it first. So let us execute it. See that each turtle was moving as we commanded the turtle went out but again came back in as soon as its coordinates became consistent with interior of the canvas. So we just did this. Now we are going to turn to creating other graphical objects. In general to create a graphical object you do something like what you do to create a variable, you are going to give the type, this time the shape type and then the name along with the arguments. So the shapes that you can create are circle, rectangle, line and text. So the name that we have in this basic form is the name to be given to the created object. And you can move the created object forward or in general manipulate it by writing name dot whatever operation. So if you write name dot forward then you will be moving that object forward by 100 pixels. So each object will have a current direction in which it is facing and that and forward will cause that object to move in that current direction. And we already saw this that multiple objects of the same type can be created by giving comma separated names with arguments. And all these objects also have pens but unlike turtles whose pens are down by default these other objects have their pens up. So they will not draw by default. So how do you create circles? So we are going to supply three arguments. The first two are the x-y coordinates of the center and then the radius. So for example if I write circle C1, 110 that gives me one circle at center 100 of radius 10. The second C200, 120 will give me another circle at the same center but with radius 20. So these two will be concentric circles. I can make rectangles. So I can make a rectangle called R1 and the first two numbers are going to be interpreted as the x-y coordinates of the center. So in this case 200-100 is the center of the rectangle and the width is 20 and the height is 40. I can create lines and I just have to supply the coordinates of the first end point and then the coordinates of the second end point. So for example here I have a line starting at 2020 going to 2030. So the x-coordinate remains the same, the y-coordinate goes from 20 to 30. So this is going to be a vertical line. The second line is 25-15 going to 25-25. So this also is a vertical line. It is going to be a vertical line at x-coordinate 25 and it will go from 15 to 25. I can create text if I wish. So I supply the x-coordinates of where the text is to be centered and then the text itself encodes and along with text I have these two additional commands. Text width of the text tells me how wide the entire text is going to be and text height of t tells me how high the text t is in pixels and using this I know what the shape over the size of the text is and so I know I mean I can do my layout a little bit better. So here is an example. First I am going to create the text centered at the point 100 and having the text itself being C++. So C++ will be written at 100. Then I am going to create a rectangle. This rectangle is also centered at 100 and its text width is the text width of C++4. So it is going to be 2 pixels outside on each direction and text height is also similar. So it is going to create a rectangle which sort of borders this text. So it sort of fits reasonably snugly. So this way you can sort of create nice buttons if you like. So you might have seen programs in which there are buttons. So buttons are maybe rectangles with text and this is how you might create buttons. So there are some commands allowed on shapes. So for example I can say move shape S to coordinates XY. So XY are absolute coordinates over here. The shape which was created at some other point is now moved to coordinate XY. So by the way when I say move a shape what moves is its center. So the center of the circle moves, the center of the rectangle moves and for lines also the center of the line moves. I can move by giving a relative displacement. So if I say S move DXDY then if its original position was X1, Y1 then the new position is X1 plus DX and Y1 plus DX. I can scale a shape. So if I say S dot scale 2 then that shape will become twice as big. Its center will remain where it was earlier. So around that center it will become twice as big. I can rotate it and it rotates again around the center. So here I specify the angle and this angle must be in radiance. So radiance is actually the more common measure on a computer just as it is a more common measure in scientific work. Now rotation and scaling as of today cannot happen on text but there are efforts to change that. When a graphic subject is created it has the color black except for turtles which are red but the color can be changed. So you can write if S is the graphic subject or S is the shape that you created then you can change its color by writing S dot set color to call. So notice that the spelling over here is C-O-L-O-R sort of paying homage to the American spelling which was used in the logo language from which we said this turtle graphics has been inspired. So this will change the color of S to call. Call must be specified as this text color and in parenthesis the actual name of the color red or whatever. So common color names are recognized so you can just specify them. Another way is to set the color to whatever fine shade you want and as you might know colors on a computer are obtained by mixing the primary colors red, green and blue.  And these numbers red, green and blue must be between 0 and 255. Let me just observe that if you make all of them 255 you will get the color white and if you make all of them 0 you will get the color black. If you assign a color to a shape it only really changes the border but if you wanted to change the interior then you have to fill that shape. So for this you have to say S dot set fill. So set fill you can set to true or false and true means that I want the interior filled and false means I want the interior left, right. So this is allowed only when S is a circle or rectangle and for others this does not really make sense. Once you have drawn a shape you can ask where is the shape currently and S dot get X will return the X coordinate of that shape or the X coordinate of that center and similarly S dot get Y will give you the Y coordinate of the center. Similarly S dot get orientation will return the current orientation that is the angle through which S has been rotated so far. So remember that the originally all shapes start with start facing the right direction and so from that the orientation is measured. Get scale returns to you the current scale factor. So you might have done a fair amount of scaling so the end result of that is returned if you write this command. So this command evaluates to the current scale factor used for S. So you could have known that yourself because after all you were the one who issued the scale commands but this is a way by which you do not really have to keep track of all the things that you did. One useful operation is to imprint a shape. So S dot imprint will cause an image of S to be permanently drawn on the canvas at its current position. So even after S moves the image will be present. If you wish to create a static picture involving 100 circles or some other objects then it is better to follow this procedure. So you create one circle, you move it to the appropriate positions and you imprint the circle in those positions. Other than that you could have also done create 100 circles but that usually is going to be cumbersome and that usually also takes more time because C++ will have to keep track of all those circles as it draws and things like that. So if you are not going to have circles which move then it is better to get them into your picture by imprinting them. You also have graphical input and for this you have the command get click. So this will cause the program to wait until the user clicks on the screen. This is sort of like the C in command. The C in command causes the program to wait until the user types something. Get click causes the program to wait until the user clicks. This command returns the value 65536 which is 2 raised to 16 incidentally times x plus y where x and y are the coordinates of the cursor position at the position of the click. So you can wait for the user to click and you can get the point where the user clicked. So how do you get the points? Well this is how. So you do not just issue the get click command but you say in w equal to get click. So that expression 65536 times x plus y will get put into w. Now if you take the quotient that has to be your x coordinate and if you take the remainder that has to be the y coordinate. So this is how you can discover the coordinates where the user clicked. And this will work provided y is smaller than 65536 but of course the number of pixels in any device that you might have is likely to be way smaller than 65536 and therefore this scheme works quite nicely. So you may also write just get click and not something equal to get click. In that case your program will just wait for a click to happen. And whatever value that it receives by looking at the positions of the mouse cursor those are just going to get thrown away. So let us do an example. So here is the main program so we are creating a canvas and we are calling it projectile. So this is going to be the title that will appear on the window. And I am going to have an integer start equals get click. So immediately after creating the canvas I am going to wait for a click to happen. So I am going to create a circle next but it is x coordinate. The x coordinate of the center is going to be start divided by 65536 or it is going to be the x coordinate of the click position. And the y coordinate is going to be start mod 65536 or in other words the y coordinate of the click position. So this means that the circle is going to be centered at the point at which you clicked and its radius is going to be 5. So circles normally do not have their pen down so we are going to make the pen go down and now we are going to do something fun. We are going to have velocities for this circle. Well there is no formal velocity as such but we will sort of make it appear as if there is a velocity. So we are going to say that the x velocity is 1, the y velocity is minus 1 and then there is a gravitational force of 0.01. So notice that we have our vertical velocity is minus 1. So what is vertical velocity? So what is minus 1? So minus 1 merely says that our object will want to move in the negative x direction. So what is the positive x direction? The positive x direction is going downwards as we said at the beginning of the lecture. So the positive x direction is going downwards and so the negative x direction is going upwards. So initially our object has been assigned a velocity. So suppose we clicked at this point then a circle will be created over here and unit velocity will be assigned in both directions. So our object will be disposed to move in this direction. Now we will make the object move so we will make the object move for 500 steps. So in each step the object will move by vx, vy. However in each step the velocity will also change. The velocity will change by 0.01 which is going to be the effect of gravity of course. This is just make believe but this says that the y velocity will increase by 0.01. Remember that y velocity initially is negative. So as it increases by 0.1 its velocity is going to be decreasing. So it was moving very fast in the upward direction, it is going to slow down in the upward direction and eventually it is going to start moving fast in the downward direction. Notice that this is exactly what happens to a stone when you throw the stone in the air. Initially it has a vertical upward velocity and gravity acts on it and gravity pulls the stone down and also its velocity becomes faster and faster in the downward direction. So in order for you to see what is going on we are going to wait for about 100th of a second and that is it. So after the whole thing is finished we are going to wait for you to click so that you get a chance to see what has happened. So let us do a demo of this. So the program is called projectile. So this is the program which I showed to you. So let us compile it and let us run it. So you can see that a window has been created, the name projectile appears at the top and now the program is waiting for me to click on the screen. So suppose I click on the screen you see a circle got created, sort of a ball and it is moving, it is moving against gravity, gravity is pulling it downwards and it is going to move for 500 steps. So it is going to move for 500 steps and in this case the 500 steps took it outside the canvas but that is okay but once that entire thing has been drawn then I will just, it is waiting for me to click so let me click and that is the end of the program. So you can do lots of interesting things with what I have told you. So for example you can draw a plot of arbitrary function. So say y equal to sin x. So how do you do this, well you have to decide where exactly that plot has to be drawn. So you will not supply the actual x coordinates and you may have to scale this whole thing a little bit but I will let you think about it but the one point that I must mention here is that it is a curve which you will have to approximate by lines and those lines will be drawn by imprinting because there will be lots of small lines and you really do not want to create all those lines. Then there are a couple of other exercises and well you can just have fun drawing some nice designs or doing some nice animations. So to summarize you can have graphical shapes with names and circles lines are only allowed but you can move them, you can rotate them, you can change their colors, text is also allowed and the book gives more details. Later on in the course we will see that polygons can also be drawn and later on we may see how dragging and things like that can also be done. So these are basic things that you have learnt in this lecture and you can already use them to create interesting drawings and animations and in fact even graphical editors, we will see that very soon. Thank you.