Hello! My name is Kate and I'm a librarian at Kirkwood Community College. I'm going to show you how librarians use Google with purpose as an efficient and useful tool. Most of us use Google's search engine every day, probably several times a day. It's simple and easy to use, so what else is there to know? First, we will see how Google decides what results to return on your search. And second, we will look at specific techniques for gaining better control over that process. So, how does Google decide what results to return and in what order? When you enter a search, Google looks for web pages in its index that contain all the words you entered. It decides what order to show you those results based on, among other things, what pages are most popular. This comes in handy when we're looking for quick information but is much less helpful when we're doing research for school work. Google also considers the pages you have personally clicked on in your past searches. Basically, it tries to show you more of the same kind of sites that you've already looked at in the past. This can be a big problem when you want to find a variety of different viewpoints and a variety of different types of sources, which are both important goals to have when searching for resources for your research. The good news is that Google also provides tools that let you take control of these default search settings and be more specific about exactly what you're looking for. The first tool is the exact wording or phrase search, which is done with quotation marks. Quotation marks tell Google that you want it to search only and exactly what is within the quotes. So, if I put a single word in quotation marks, as shown in this example, Google will not also search for alternate spellings or for synonyms. And, if I put more than one word in quotation marks, Google will search those words as a phrase in that exact order. So, I might use quotation marks around a term that has more than one word, like climate change. Or, I might use it to find an article where I know the title or I know a specific line of text from it. This example shows how the phrase tool can be combined with other terms as well. In this case, to help me quickly identify the poem by Walt Whitman that contains this line. The second tool is the site limit or domain limit. This lets you tell Google exactly what domain or what type of domain you want the results to be from. For example, I can have Google search only the Kirkwood domain by limiting to sitekirkwood.edu. This search on the screen would search for the word calendar, but only on pages with Kirkwood.edu in the URL. Another way to use this site limit is to limit your search to a specific domain type. The domain type is indicated in the end of the domain name. It's the .com.edu.org or the many other domain types you might run across. So in this example, I can search for information about climate change published on a .gov site. You can see how we can use this knowledge about domains paired with the search technique to get very focused on what type of information we want Google to locate for us. If you haven't used this one before, you're going to find it really useful. There's another way to use the site limit, which can be very helpful. Instead of requiring results to be from a certain domain, you can exclude a certain domain. We use this most often to exclude .com sites from results. A good example of this is if you were to search for information on treatment of a certain condition in this example depression, Google would normally return many results from pharmaceutical companies by excluding .com sites with this reverse limit or exclusion limit minus site colon com. Now Google will show me everything except the commercial sites. If you want to learn about more Google search tools, see the library's website for a how to speak Google sheet that has the top 12 recommended Google search tools, as well as lots of other tips on how to search and evaluate websites. And remember that even though we can make Google a better tool, it shouldn't be your only tool for finding information. Make use of the library's books and ebook collections and subscription databases for high quality information.


According to Wikipedia, emergence is conceived as a process whereby larger entities, patterns and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties. In the previous section we discussed how synergistic relations give rise to the phenomena of two or more elements having a greater combined output or effect than the simple product of each in isolation. This process whereby the interaction between elements gives rise to something that is greater than the sum of their parts is called emergence. So whereas when we were talking about synergies, we simply said that the combined effect was greater than its parts in isolation. The concept of emergence though implies that what is created out of these synergistic relations is not just quantitatively different, it is in fact qualitatively different. That is to say, none of the elements that contribute to the emergence of this new phenomena have its qualities when taken in isolation. There are many examples of this, but maybe the simplest is the example of water. Water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Other of these two elements that make up the system have the property or quality of wetness, but when we combine them we get a substance called water that has the quality of being wet. This property of wetness has emerged out of the interaction of the system's elements and it only exists on the system's level. Another often cited example of emergence is the phenomena of life. Physical systems such as a plant cell consist of a set of inanimate molecules, none of which in isolation have the property of life, but it is the particular way that these elements are arranged into structures and processes that enable the emergent phenomena of the living system as an entirety. Our world is full of examples of emergence that we could cite, from ant colonies to galaxies and cultures, but all of these are types of structures, whereas emergence is really a process. These systems are then the product of a process of emergence that has played out to create two qualitatively different levels to the system. Emergence then is a process through which systems develop or we might say grow. During this process, unassociated elements interact, synchronized to form synergies, and out of this emerges some new and novel phenomena that previously did not exist. In order to create some qualitatively different and new phenomena, the system must go through what we call a phase transition. A phase transition is an often rapid or accelerated period during the process of a system's development, either side of which the fundamental parameters with which we describe the system can change qualitatively. Again, there are lots of examples of this, such as the phase transition between solid and liquid that a substance goes through when heated, but maybe the most dramatic example is the metamorphosis of a butterfly, from being a caterpillar to a mature adult. Not only does the system's morphology change, but the whole set of parameters that we define it with are so drastically altered prior and post the phase transition that we give the creature a whole new name. This illustration helps to bring us to another important theme within emergence, that is the distinction between what is called strong and weak emergence. Strong emergence describes how the emergent phenomena can be traced back to the individual elements, meaning we can predict and observe higher level emergent phenomena just by looking at individual components. In contrast, strong emergence, also known as irreducible emergence, states that these phenomena cannot be reduced to the individual components. Instead, the emergent phenomena are traced back to the interactions between the multiple components so, quite literally, cannot be predicted in any sense by looking at the components on their own. Consciousness is often cited as an example of strong emergence. It would appear that without prior knowledge or experience of what consciousness is, it would be virtually impossible to understand the vastly complex and subtle system that is human consciousness by analyzing the properties of the very simple neurons that formulate it. This distinction between strong and weak emergence may also be formulated within the language of information theory, where weakly emergent phenomena are essentially computable. That is to say, if we had sufficient information, we could simulate them. In contrast with strongly emergent phenomena, no amount of information could predict or formulate the end result of the process prior to its completion. The discussion of strong and weak emergence leads us to another key theme in system theory that is hierarchy, the distinction between micro and macro and top-down versus bottom-up causality, all of which we will be talking about in the next lecture.


The one word that I know my son probably hates to hear, even if somebody else says this word, I'm sure my son probably shakes a little bit, right? Because he just hears me say it all the time. And the word is details. There was one time there was a game where Kobe was, before the game, he was shooting free throws. And he was like, something isn't right.  And he goes, are you sure this basket is right? And the guy said, yeah, he goes, well, I want you to check it for me, measure it. It was an eighth of an inch off. When you're that obsessed, when you're paying that much attention to the details, the separation is in the details. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Take your time, be precise, pay attention to details. Rushing only increases the chance of mistakes.


Welcome back to AWS Storage Day 2022. I'm Dave Vellante and we're pleased to have back on theCUBE, Ed name, the GM of AWS File Storage. Ed, how you doing? Good to see you. I'm good Dave, good to see you as well. You know, we've been tracking AWS Storage for a lot of years, 16 years actually. We've seen the evolution of services. Of course, we started with S3 and Object and saw that expand to block and file. And now the pace is actually accelerating. And we're seeing AWS make more moves again today and block an object, but what about file? It's one format in the world. And the day wouldn't really be complete without talking about file storage. So what are you seeing from customers in terms of let's start with data growth? How are they dealing with the challenges? What are those challenges? If you could address specifically some of the issues that they're having, that would be great. And then later we're going to get into the role that Cloud File Storage plays. Take it away. Well, Dave, I'm definitely increasingly hearing customers talk about the challenges in managing ever-growing data sets. And they're especially challenged in doing that on-premises. When we look at the data that's stored on-premises is zettabytes of data. The fastest growing data sets consist of unstructured data that are stored as files. And many companies have tens of petabytes or hundreds of petabytes or even exabytes of file data. And this data is typically growing 20%, 30% a year. And in reality, on-premises models really are designed to handle this amount of data and this type of growth. And I'm not just talking about keeping up with hardware purchases and hardware floor space, but a big part of the challenge is labor and talent. To keep up with the growth, they're seeing companies managing storage on-prem. They really need an unprecedented number of skilled resources to manage the storage. And these skill sets are in really high demand and they're in short supply. And then another big part of the challenge that customers tell me all the time is that operating at scale, dealing with these ever-growing data sets at scale is really hard. And it's not just hard in terms of the people you need and the skill sets that you need, but operating at scale presents net new challenges. So for example, it becomes increasingly hard to know what data you have and what storage media your data is stored on when you have a massive amount of data that's spanning hundreds of thousands or thousands of applications and users and it's growing super fast each year. And at scale, you start seeing edge technical issues get triggered more commonly, impacting your availability or your resiliency or your security. And you start seeing processes that used to work when you were a much smaller scale, no longer work. And it's just scale is hard, it's really hard. And then finally companies are wanting to do more with their fast-growing data sets to get insights from it. And they look at the machine learning and the analytics and the processing services and the compute power that they have at their fingertips on the cloud. And having that data be in silos on-prem can really limit how they get the most out of their data. You know, I've been covering, I'm glad you brought up the skills gap. I've been covering that quite extensively with my colleagues at ETR, our survey partner. So that's a really important topic and we're seeing it across the board. I mean, really acute in cybersecurity. But for sure, just generally in IT and frankly CEOs, they don't want to invest in training people to manage storage. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that managing LUNs was a talent. And that's, of course, nobody does that anymore. But executives would much rather apply skills to get value from data. So my specific question is, what can be done? What is AWS doing to address this problem? Well, with the growth of data that we're seeing, it's really hard for a lot of IT teams to keep up with just the infrastructure management part that's needed. So things like deploying capacity and provisioning resources and patching and conducting compliance reviews. And that stuff is just table stakes. The asks on these teams to your point are growing to be much bigger than those pieces. So we're really seeing fast uptake of our Amazon FSX service because it's such an easy path for helping customers with these scaling challenges. FSX enables customers to launch and to run and to scale feature rich and highly performant network attached file systems on AWS. And it provides fully managed file storage, which means that we handle all of the infrastructure. So all of that provisioning and that patching and ensuring high availability and customers simply make API calls to do things like scale up their storage or change their performance level at any point or change a backup policy. And a big part of why FSX has been so appealing as well as customers is it really enables them to choose the file system technology that powers their storage. So we provide four of the most popular file system technologies. We provide Windows file server, NetApp on tap, OpenZFS and Luster, so that storage and application admins can use what they're familiar with. So they essentially get the full capabilities and even the management CLIs that they're used to and that they've built workflows and applications around on premises. But they get along with that, of course, the benefits of fully managed elastic cloud storage that can be spin up and spun down and scaled on demand and performance changed on demand, et cetera. And what storage and application admins are seeing is that FSX not only helps them keep up with their scale and growth, but it gives them the bandwidth to do more of what they want to do. Supporting strategic decision making, helping their end customers figure out how they can get more value from their data, identifying opportunities to reduce cost. And what we realize is that for a number of storage and application admins, the cloud is a different environment from what they're used to. And we're making it a priority to help educate and train folks on cloud storage. Earlier today, we talked about AWS Storage Digital Badges and we announced a dedicated file badge that helps storage admins and professionals to learn and demonstrate their AWS skills. And our AWS Storage Badges, you can think of them as credentials that represent cloud computing learning that customers can add to their repertoire, add to their resume, as they're embarking on this cloud journey. And we'll be talking more in depth on this later today, especially around the file badge, which we're very excited about. So a couple of things there that I wanted to comment on. I mean, it was there for the NetApp announcement. We've covered that quite extensively. This just shows that it's not a zero sum game necessarily, right? It's a win, win, win.  And then the managed service model, you know, to me is a no-brainer for most customers. We learned this in the Hadoop years. I mean, it just got so complicated. Then you saw what happened with the managed services around, you know, data lakes and lake houses. And it's just really simplified things for customers. I mean, there's still some customers that want to do it yourself, but a managed service for the file storage sounds like a really easy decision. Especially for those IT teams that are overburdened as we were talking about before. And I also like, you know, the education component is nice touch too. You get the badge thing. So that's kind of cool. So I'm hearing that the fully managed file storage service is a catalyst for cloud adoption. So the question is, which workloads should people choose to move into the cloud? Where's the low friction, low risk sweet spot ed? Well, that's one of the first questions that customers ask when they're about to embark on their cloud journey. And I wish I could give a simple or a single answer, but the answer is really it varies. And it varies per customer. And I'll give you an example. For some customers, the cloud journey begins with what we call extending on-premises workloads into the cloud. So an example of that is compute bursting workloads where customers have data on-premises and they have some compute on-premises, but they want to burst their processing of that data to the cloud because they really want to take advantage of the massive amount of compute that they get on AWS. And that's common with workloads like visual effects or chip design simulation, genomics analysis. And so that's an example of extending to the cloud, really leveraging the cloud for bursting your workloads. Another example is disaster recovery. And that's a really common example. Customers will use the cloud for their secondary or their failover site rather than maintaining their second on-prem location. And so that's a lot of customers start with some of those workloads by extending to the cloud. And then there's a lot of other customers where they've made the decision to migrate most or all of their workloads and they're skipping the whole extending step. They aren't starting there. They're instead focused on going all in as fast as possible because they really want to get to the full benefits of the cloud as fast as possible. And for them, the migration journey is really, it's a matter of sequencing which specific workloads to move in when. And what's interesting is we're increasingly seeing customers prioritizing their most important and their most mission critical applications ahead of their other workloads in terms of timing. And they're doing that to get their workloads to benefit from the added resilience they get from running on the cloud. So it really does depend, Dave. Yeah, thank you. I mean, that's pretty good description of the options there. And I just come something, I mean, bursting, obviously. I love those examples you gave around genomics, chip design, visual effects rendering, the DRP. Again, very common sort of cloud, historical sweet spots for cloud. But then the point about mission critical is interesting because I hear a lot of customers, especially with the digital transformation push, wanting to change their operating model. I mean, on the one hand, not changing things, putting it in the cloud to lift and shift. You don't have to change things, low friction. But then once they get there, they're like, wow, we can do a lot more with the cloud. So that was really helpful, those examples. Now, last year at storage day, you released a new file service. And then you followed that up at re-event with another file service introduction. Sometimes I get lost in the array of services. So help us understand, when a customer comes to AWS with like an NFS or an SMB workload, how do you steer them to the right managed service, the right course for the right course? Yeah, well, I'll start by saying, a big part of our focus has been in providing choice to customers. And what customers tell us is that the spectrum of options that we provide to them really helps them in their cloud journey because there really isn't a one size fits all file system for all workloads. And so having these options actually really helps them to be able to move pretty easily to the cloud. And so my answer to your question about where do we steer a customer when they have a file workload is it really depends on what the customer is trying to do. And in many cases, where they're coming from. So I'll walk you through a little bit of how we think about this with customers. So for storage and application admins who are extending existing workloads to the cloud or migrating workloads to AWS, the easiest path generally is to move to an FSX file system that provides the same or really similar underlying file system engine that they use on premises. So for example, if you're running a NetApp appliance on premises or a Windows file server on premises, choosing that option within FSX provides the least effort for a customer to lift their application and their dataset. And they'll get the full set of capabilities that they're used to. They'll get the performance profiles that they're used to but of course they'll get all of the benefits of the cloud that I was talking about earlier like spin up and spin down and fully managed and elastic capacity. Then we also provide open source file systems within the FSX family. So if you're a customer and you're used to those or if you aren't really wedded to a particular file system technology, these are really good options. And they're built on top of AWS' latest infrastructure innovations, which really allows them to provide pretty significant price and performance benefits to customers. So for example, the file servers for these offerings are powered by AWS' Graviton family of processors. And under the hood, we use storage technology that's built on top of AWS' scalable reliable datagram transport protocol, which really optimizes for speed on the cloud. And so for those two open source file systems, we have open ZFS and that provides a really powerful, highly performant NFS V3 and V4 and 4.1 and 4.2 file system built on a fast and resilient open source Linux file system. It has a pretty rich set of capabilities. It has things like point-to-time snapshots and in place data cloning. And our customers are really using it because of these capabilities and because of its performance for a pretty broad set of enterprise IT workloads and vertically focused workloads like within the financial services space and the healthcare life sciences space. And then Luster is a scale out file system that's built on the world's most popular high performance file system, which is the Luster open source file system. And customers are using it for compute intensive work loads where they're throwing tons of compute at massive data sets and they need to drive tens or hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput. And it's really popular for things like machine learning training and high performance computing, big data analytics, video rendering and transcoding. So really those scale out compute intensive workloads. And then we have a very different type of customer, very different persona. And this is the individual that we call the AWS builder. And these are folks who are running cloud native workloads. They leverage a broad spectrum of AWS's compute and analytic services. And they have really no history of on-prem. Examples are data scientists who require a file share for training sets, research scientists who are performing analysis on lab data, developers who are building containerized or serverless workloads and cloud practitioners who need a simple solution for storing assets for their cloud workflows. And these folks are building and running a wide range of data focused workloads. And they've grown up using services like Lambda and building containerized workloads. So most of these individuals generally are not storage experts and they look for storage that just works. S3 and consumer file shares like Dropbox are their reference point for how cloud storage works. And they're indifferent to or unaware of file protocols like SMB or NFS. And performing typical NAS administrative tasks is just not a natural experience for them. It's not something they do. And we built Amazon EFS to meet the needs of that group. It's fully elastic, it's fully serverless, spreads data across multiple availability zones by default. It scales infinitely. It works very much like S3. So for example, you get the same durability and availability profile of S3.  So that service just clicks with cloud native practitioners. It's intuitive and it just works. There's a mind boggling the number of use cases you just went through. And this is where it's so, a lot of times people roll their eyes, oh, here's Amazon talking about customer obsession again. But if you don't stay close to your customers, there's no way you could have predicted when you're building these services, how they were going to be put to use. The only way you can understand it is watch what customers do with it. I loved the conversation about Graviton. We've written about that a lot. I mean, Nitro, we've written about that, how you've completely rethought virtualization, the security components in there, the HPC Luster piece and the EFS for data scientists. So really helpful there, thank you. I'm going to change topics a little bit because there's been this theme that you've been banging on at Storage Day, putting data to work. And I tell you, it's a bit of a passion in my head because frankly customers have been frustrated with the return on data initiatives. It's been historically complicated, very time consuming and expensive to really get value from data. And often the business lines end up frustrated. So let's talk more about that concept. And I understand you have an announcement that fits with this theme. Can you tell us more about that? Absolutely, today we're announcing a new service called Amazon FileCache. And it's a service on AWS that accelerates and simplifies hybrid workflows. And specifically Amazon FileCache provides a high-speed cache on AWS that makes it easier to process file data regardless of where the data is stored. And Amazon FileCache serves as a temporary high-performance storage location. And it's for data that's stored in on-premise file servers or in file systems or object stores in AWS. And what it does is it enables enterprises to make these dispersed data sets available to file-based applications on AWS with a unified view and at high speeds. So think of sub millisecond latencies and 10s or hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput. And so a really common use case supports is if you have data stored on-premises and you wanna burst a processing workload to the cloud, you can set up this cache on AWS and it allows you to have the working set for your compute workload be cached near your AWS compute. So what you would do as a customer when you wanna use this is you spin up this cache, you link it to one or more on-prem NFS file servers and then you mount this cache to your compute instances on AWS. And when you do this, all of your on-prem data will appear up automatically as folders and files on the cache. And when your AWS compute instances access a file for the first time, the cache downloads the data that makes up that file in real time and that data then would reside on the cache as you work with it. And when it's in the cache, your application has access to that data at those sub millisecond latencies and at up to hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput. And all of this data movement is done automatically and in the background, completely transparent to your application that's running on the compute instances. And then when you're done with your workload, with your data processing job, you can export the changes and all the new data back to your on-premises file servers and then tear down the cache. Another common use case is if you have a compute intensive file-based application and you wanna process a dataset that's in one or more S3 buckets, you can have this cache serve as a really high-speed layer that your compute instances mount as a network file system. And you can also place this cache in front of a mix of on-prem file servers and S3 buckets and even FSX file systems that are on AWS. All of the data from these locations will appear within a single namespace that clients that mount the cache have access to and those clients get all the performance benefits of the cache and also get a unified view of their datasets. And to your point about listening to customers and really paying attention to customers, Dave, we built this service because customers asked us to, a lot of customers asked us to actually, it's a really helpful enabler for a pretty wide variety of cloud bursting workloads and hybrid workflows ranging from media rendering and transcoding to engineering design simulation to big data analytics. And it really aligns with that theme of extend that we were talking about earlier. You know, I often joke that AWS says it's the best people working on solving the speed of light problem. So this is, okay. But so this idea of bursting, as I said, it's been a great cloud use case from the early days and bringing it to file storage is very sound and the approach with file cache looks really practical. When is this service available? How can I get started bursting to AWS? Give us the details there. Yeah, well, stay tuned. We announced it today at storage day and it will be generally available later this year. And once it becomes available, you can create a cache via the AWS management console or through the SDKs or the CLI. And then within minutes of creating the cache, it'll be available to your Linux instances and your instances will be able to access it using standard file system mount commands. And the pricing model is gonna be a pretty familiar one to cloud customers. Customers will only pay for the cache storage and the performance they need. And they can spin a cache up and use it for the duration of their compute burst workload and then tear it down. So I'm really excited that Amazon file cache will make it easier for customers to leverage the agility and the performance and the cost efficiency of AWS for processing data no matter where the data is stored. Yeah, cool. Really interested to see how that gets adopted. Ed, always great to catch up with you. As I said, the pace is mind boggling. It's accelerating in the cloud overall but storage specifically. So by ask is, can we take a little breather here? Can we just relax for a bit and chill out? Not as long as customers are asking us for more things. So there's more to come for sure. All right, Ed, thanks again. Great to see you. I really appreciate your time. Thanks Dave, great catching up. Okay, and thanks for watching our coverage of AWS Storage Day 2022. Keep it right there for more in-depth conversations on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.


These two galaxies resemble a penguin safeguarding its egg. This Hubble image of the interacting pair shows the blue, twisted form of galaxy NGC 2936, the penguin, and its partner, NGC 2937, the egg. The former galactic bulge now forms the eye of the penguin, around which it is still possible to see where the galaxy's pinwheel arms once were. These disrupted arms now shape the cosmic bird's body as bright streaks of blue and red across the image.


Alrighty, got a shot here. Swash swing, okay, short and sweet. What is this, 108 frames? This is based on reference. Let me check here. Swash swing, swing, swing, cool. MC Hammer pans, I love it. Now let me quickly double check something. If I bring this and say viewer horizontal, bring this in here. Swing, swing, swing, swing, okay. It's not exactly sticking to the plate, which you don't have to, of course. And it's taking what, the first step pose here, then you go up, which would be on the right side, something around this. I do love how it's kind of a slight shuffle over with a long, like a lean into it. Look at that, that's cool. I like that, when I bring it back in, but then I would almost go, back in there. In your case, you're bringing this up like that, which would be this one, and then, turn, turn, turns, turns, which in your case, you have that in there. Yeah, where are you taking this pose on the right, which is there, into, up, and that's on the right side around here, right? Swing. Not sure you need this pose here. Let me go back to the other one. So if I look at this here, I think what's probably gonna help you, like the way I approach this sometimes, that's when you have reference like this, right?  There's some good stuff here, right? You got all of these. And since the camera is not moving too much, I know there's a bit of a follow, especially at the end, there's a pretty good way to just put that into Maya and then just trace this and get most of this into your scene quickly, and then you can start deleting things. Right now, I feel like we don't have enough information. You're talking here about, let me see, you got the golden poses, you need fresh eyes in terms of appeal and timing. It's just some of these are fairly rough. I don't mind when you have, but then here, it feels like I'm really dragging. This needs to have either more information to understand why he's lingering back so far here for so long. It just feels like it's dragging out. And then is this, is this a swing? There's another sword here. Swung, was that a move down with an arc in whatever way to deflect another sword? Because then after that, it's this, but it's not this as in, I'm here, swinging now, swing, to move someone's sword away so that the person is now, you know, whatever it is, like, oh, it's over there. The sword has been pushed out this way. Oh, and the person is open. So now the character, put the on and skinning on here, can go swung, but not this, right? So if I take this and I draw this fantastically as I always do, sarcasm. And then do this, I would not go back into that pose. I would now go forward with like a nice, long, elongated here, and then swaw, sword into the face, sword into the chest, you know what I mean? And then really lean forward to attack that person. Like I would, basically if you're looking just for an exercise, I would look at taking those poses and just pushing it in terms of the timing and the intent and all that good stuff. So what does this guy do? Right, so he's got a little bit of a taunting stab and then he is shing, potentially, there could be a sword hit here. Sure, that he's blocking, but the thing is he's doing this to nothing. So the timing wouldn't really work because I would go shaw, hold, and to this. And then what is that? Like I would take that away. That's more like you do block and get away. And then it doesn't do much to me. That's more like a posturing. It's more like you wanna go into this and then straight into shaw, into that. That makes sense. Actually, let me open this in quick time. And I always wish that someone would read you a quick time to allow for the copy, paste, and edit function in players. I can now take this and say, all right, well, I like this. I don't like what he's doing in the middle here. That's a bit boring. Go straight into this. I like that little double step there. It's gonna pop, obviously, but still, I want him to go from this to up here into the next. Where are we gonna have anything before? No, it's not really that usable. So it's gonna be from this to a pop. Cut this out. And it's more like taunt, to block, and shaw. You know what I mean? Even this, you would really need to taunt. You can basically start from here. Like it's just started on action, right? Then it's back, block, get away from me, shaw, shaw. Death strike. But even then, I wouldn't even have that pause. It would just be going into shaw. What is he doing? He's get away into straight into that thing. Yeah, I mean, you can even, then I get it's obviously even poppy-err, but cut out even more just so that you have this feeling of shaw, shaw, shaw, right? Okay, I looped this. It's the hockey for looping. Oh, I got it. But when you edit things, it messes up the footage that you worked on. See that, all the skipping stuff? Yeah, that's good old quick time. Shaw, shaw, shaw, shaw, shaw. That to me is what I would take in terms of the ideas. There might just be a return, right? And even this starting pose could be tweaked, even though there's a good, let me change tools here. It's a good lean forward, but I can't go frame by frame with that tool. But anyway, you have that. And then I like this idea of, when I like that he is, like I said, there might be blocking of another sword, but he's doing this while leaning forward. So there's still weight towards the opponent. I think that's pretty cool. Then it could be almost like get away from me and then right into that, right? All that flourishing into the next one. So to me, that's what I would take. Don't save. And when I look at this, it gives me kind of a, okay, so that's the first top, but then it goes immediately back into a block where it's almost like I need to go backwards from this to this to this. Just timing wise, it's gonna be, I'm attacking and immediately back. Like that's gonna take a lot more time in your animation because you're moving forward. Now this leg has to push the body back. And you don't have, obviously, I know this is just stepped, but even if you add stuff, it's gonna take a while for that. Let's go back here. From this, the root goes screen left, then has to stop and return and on top of that, push up to go into this pose.   And then even this would be leaning forward into take this out into that. But that, like I said, would be really leaning forward. That's kind of the thought that I would have looking at this, where I was kind of looking at what are the actions, what are trying to push? And then think in terms of rhythm, timing wise, where it's am I attacking, go back and show. And that last thing where you're blocking or retreating from something, hold for a block and then flourish into show into a fast attack. That type of thing. And actually speaking of pushing reference, funny enough, I just emailed someone. Let's see, do I still have that link in my, I do not, hold on, I have it here. I had someone that just asked me about pushing poses and someone else that was asking about how to have the workflow be faster. And my question was based on what they sent if that was based on reference. And the reason why I'm asking all this is because Ricky did this fantastic thing here. Just turn this off just quick, where you see like that type of thing. And I frequently do the same thing here where you take the reference and I just wrote with a reference. This is so much faster, just put that in there. And it's usually kind of like, eh, it's okay, but it's not pushed, right? Like he says, your rapid rotoscope always lacks energy when you do that. And then you start pushing the timing and cameras and ideas and he pushes even more with cool stuff like that. That's really cool. I love all that. So then you can see here, this is halfway through where to push things, line of action and so on. So that's what I would recommend for some reason that I have just a frame in here. I wanted to see if I had the links in there. But so if you take this reference, look at what's in there and then push that. So that it's not just taking, I would say random pose, I think you have good pose in terms of what's happening, a stab, a block, a flourish into the next attack. That's fine. But looking out, maybe have in mind what's going on there and then what is the other opponent and make sure that you think about that when you adjust the timing, right? So when you do have something like this, give this enough time for going back to the mechanics but also for a imaginary strike and then return here. And then something about just the energy and pushing that over. Someone has retreat, right?  The root shouldn't go back at the end. Because otherwise are you saying, is this the main strike? Because you are going forward. He's at a downward slash.  A defensive but aggressive pose or is that the last pose in terms of attack? So that's just not quite clear if that makes sense. So anyway, I hope that all of the thing makes sense. And if not, let me know. All right, there's an email. You can sign up. You can start whenever you want. You can submit whatever you want. You get 16 submissions. Either way, a like and subscribe would be awesome. All right, thank you.


Why do games take so long to install on PC, Xbox, and PS4? Most modern games take at least an hour to install and download, but why can't it just be faster, like downloading an image? Basically, it's because games, especially modern ones, can take a width of 100GB of storage. An image is like 5MB, so downloading games is like downloading 200,000 images. But why can't your PC just download faster? Well, it depends on a lot of factors. First, you have your internet connection. If you don't have a fast or stable connection, it will drastically slow down your download speed. Next are your background tasks. There isn't really a good way to make it download faster because usually the internet your device is using is most likely the fastest it can download. Using ethernet is a good way to speed up your download speeds, but I would say just wait a couple hours is the best way to go at it. It will boost the download speeds, but not by that much. If you have an open game while downloading another one, it will slow down the download to try to give you a better connection in the game you're playing. Most of the time, however, it would also struggle to run the game at low ping when downloading. That's why launchers pause downloads when you try to update or play another game. It also depends on where you downloaded the game from. If you download it from Chrome, it will be quite slow because Google isn't used to downloading 30GB games at high speeds. That's why Steam built their own download server so that users can download and install their games faster. This however affects the download speed. Since there are a lot of players trying to download their games at the same server at the same time, it will take slower because so many people are using it. They have to decompress these large files without losing any data and install it all after. Games take up so much space because they're getting more graphically demanding as well as getting bigger and having more content. This all comes at a cost because it would take more space to download and then install. It's not just as simple as a one hour video, but it's more of an app or software. A wide misconception is that download speeds are faster on an SSD compared to a hard drive. These are mainly dependent on your internet. This is because it has to get files from the internet to the device. The soft speeds however can vary, but it's taking a file from your computer or console and making it playable. So in conclusion, just be patient with the download. Your internet is trying its hardest and you can just speed it up by minimizing your task and connecting to Ethernet. It has to download a ton of files and install them.


Well, hello and welcome to understand men now. I'm your host Jonathan as they have Jonathan as a comment I'm so excited to be shooting this short video for you today our topic Why do men act so wishy-washy wishy-washy? when dating um Really quickly if you're new to my youtube channel hit the subscribe button hit the bell so you can be notified of new content I shoot about four videos a week. All right, let's talk about why men are so wishy-washy. I don't get it Why are they so wishy-washy? This is actually a very serious conversation, so I've been a little bit ingest, but not bad and I Want to dig a little bit deeper into what causes someone to act hot and cold in and out that sort of thing and I do believe that one of the number one causes is that life gets in the way of the pursuit of love life gets in the way of the pursuit of love and I'm going to share a very dramatic Illustration of this and it's going to be something very personal and for most of you who have been following me for a little while You know, I lost my 19 year old son Connor to an accident in the summer of 2018 oh Excuse me for a second and While I'm going through this experience in my life of mourning my child I didn't date, you know, like the day after he passed away but months later I put myself back out there because I have been single for a little while and Um, and I and I'd like to have a mate in my life I genuinely like to have a life partner just like my mom and dad that's a picture of my mom and dad who were married 66 years before my mother passed away and What I experienced though is a roller coaster of emotions That were centered around Predominantly losing my son. So while I was actively putting myself out there I also found myself kind of on this emotional roller coaster and I was acting hot and cold and back and forth and And you know, well, some people might say well, you may not be ready for a relationship in my heart of hearts I want a life partner It's the date it's the challenge of dating. It's the challenge of getting to know another human being That is difficult when life Gets in the way of all this and it's not just the loss of my son or something that's happened in your life Maybe a loss of a child might be COVID going on. It might be It might be work related issues It might be elderly parents It might be health issues going on in one's life when when stuff is going on in one's life It can make it kind of challenging to be fully present To approach the dating process and I know you've been so conditioned to hear that when a man knows what he wants And he goes after what it wants everything else stops in his world and he's single focused on you Well, that sounds great in theory sure, but the reality is is I mean unless we're chasing sex You know, which we are very highly focused on that Man like necessarily highly focused on being I want a relationship I want a relationship from a fantasy perspective now I certainly want a life mate and I'm very present to that But I'm also aware that my emotions can be rocky at times and it might seem wishy-washy Does that make me a bad guy? Does that make other men bad men? Does that make you a bad person because you might have stuff going on in your life? No, it's part of the process and This is why if you're not familiar with the book by Barbara DeAngelis called are you the one for me? Are you the one for me? This is a great book to really learn how to assess who's really a right partner for you and They asked those deeper questions related to what's going on in one's life because that's a fundamental principle of vetting a person is to get a sense of where their life is at and I'm very upfront with women I say that either at times when I can act emotional because I'm mourning still mourning the loss of my job But I'm upfront and I'm aware of that not everybody is up front This is why you got to get a picture of what their life looks like to get a sense of how stable is the ground underneath him How strong is his foundation in life and if his foundation is weak from a Practical sense what's going to make it challenging to fully invest in a relationship and God forbid the foundation of his self Love is weak. Well, that's very problematic And if you're not familiar with my book and I always pitch it on every video what the heck is self love anyway by Jonathan Asley That's my book. The link is there below self-love the book I Talked about this on multiple videos a man can't fully be present to a relationship if he's not at least Loving on himself a little bit a little bit Not like this never do this in front of a guy, but a little bit I'm not expecting men to love themselves this way. I'm not expecting you to love yourself this way But loving on yourself a little bit making that effort that that daily Investment of personal development self-help and spiritual work Because how can we really truly be partners with one another if we're not at least on a journey of loving on ourselves? Loving on ourselves when we're loving on ourselves. We're not as wishy-washy in our lives and That's my invitation for you in your own personal life and to be mindful to pay attention how a man shows up and Recognize that there sometimes are very valid reasons why he might seem hot and cold that have nothing to do with you Oftentimes it's always pointing the finger a lot of coaching is pointing the finger at women And I'm here to say we got to point the finger at the individual And I mean by point the finger is at least understand their perspective Understand their perspective because when we can understand we can predict behavior and we can predict behavior We can make better choices and that's what this is all about how to make better choices. Oh my god I'm so parental when I teach. I'm yelling because it's a wake-up call I want to invite you to make better choices in your life And that's what my channel is all about when you understand you can predict. I mean you can predict you make better choices Okay, you got it All right, you might have something to say Please do come post a comment below if you have a question for me on this I do my best to read all the questions. I try to respond to some or certainly you can go to my private group Midlife Love Mastery to join my VIP group. The link is below So you can ask me direct questions on a regular basis. All right, I'm gonna wrap up this video As I always do first off giving myself a big gigantic hug of self-love I'm gonna reach into the cyber screen and give you a gigantic hug of love I'm gonna ask you to turn to someone and give them a hug of love because hugs are a great source of love And we can use a lot more love in our lives. Thank you so much and wishing you a fabulous day Bye-bye now


Turkish security forces neutralized a total of 13 PKK-slash-YPG terrorists in northern Iraq and Syria near the Turkish border. The Ministry of National Defense of Turkey announced this. The Turkish armed forces and neutralized six PKK terrorists in the north of Iraq and seven PKK terrorists in the Euphrates Shield operation area in the north of Syria," the report said. Our operations will continue resolutely until there is not a single terrorist left in the region," the Ministry said in a statement. Turkish authorities use the term neutralize to imply the terrorists in question surrendered or were killed or captured. In its more than 35-year terror campaign against Turkey, the PKK, listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the US, UK, and EU, has been responsible for the deaths of more than 40,000 people, including women, children, and infants. A total of 519 terrorists have been neutralized since the beginning of 2024, 204 in northern Iraq and 315 in northern Syria. The Turkish security forces have ramped up operations against the Kurdistan Workers Party after the group killed 12 Turkish soldiers in northern Iraq in December last year. Footage has been released, showing the destruction of the Caesar-Kunikov ship belonging to the Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet as a result of the operation conducted by the Chief Intelligence Department of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry. Footage taken by crew members and shared on Russian telegram channels shows underwater drones attacking the ship and Russian sailors firing at the drones. Russian officials said that one of the drones immobilized the ship, while others damaged its left side. As a result of the last drone strike, the ship exploded. It should be recalled that on February 14, as a result of the operation carried out by the Group 13 Special Purpose Unit of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's Main Intelligence Department, Caesar-Kunikov landing ship belonging to the Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet was destroyed by the Magura V-5 underwater drones. The ship sank 40 minutes after the attack.


I've noticed that over the past 10 years or so, there is a phrase that's been popping up in marketing trainings, which is that we're supposed to create irresistible offers. Have you ever heard this? You're supposed to create irresistible marketing, irresistible messages, irresistible offers, meaning offers, products and services that your audience can't resist but buy. That sounds great, right?  Would you like to have that happen? Would you like your audience to just not have a second thought?  They can't resist it. Now, that sounds good. From the profit point of view, like, oh, I can make more money. I can have more power over my audience. I can make them do things that I want them to do so that they will change their life and have a better life, right? But let's flip it around and let's now place you in the audience's position. Would you like me to say things to you where you can't resist? Doesn't matter what your budget is, doesn't matter if you think it's really, if I don't give you a chance to think and you just buy from me. I just want you to buy. I don't want you to think anymore. I just want you to do what I say. I want you to buy my stuff. I want you to do what I tell you to do so that you can change your life for the better because I'm really here to make you, I really have good intentions for you to have a better life so you just don't think. Just do what I tell you because I know what's better for you. How does that feel? Well, I don't think any of us want to be treated that way. We are adults. We have free will. In fact, probably the most valuable thing you have is your free will.  The ability to think and make a choice based on your thought. And if a marketer is trying to take that away from you, they are going against the most essential sort of characteristic about you as a human being. But that's what marketing is trying to train us to do today, is to do that to other people. And so I want to show you some marketing copy that I saw that is essentially trying to teach that kind of stuff to us. Now, let me warn you, this is not, well, I should say, when I say warn, I really should say, this kind of copy is everywhere. So I don't even have to warn you because you probably have seen it, but maybe you haven't been conscious of it until this video. I don't know. Let me know what you think. Let me go ahead and share my screen and then we can kind of walk through this together here, okay? So I saw this on a website and I don't want you to go looking for who wrote this. It doesn't matter who wrote this or what company or what product or what service this is about, because you know what, I have used this kind of language too. So it's not blaming a certain company or person. It's becoming conscious as business owners that it's easy to fall into this kind of thing. So it's not to blame anybody, but it's become conscious ourselves that are we doing this kind of thing? And by the way, are we buying from people who are doing this to us and maybe we should have second or third thoughts, maybe instead of making a decision right on the webinar, right on the call with them, right on the video with them, maybe we should sleep on it for one, two or three nights and talk to three or five different wise people about the decision before we say yes to a $2,000 program or a $5,000 program or even a $200 program, okay? So this is what the sales page is promising to teach us. You'll learn secrets for sharing what you do that produces instant trust and desire in your ideal clients. Now wouldn't we want that? Again, if you don't, if you aren't thoughtful about this stuff you just, and you go to your basest instincts, all you want, all we want to do from a unwise sort of lower human being perspective is to control other people and make them do what we want them to do because then we can have money and power, right? So that's why we gotta be really careful that are we overriding other people? The most important thing about other people is their free will, right? Okay, how to share your story about why you love your works with people lean in and get an intuitive hit that they need to work with you, right? Or how to create your unique aligned irresistible, what do you do statement or irresistible offer or whatever you want to say, all right? So first of all, secrets. The word secrets, I think is a terrible word to use in marketing because it creates fear of missing out. It basically makes people afraid that they won't get some kind of advantage that other people will get to have security, to have a fulfilling life. And to be honest, there are no secrets. Anything you learn that resonates with you is because it resonates with the deep truth you already believe. Now, if there's some kind of new fangle tactic or technology or tool or process, you could probably find it by Googling it, honestly. Having learned marketing for 10 years, I learned that there are no secrets. Everything is free out there. Everything is free. If you learn how to Google, if you search Google, it's all free out there. And people who use the word secrets are just trying to sell you something. They're using fear of missing out. And when people use fear, I don't think we should support that kind of marketing. I don't think we should support that with our dollars, with our purchasing dollars. Let's not support it because you can find it for free, okay? If you, in fact, come find some kind of programs as George, there's some secret here. I will send you 10 YouTube videos that are teaching it to you for free. There are no secrets. And yes, you might buy someone's thing to support them. And I thank all of you for buying my courses because you're essentially doing that to support me in part. But also you enjoy that I'm putting together some, all everything's free out there. And I'm just putting it together in some format that inspires you. And you like to be and work with me, et cetera. But there's no secrets, okay? It's all out there, all right? What about instant trust and desire? Instant trust? What do you mean instant trust? Trust is earned. Trust is built by repeated trustworthy interactions. Trust is not something you dangle some meat in front of someone and suddenly, or you use a certain copy.  That's not real trust. That's manipulation and that's fake trust but you've manipulated them to trust you in that moment. But really it's you having power over someone's free will and someone's thinking. Instant trust and desire, that's treating them like a Pavlov's dog, right? Treating them like they are manipulative, right? Which is really unfortunate and that's something we don't want to be done unto us. So why are we doing that to others? We don't. Bad karma, really bad karma and it's also bad for long-term business because long-term business is about actual trust. Real trustworthy interactions creates a sustainable sales in the long-term and it actually makes your marketing easier and easier. Like these days, I'm so grateful that I have been showing up consistently and built real trust, I hope, with many of you so that when I am selling something, I don't feel stressed out selling it. I just, and I don't even try to persuade you. I don't even try to have great marketing copy. I actually, I'm quite lazy in my marketing copy when I'm trying to sell you something, I'm quite lazy. I just like, well, this is basically what it is. I'm very plain in how I describe what it is. I don't try to make you desire and make you go, oh my God, I must, I just said, this is what it is. This is when it's starting. I hope you join us if you are into this kind of thing and that's it. I'm very lazy about it. I don't try to persuade and I just say, well, if it's something that you guys want, you'll buy it. If it's something that's not you don't want, you won't buy it and I'll just be more aware of that in the future. So I'll sell you more of what you want because you know it, you feel that it'll help you. There's no manipulation. There's just building trust over time with content. And then, like I said, even if I do it lazily, I still make plenty of money. I still make plenty of sales because again, long-term trust makes your marketing and selling easier and easier and easier instead of having to try to produce instant trust because you think everybody doesn't trust you. And by the way, with those kinds of marketers, people shouldn't trust them because they are trying to manipulate everybody who's reading your copy. So the next phrase I wanna mention is how to share your story about why you love your work so that people lean in and get an intuitive hit that they need to work with you. Do you want people to get an intuitive hit that they need to work with you? Okay, let's talk about this. What is an intuitive hit? Is an intuitive hit something that a marketer manipulates within you or is an intuitive hit something that comes from a higher source? Your higher self or God or your angels an intuitive hit is something that is supposed to come from a higher spiritual source.  You really should go in this direction. That's an intuitive hit. That's truly what an intuitive hit is. It's not what a marketer should do, right? Or a business owner should do to write certain things that make you have an intuitive hit. That's, they're corrupting a spiritual idea for the sake of gaining money and power over others. It's just, it's terrible. We should not try to create an intuitive hit in people. We should just do what we do out of love and service. And if their source, their God, their angels or their higher self can tell them that this is the right path for them. Let that happen between them and their God, between them and their higher self, not because we said certain things that make them feel a certain way. That is the essence of manipulative and the kind of marketing that we don't want to be done unto us. That's what I mean by unethical. If we don't want it done unto me, if I don't want to be done to me, nor to my spouse, nor to my, you know, nephews and nieces, nor to my parents, I don't want that kind of marketing done to my parents or to my nephews and nieces or to the children of the world, then why am I doing it to other people? That's the golden rule. It's just notice what we don't want to be done unto us or our loved ones. And then be careful not to do that to other people because we're creating bad karma and we're also creating a bad long-term model for our business, right? So lastly, irresistible, create your unique, your irresistible offer or statement. We don't have to do that anymore. What we, we are naturally interesting to our ideal audience, our true fans when we show up as our authentic selves in exploration of our own journey and in genuine sense of I want to help other people. That's it. This combination of I'm exploring my own journey and I'm doing it also because it might actually help other people who are on the same kind of journey as me. That is authentic marketing. And when we show up consistently, lots of things happen. It's good for our creativity, which is good for our life vibrancy and our life interests and our life purpose. Showing up consistently, I've said many times in my videos, isn't about so that I can get more clients. That kind of means, ends justifying the means is the whole problem here. Marketing is not a means to an end. Marketing is not a necessary evil so that I can, not a chore so that I can finally get clients and do the work that I'm meant to do. Marketing is the work you're meant to do. Marketing is part of the work you are meant to do. It's not, oh, I gotta learn how to do Facebook ads. What a chore. What a, what a, it sucks so that I can do the work I love and get clients and provide services and products. Marketing is part of the work you're supposed to love because marketing itself can be a ministry. I've said this so often, but I don't think I can say it enough. Marketing itself is part of your life purpose as a business owner, as an authentic business owner. It's part of your life purpose. The marketing is where you show up consistently to explore your life force in creativity and in service to your audience, right? Which again, fulfills you. It makes you vibrant. It keeps you young. Creativity keeps you young and keeps your mind clear and keeps your mind sharp. I wasn't very sharp. Keep your mind sharp when you show up consistently to create content. It keeps you deepening your ideas and broadening your understanding of the world and of yourself, which is all good. Marketing is really for your own personal growth. And by the way, it helps, it happens to help other people. And by the way, it also happens to resonate with your true fans and therefore over time, they, you build worthy trust. You become trustworthy, which then makes your selling easy because you don't have to try so hard. You just say, hey, I think this is cool. I don't know if you guys think it's cool but I've built something. I've created something. I'm facilitating something. And I think it'll, I'm excited about it and I think it'll help you, but you let me know by whether or not you buy. And hopefully before that, you could take surveys and have conversations with your fans to see if they really want that stuff before you try so hard in selling it. Because if you try hard in selling it and it's the people aren't buying, it's not, it also it's not because you don't have an irresistible offer or that you're not trustworthy. Because, you know, you just, you're trying to find a match between what you're excited about and what your audience is excited about. That match is really what makes our marketing and selling so easy and so authentic because we don't have to try hard. We're just finding a match. That's it. So I hope this is helpful. Let's stop trying to create irresistible offers because in plain and simple, it's manipulation and mind control. And it's really done for power and money. And like I said, it's bad karma and it's bad for your long-term authentic business. It doesn't work. It might create some short-term sales but people trust you less and less over time. Okay, so stop with the irresistible offers and instead yes to showing up consistently, authentically in exploration of yourself, in service to others and it just becomes a joy. It just becomes a joy. All every marketing you do is a joy and then the selling you do is a really curious observation of whether there's a match. That's it. All right, I hope this is helpful. I look forward to your comments. Go ahead and add a comment below if you'd like and I'm gonna give you some time to do that while I check to see if there's any comments on my live video here. All right, so thanks for joining me, Carissa and Jen and Marco. I so appreciate it and let's see here. So I don't see any comments right now but sometimes I can't see comments right away. Thanks again, Jen and Carissa, Marco. All right, have a great rest of your day. Remember marketing itself can be a joy, can be fulfillment and I believe it is part of the life purpose of authentic businesses. All right, take good care.


In this module, we'll be talking about adaptive capacity, the capacity of the social system of any kind from whole societies to individuals to deal with change within their environment. This question of social adaptation becomes increasingly significant when social change affects important aspects of life over comparatively short periods of time. Such changes might include migration, changes in age, rapid industrial development or major shifts of the population from rural to urban living that has been characteristic of the modern era. In such times of rapid and fundamental social change, it is the adaptive capacity of the social system that ensures the preservation of its structure and functionality over time. And this question of what enables or constrains the system's adaptive capacity becomes of central interest. As we've discussed in previous modules, agents operate within some environment, they are periodically subject to change within that environment. They have to deal with this change in some way in order to ensure the preservation of their structure and function and their capacity to do that we would call their robustness or resilience. The question we're interested in then is how do they respond to that change? What strategy does the agent or organization use? And there are fundamentally really just two different approaches to dealing with change of this kind. Agents can resist it or they can adapt to it. And of course most eventualities will involve some combination of both but we need to understand these two different paradigms of resistance and adaptation. And in this module we'll be using models from the area of cybernetics to help us do this. Adaptive systems typically have a specialized subsystem for regulating their behavior and this is called a regulatory or control system. Examples of this would include the human brain, the border directors within a company, a national government or a military commander among many others. Regulatory systems are designed to manage the overall maintenance of the system's structure and functionality to ensure preservation and homeostasis. All complex adaptive systems are in some way dependent upon their environment. They are what we call thermodynamically open systems. They require the input of energy and resources in order to maintain their dynamical stage. Without it they will slowly or rapidly decay and thus the regulatory system has to ensure that the system as a whole is and will be receiving the required input values from its environment. The regulatory system then has to know what the parameters to these input values are and direct the system towards a state that will optimize them. If we are cold and there is a fire nearby we will move towards it. If we are very poor we will be driven to make money. If our economy requires a high input of oil we will try to secure that resource. These are examples of homeostasis where the regulatory system monitors, controls and adjust the whole system so as to maintain it within the optimal set of input values required to preserve and develop its level of structure and functionality and this is the same for all complex adaptive systems. Regulatory systems always define a desired state for the system and parameters or boundaries around that that are required for it to achieve that desired state. Here we are defining what the system is, that is to say there is some structure or function through which it defines itself. This might be the identity of being an Indian, of being a good person or being an athlete or being a tough guy. But in order to be any of these things you have to stay within a certain set of parameters. You can't be a good person if you are taking lots of drugs and stealing lots of things.  All of these identities are dependent upon a set of boundary conditions that must be maintained in order to maintain that state of functionality. In order to occupy that state you are dependent upon those input values. When we as groups or individuals form an identity it defines what we are. This identity also typically depends upon some resource. Such as the territory that a nation occupies, the job status that an individual occupies or the position within some social hierarchy. In defining what we are, we are of course also defining what we're not. We are creating some kind of boundary condition that limits our existence. These dependencies and boundary conditions create a structure that holds the system within a certain configuration creating inertia and the resistance to change. The formation of identity and boundaries is often path dependent with negative externalities that create the lock-in effect. The emergence of the structure may have been initially contingent with other directions being equally feasible in the early stage. But once the structure is in place it can be self-perpetuating creating its own conditions for persistence. Think about the carving up of the Middle East by the colonial powers after the Second World War by drawing often arbitrary lines in the sand. But these lines in the sand would now be considered semi-sacred, trying now to move them just a few kilometers could possibly result in a Third World War. Once contingent historical events take place, path dependent sequences are marked by relatively deterministic causal patterns or what can be thought of as inertia. And this inertia is driven by the same process that we discussed before. Negative feedback loops making it easier to continue with the same pre-existing solution and negative externalities reducing alternative options and out of this the boundary condition gets self-perpetuated and reinforced over time. Once the adaptive system has defined a boundary condition and become locked into that condition we will get in inertia the resistance to change. This as a strategy means the control system trying to limit the number of possible eventualities and maintain only a limited number of responses. In order to reduce the number of possible eventualities to some small subset that is conducive to the system we have to try and control the environment. Further we go down this path of resistance the more we're trying to control the environment and the more we're trying to reduce the possible input values to the system. In order to properly control a system or environment we have to linearize it. Non-linearity is inherently uncontrollable. We have to externalize it from the system in so doing reducing diversity, reducing redundant components and by linearizing the environment we can increase the coupling. All of these will give increases in short-term efficiency but also of course leads to the long-term self-organized criticality as the system becomes more dependent upon a narrow band of input values and any small change in those critical values can create systemic shocks. The classical example of this being our current dependency on petroleum where small changes in the input value can ramify across the whole system and here again this critical state was created by path dependence, a process driven by positive feedback and negative externalities as we previously saw when we talked about carbon lock-in. But this state of inertia reduces the system's adaptive capacity and requires the heavy maintenance of a control system in order to ensure that these critical values are not altered. We've already defined adaptation as the capacity to generate some appropriate response given some environmental change. Adaptation as a strategy is essentially the opposite from resistance and control. Both resistance and adaptation are methods for maintaining the system structure and functionality but control does so by reducing the number of input values to the system to the required type by creating boundaries and exerting some external force to alter the environment whereas adaptation tries to ensure that the system has the appropriate response for any given input value. Adaptation means being open to a number of different eventualities that is to say the condition of uncertainty and having the capacity to reconfigure the system in response to that change without compromising critical functions. Whereas regulatory systems will have to expend a large amount of their resources on maintaining their whole mechanism for regulation that is to say the means through which they amass information define and protect boundaries, exercise control etc. Adaptation as a strategy in contrary is not trying to reduce the range of input values thus it does not mean to maintain all of this control apparatus meaning it can be a much more agile strategy. This strategy of adaptation is then focused on ensuring the system has a sufficient number of states to generate the appropriate one when required and ensuring the competency of these components. Whereas resistance will try to remove all disturbances adaptation comes with the recognition to the importance of disturbance in testing the system in order to maintain the competency of the system's components because without control over its environment the diversity and effectiveness of its constituent components is the only thing that is going to ensure its preservation. As an example of this we might think about the different philosophies surrounding child rearing. On the one hand we'll have those parents who believe that it is best to try and protect their children from every eventuality giving them all the vaccines not letting them play in the garden and get dirty, talk to the bad children or stay out late. On the other hand we have parents who believe it's necessary to expose the child to those environmental perturbations in order for it to develop its adaptive capacity through overcoming them. This is of course how our bodies develop their adaptive capacity the human immune system develops by encountering interventions from antigens having to develop the appropriate response and then retaining a copy of those successful responses for future application. In so doing it uses these environmental perturbations to build up resilience over time. And this whole discussion ties back to the previous module where we talked about the theory of the edge of chaos. The hypotheses that successful complex adaptive systems somehow maintain themselves between chaos or randomness and order where they are exposed to perturbations that broaden their possible set of input values and remove those components that do not add to its overall adaptive capacity. The system uses the two different regimes in order to configure and reconfigure itself enabling it to evolve over time in a sustainable fashion. Because of emergence complex adaptive systems like whole societies are multi-dimensional or multi-scalar systems. Through emergence patterns develop on different levels and these patterns have their own internal processes taking place. This means that change is occurring on many different levels from the micro to the macro and these processes of change are taking place in parallel with small processes nested within larger ones. For example within Western society during the past 500 years we've been going through the macro process of change that is modernity representing a very fundamental socio-cultural transformation. But nested within that we've also been going through the process of industrialization for the past 200 years approximately and within both of these we have the process of economic liberalization that's been taking place for the past 30 years or so. Thus in these complex social systems there are many processes of change taking place in parallel. These macro processes of change typically take place very slowly. Within ecology these are called slow variables. Micro level processes of change happen very fast and they have fast variables associated with them. Fast variables are factors that change rapidly and are most easily measured and manipulated by managers. Regulatory systems can try to directly influence and manage the system through these fast variables such as a central bank reducing interest rates or putting liquidity into the market in order to affect the state of the system immediately. But we typically cannot use centralized regulatory systems to manage macro processes of change. There is no government to the process of modernity. There is no board of directors to the process of globalization. These things are managed through the mechanism of evolution that takes place in a distributed fashion over prolonged periods of time. There is no centralized regulatory system that can really affect these slow variables. If the macro system has self-organized into a critical state there is nothing we can do about that now. You cannot now affect this macro situation and the slow variables associated with it by altering fast variables. The possibility for solving that problem was in the past. Here again we see path dependency and again most of this can be understood in terms of positive feedback and negative externalities. These stresses on the macro level accumulate because some regulatory system on the macro level has learned to displace a lot of its problems to its external environment. Quite simply it pushes them beyond its boundaries. But it is really just pushing them onto the macro level distorting the process of evolution and leading to macro level self-organized criticality that it cannot affect through its fast control variables on the macro level. The system might become increasingly competent at managing everything within its boundaries but through linearization and externalizing those things that it can't manage well. And the big idea here is that of sustainability which we haven't had the chance to touch upon but we might say is the ultimate aim of adaptive capacity. In this module we've been discussing adaptive capacity and resilience within social systems. We talked about two different strategies for trying to manage change, resistance and adaptation. Their resistance involves developing some static identity based upon a boundary condition and creating a regulatory system for monitoring and controlling the system's environment to ensure a limited subset of eventualities that are conducive to the system's self-preservation and continued functioning, what is called homeostasis. This is done by amassing as much resources as possible in order to be able to exert as much control as necessary to resist any perturbation that might take it outside of these operating parameters. Inversely we talked about adaptation as a second alternative strategy, one that is focused upon systems capacity to generate a wide set of responses, ensuring its capacity to reconfigure itself given as wide a spectrum of input values as possible, in so doing ensuring its resilience and continued functionality. We talked about how the adaptive approach is not focused on amassing resources in order to prevent change but instead on generating the appropriate response and fast recovery from inevitable failures, thus responding to change in a constructive way as an important means through which it develops. Finally, we discussed the multidimensional nature to complex social systems as they're engaged in processes of change on various levels from the micro to the macro, giving us slow and fast variables, with these fast variables being the means of centralized regulation and slow variables being the outcome to the long-term process of evolution.


How do we demilitarize the key track of the precious suffering of Ukrainian brothers and sisters but understand the NATO expansion not simply with a provocation, but it's part and parcel of an overall pattern of U.S. imperial activity that's been going on for decades and decades and decades. Pantabar been invaded 22 times. Looks like there's gonna be another occupation coming. Plus it's not to be overwhelmed by it, but like blues folk, look the catastrophe in the face and not allow it to have the last word. Oh, that's it. That's it.