You are listening to the 8% Nation podcast created to help you become a top producer in the insurance industry Enjoy the show All right, welcome to another 8% Nation podcast where we are dedicated to helping you as an insurance agent get into the 8% Cody dude, we just got back from a really really epic and fun trip. Yep Why don't you tell the people sort of what we were doing why we were doing it just kind of give it give give an overview What we just got back from yes, we were doing the 8% monster retreat So the top 8% which are monsters Collided we did a little collab event with we might have been at the top 1% Yeah, that's that retreat. I think it was the point 8% of The you know what I mean? Yeah, well, I mean it was eight nine people So it was like the next levels you got the top 8% then you've got the 10% of that group Which is the point 8% dude. I like the point 8% you like that. I think that's a branding play we could That's that's new man, right? That's the next level, which is kind of what we're gonna talk about today Not only the event but branding but the retreat went well Several big clients and friends of ours were there. It seems that it seems to be a trend power players show up No matter where we are they're there There's something to be said for that. Yeah, we always find ourselves at the same kind of events too Like I know Matt Monero is doing an event in Dallas and like three of those people were like gonna go down there And I was thinking about going there and even know Ramiz and those guys were going. Yeah, you know So it's like we all kind of like Kind of finding the same sort of event. We're all kind of doing the same kind of thing It seems like there's something you could learn from that The the real power behind if I can ever challenge anybody like to get around stuff like that the real power behind those is It's the networking. Oh, yeah, the coaching is great. You'll pick up some nuggets But whether you pick up nuggets from the coaching you'll get you the networking is unbelievable And you'll also always pick up nuggets from the coaching but in from the conversations to for sure leave We leave events whether we're putting them on or hanging out at them with the biggest freaking ideas ever Absolutely, absolutely. I spent all weekend thinking about stuff I even planned an event that I haven't even like a big event that I have nobody even knows about yet Because I went to that and someone gave me an idea. No, it's incredible. So let's let's start from the beginning and we're gonna unpack this event So we left Thursday or Wednesday. Yeah, Thursday No, Thursday morning. It started Thursday at like five o'clock roll in we roll into where we just pants the picture rolling the coat birch Coat birch lodge in Murby's Broad, Tennessee. Yep, Cristiana Just south of Murby's Broad me square feet. You think that place was 15,000 11,000 I don't think it was well, it's big. I mean with the meeting rooms above the garage and all that is huge. Well, I didn't even see that part Yeah, there's like a big old like Yeah, there's extra there do like classroom up there above the garage. Anyways, all right, not important. But yeah, yeah, it was huge It was big So thanks the picture man. Yeah, it was we got in we had a networking hour I stayed in the master suite, which was awesome There was a sauna in the in the bathroom. Nice. Nobody even do that. I didn't even use I should have used I should have tried it out Master suite we get unboiled unpack.  We had was it was it was barbecue?  We have a brief You know our session where we were we ever everybody like say what they want to get out of it I actually said, you know, I spoke up and was able to share what I liked about each person there and why they were there and why I was impressed and why I loved them and We were able to ask some questions and talk through some stuff I ended up jumping down and asking some questions, you know of people in the audience about culture and team and Building something and a sales team and organization and it just man. I always leave with so many freaking ideas I know I'm like I'm like maybe I'm weird, but I actually have more fun in like the social Times built in that I do with the content. You always say that it's because I'm 80d and I'm like listening I'm like, that's good. That's good. I'm gonna write that down But then I forget it like half the time. Yeah, because I'm not so much like a classroom guy I'm more of like a networker and I feel like the way that I found Success is that I've kind of just connected with the right people. Yeah, aka business partners with you I mean, it's like, you know, yeah, I kind of see people and I'm like, wow, I really respect what you're doing Let's see if we can do these things together, you know, and you're great at that Well, it was fun. It's just fun because I think that's really the core of most people ignore that like what is it about you? You're always interviewing me.  What the script? Well, what is it about you that makes you want to seek that out spend time to connect with people actually? Care because most people most people ignore that stuff man. Most people are scared of that most people avoid Being social. Yeah, I think it comes with really any any big thing that I've ever done in my life has usually come from a Created relationship. Mm-hmm. It really hasn't been say that again Any exception anything big that I've done in my life has been the result of a created relationship period. Wow I don't think I've ever really like had a unique Solo idea. Mm-hmm that I then implemented ran with Executed on and then reap the results of Any magnitude compared to what I've done with other people and maybe that's just because I'm a basketball player probably and I'm a team sports guy And I've always enjoyed a team effort team activities. I've always I would rather make You know, it's not about the money for me. It's about kind of who I'm doing it with. Mm-hmm, you know And so I'm just drawn to people. I don't know what that is about me But I really enjoy I feel like there's so much wisdom typically In an individual that no matter who it is I can learn even guys like Ryan Lody, right? I mean, you know younger guys 22 year old producers, but what I take from that guy is is Good grief like the work ethic that you that he has and then therefore the results He challenges me man 10 12 hours a day running an appointment store knocking Well, I mean, it's like what am I doing? Why am I too good to work 12-hour days? Oh, no, no, not at all.  I pursue wisdom and wisdom is found in others Whether it's their book people or whatever it is two takeaways from what you're saying right now first one is most people think that when you get to a certain level you like Slow down or when you get when you become a person of interest or you start helping people or whatever You know start building a business or whatever it is But I mean we work a lot and we enjoy what we do. Yeah, I had a 13-hour day yesterday and freaking loved it It was jam-packed. It was crazy. Your day was insane. That's the first takeaway. The second thing is You talk about relationships and how valuable they can be and how you need to connect and care and actually try Like if you're not you're missing out and I can attest to that because I look back probably you know what about two years ago and About two years ago if I look back at Cody Askins, let's call it August of 2017 I Didn't care to meet anybody. Yeah, I was like Relationships suck I gotta talk to people like I gotta you know sit there talk to you for 30 minutes Or relationship as a means to an end. Yeah. Yeah, or like it didn't have to continue It was like, okay, I can I can build a relationship quickly like I was like the it was like the life insurance salesman inside of me Okay, build a relationship make the sale move on. Where's the next relationship and It was I was just I was just wrong and my business wasn't growing and I look back and over the last two years I've made so many and you comment all the time. I made so many Lasting relationships and my network of people that actually like trust and care and that I can like call at any time and they'll care in a conversation with me like we're best friends has 100,000 Xt. Oh, yeah, and it's just Super valuable, but I Made a mistake and used to ignore that element of business. I ignored it. We didn't even plan on talking about this today That's what's cool about this podcast. It just always transitions and moves. In fact, it like lives.  Well, I was too. Honestly early on I think that was a big mistake that I made as well where to me I was like I even had friends of mine I'm sure they won't be watching this podcast, but if they did they would raise their hand. They would tell me Landon, you're always selling to me. You're always selling to me. You know what I mean? And I'm like, what do you mean? I'm just talking but in the back of my mind The conversation and the reason I picked up the phone to talk to them was to ask them for something Yeah, and and if I didn't ask them for something it was to Soften the blow for the next time that I asked them And you actually thought like that like I did too like I would say things like I'm not trying to ask you But I want to show you this but I was actually my intention of that call was only to make the next time that I asked them for something easier Genuinely when I look back, you know, and I and I feel like That just won't get you very far in life because you know, I feel people can see through that junk. Well, think about this People that have done anything big in the world, especially in the insurance industry. Did they do it alone? Not normally so they had a team. I didn't used to have a team two years ago. Yeah, think about that now Another huge take I didn't care about relationships people to do big stuff Like they have other people that they have relationships with and that can help them and they can grow with And they can lean on or you know help each other And Burt said something at the lodge He is like a top 25 that he can call on at any point and he stays in touch with so that Just in case if he you know, it's just like his closest top 25 is top 25 biggest supporters and I thought Is connected as I am. I don't know who my top 25 is I mean, I can I can write it down and I'm not actively talking to them every week or trying to you know, and I'm missing out. Yeah. Well, that's a good. That's a good segue into sort of, you know, the retreat so Because in order to have that top 25 you have to have 25 people that actually want to take your phone call Which means that you need to be interesting. Oh, totally Which means you can't be self-serving two years ago. I didn't have a top 25 You know, I just didn't or they were all in the office, maybe yeah And what I mean by interesting is not like wow I parachute and do a you know hang gliding and all this stuff What I mean is is like I think people are drawn to authenticity And so that's part of what you talked about at the at the lodge So would you mind just kind of unpacking so you did the 8% monster retreat as a follow-up to those that bought a monster Premier ticket. Yeah, okay, and then we that was how long goes 8% four weeks ago Four weeks to the day.  It was but bulk of it was a Personal brand. Yeah, it was building up and I didn't plan on talking about that by the way it was a conversation the night before that shifted my whole talk and It was all about how you need to be often Authentic need to be transparent need to be genuine need to care and you need to be being a Monster because if you want to be you want to get attention you want to grow your brand and you want to become a celebrity in your space I don't mean celebrity is like an ecotistical. Hey look at me kind of thing. I mean a celebrity is in people Look at me as a person of interest. Okay, if that's what you want then You've got to be consistent and you got to be focused on growing your brand most people most people aren't they don't think that way and If people you know there's people that respect what we do and if that's the case it's only because it's almost been four years I'm just constantly putting stuff out every freaking day. Let's talk about that. So consistent with growing your brand Let's let's let's breast-hacks this and break it down. What is that? What does that mean being consistent with growing your brand sounds good? Well, yeah, what are you trying to do in the world and how can you consistently educate people as you say people work with people educate them how can you consistently educate people and then One year later two years later three years later four years later a decade later They look at you as this person of interest that can help them with because you've been educating and giving away so much free stuff for so long Yep, and there's been a few pivotal moments in my life where that's like stood out to me and it stands out a lot now because putting out content for three years and eight months That'll be in two days by the way. Yeah That I've been putting out free content to help insurance agents and educate them and take them through another level It's people respect that they look at it they look at you differently because of that and Whether you're trying to generate leads or recruits or sell insurance policies You can still build a personal brand that lives on forever that create creates passive leads that people respect that But you got to be consistent and you got to do some big stuff along the way and care about people and focus on educating What are some big things that we can do along the way? Mine was a conference, you know, like okay. Okay. I was talking to an agent recently and they're like I don't know what to do.  It's I mean like to get people there just to put a marketing spend I bet you you could spend 600 bucks. Yeah, get like 50 registrations You get more by just creating a top 25 in your city and Bang on. Yeah, that's good. So okay. So in event. What's not a thing we can do? I mean for me with a personation Podcast like something weekly like we've got multiple things that come out every week now shows videos everything else Maybe it's a maybe it's a maybe it's every week you interview someone in your city That's a freaking power player that's doing something big that other people in your city could learn from Because the thing about the most people think they most people in our industry think so short-term because so many people fail that They're like, okay, I got to sell an insurance policy today And yeah, you got to sell an insurance policy today But if everyone knew everyone in your city knew you as this or in your state or whatever knew you as this person of interest that they want to That that they think about when they think about the word insurance Who do they think about in your city when you think about the word insurance? Who do you think about in your city and? They don't think about me in my city Something's something's wrong Right, I never even heard of you and you're spending the most amount on Facebook I bet you when I first met you you're spending hundreds of thousands dollars on Facebook generate leads I may spend more money on Facebook and on marketing Then anyone in our city By far well, I was actually interested this I was the largest digital marketing agency in Springfield with 38 employees And you spent more than I did so who else is gonna compete?  There's no way you're doing that.  It's true So well, okay, you know what I think is interesting. I think people get things backwards I think sometimes people try to become people of interest before they've mastered any sort of trait or Mastered anything at all and so I feel like my opinion is is that there's a lot of people that want to be coaches and Personal coaches and they want to be influencers on this or that or whatever it is But you know to me it's like that comes after you've accomplished something. Yeah, do you agree?   He loses money for now to connect you guys Okay, think about that for a second a lot of people, you know, he would react to that and be like, oh my goodness Like what is he thinking? Like maybe there's a better way to do it You know what ends up happening people end up trying to shrink your vision.  Oh, and maybe it'll you know Like dude, I'm 29. I do not want to look back at 40 and be like It's almost there and no matter what you're investing. Okay What I've seen is your trajectory of your business who who cares about that number Because in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, that number means nothing because we added 11 marketing clients yesterday yesterday And a lot of them came from 8% true and my but my my point is is that like It's not about cash flowing on 8% because if that if that's our goal, then it's a completely different event completely different Yeah, yeah, if if that company was created to make a lot of money from throwing that event then I Probably wouldn't know you still be doing it or it would have been a tiny little ballroom somewhere for free We would pay for food have been a day deal Like all industry conferences, especially insurance, they're in a traditional ballroom. They got a hundred and you know 92 people in them they got nobody that nobody cares about and And there's usually showing up. There's usually like a self-serving like I'm here. We're trying to recruit you Yeah, I mean something like that. This is also very true. So but but okay, so so bringing it back So we're talking a lot about this person of interest his personal brand You know unpack that a little bit more because we did you did a session I did a session coach Bert did a session, you know What else what else do you think you kind of like? Summarize and give to the people of things you talked about on Saturday. Yeah, I mean mine was about you know Hey, who do you want to be in the world?  So whatever the case is like there's You know, uh, he won't mind me saying it. There's medicare bob, you know, Justin's friends with him Robert Bach I don't I don't have never met the guy But he's all over online. It's selling medicare across the country over the phone and online and you know Supplements advantage and all that like personal brand people buy from people They don't really buy from companies anymore. They buy from you. They're invested in you and so To really do something big in this industry. I do feel like a personal brand is really really important I agree. It's something we don't talk about in our industry at all You know what and just to give you people make fun of me for doing it We'll give you some credit, right? So and I like I said sometimes I feel weird like we're just giving each other compliments But this is true. That's what that's what uh, Nate offered always says The point is he likes it though My point is is that I think if you were to add if we were to poll a bunch of people On you know, who has done a good job building their personal brand in the insurance industry. I think your name would come up You know what I mean? Well, there was multiple eight fig and again not talking about us, but there's multiple eight eight figure earners at the retreat That said no one's doing it. Yeah Like that's funny. That's funny. So Nate actually said that Your podcast is just you guys. No, no, no He just said that he just said he needs people in his life that he can like Be around and that can challenge him and he said he said it's cool He said because you and landing can always like lift each other up and talk about how amazing the other person is He's like I don't I don't have anybody that like I can do that with and he's like it's kind of freaking cool He said because he said because we look up to cody is this, you know marketing person And he's acting like landing just way better and it's like just this forever back and forth. Well, it's funny You know what he actually said which I think is some wisdom. He said um, it was cool He said most people will take the compliment and then just it just sinks in it's like oh, and it's like feeds the Yeah, it's like, oh my gosh. I'm amazing. Cody's give me these props But yet I'm not like throwing it back over the fence because at the end of the day I'm selfish, right?  Yeah, it's like whenever I'm getting up, then I'm bringing you up with me and the rising tide raises all ships That's genuinely well, it's it's so true for marketing too But that's my heart and that's that's one of the things that we talked about with your personal brand is that You know once you're accomplished And you actually are a subject matter expert then begin working on your personal brand and investing in that So let's talk about the brass tacks You can share some real numbers. I think with what does it take to invest in your personal brand? Dollars and cents. I mean, let's just take peace When you started your videography sort of me Yeah, whenever you started doing videos, what did it cost you to to invest in that? Nothing, what did it cost you? It cost you something.  I mean the camera did you buy a camera or what'd you do? No, I use my phone Okay back then and then it evolved into what then you put but I didn't know what it was doing True, but but you learn along the way. Okay, so something to be said for that. Some people want to learn quicker That's why we help them Uh, but doesn't mean you have to give anybody money It just means that I was consistently putting out videos or for instance I was training. I was I had a local mentorship program. I had this weekly training call and every week I would train local insurance agents and I had a few remote ones or whatever but I would mostly local but I would record it and then put it up on youtube and My two most popular videos organic videos used to be for a while Was weekly insurance training call number seven and weekly insurance training call number eight One was on how to door knock to sell insurance and one was about how to code call to generate insurance leads and Those two did very well on youtube And so most people found me because of those videos for the first couple years now That's not true anymore. They probably still find them, but they're they're old and they're not even that good anymore but the point is I was just putting out content every week Not realizing where it was going to go. It wasn't self-serving at all I didn't monetize anything for the first 13 months. It didn't matter I was just like I kind of enjoy helping other people and I love our industry So why not give back and I did and It it worked you became a person of interest You became someone that people are interested in talking with without without that ever being the point by the way No doubt. Well, it started with an iphone with zero expense and now I was propping out. Look at what we have. Yeah, right. You got a video. You got two videographers You got what 12,000 dollars equipment back there dylan. How much a lot more than that The pearls 10 the computer six or seven So you're a smart businessman, right the studio you invest in what's working, right? Yeah, so you started with an iphone and I mean, I mean, can you share with how much you have invested in the studio? Is that we've tried to figure out numbers. I know it's North of 60 70k and I bet when you start including all the cameras and tv's and lights and So you put your money where your mouth is I bet it's north of six You're not just saying hey, you should become a person of interest and invest in your content brand But my first video ever, right? I show this all the time when I when I'm doing keynotes Or when we're doing like I showed it the retreat awful video. I talked super slow It was like I was like, oh my gosh, this is painful But I've set the my phone on a shelf and leaned it up against some books So without a tripod to click play yeah with an outline and thought through it all but it didn't take It wasn't like it took money. It was just that it takes It takes consistency And it creates it takes like okay. I want to educate people on this topic In this niche and it takes just a lot of content towards it. Let me drop a knowledge bomb on you guys Okay, and this is if they don't they're not picking them nuggas stealing Bradley's So let me let me explain exactly why this is true and what you're saying Yeah, so when we went to the monster retreat and in murphy's borough Um, ryan. Lody was there which you guys hear me talk about him all the time because he's a stud And remiz was there. It was Equally a stud except a whole another level. Yeah, it makes everybody look. He's the grill in the room. Okay So, uh, ryan. Lody every day does this daily tip from the whip. That's instagram and facebook story. Yep, and remiz meets, um, ryan. Lody and says hey, man the daily tip from whip. I watched every day Let that sink in for a second. Okay Let that sink in ryan. Lody a 21 year old final expense producer Has the owner of one of the largest final expense telecenters tuning into his content every single day Hmm Okay, how cool is that that's kind of crazy if you think about it and and it's not like You know remiz knew exactly who ryan was That's nuts Like that's nuts. It is weird You've got Yeah, you've got a 21 year old and then you get a guy that owns you know operates a 10s a million dollars company or whatever it is and their friends on facebook and He notices the new agents content And they talk about it. Let that sink in. I mean, that's not a small thing.  You may see a little number in the corner one two three Yeah, but like what if those well, okay, you also bring up a really good point too Most people they do like these live videos in this content And they think oh i've only got one person watching or i've only got three people watching When we do live stuff It yeah, it's grown over time But think about the fact that my oldest video that I think is total garbage Has been seen 5 000 times Yep So Don't think about in the moment What you're doing and then talk yourself out of doing it because it's not doing what people thought it would do immediately think about The long-term effect think about the consistency aspect thing and think about the brand awareness aspect like the facial recognition Like they walked up and talked to each other because of that and they knew each other were So I haven't even thought about yet. In fact, it's just dawning on me I have not looked we we put these podcasts on all the different platforms I haven't even looked at how many times have been downloaded. No idea because I don't care Yeah, it's not even why we're doing it. I haven't even looked at it Haven't even thought about it and guess what it'll grow over time Well, if we quit it won't and someone will stumble on to one of our podcasts and they'll be like Oh, wow, and then they'll just binge them all. Yeah, that's how it works My point is is that like I don't even know how many people have downloaded this podcast, right? Well, some people would be like, well, you know, I'm not getting traction. I've already done, you know Seven hours of content already on this one. It's like we're probably not getting traction on like iTunes We're probably getting all of our traction on facebook and youtube, which is where we put all of our content out Anyway, but I bet you there's a final expense or a medicare or some recruiting agent or somewhere out there That's gonna hear this podcast connect with our brand and reach out to us. Yep, and when you're that person Tell me tell me yes Everybody wants to hear that It's interesting So You have anything other nuggets you want to break down for them? No, we're getting well. We'll be about 30 minutes That seems to be like a common thread. Sometimes we'll go longer. Okay. Um Anything else I want to add I want to say that uh I think Anyone can be a person of interest. I think anyone can be a personal brand I think anyone could have got to where we've gotten right now, which isn't even that big Is but in our industry it feels big because nobody else does it. It's which is dumb But most the reason most people don't is They don't Do it consistently enough for long enough, which means you know what that means It just means they gave up. Yeah Like when you say you're gonna do something you start something Just don't give up. Yeah when we don't and wow weekly you're not you're not excited about that Oh, my gosh, we miss a video. You don't want to be daily Oh, you sound like a show. You don't want to be around here. We forget to post a show Yeah, and if Cody sees sees that right dylan, that's that's not that's not the most comfortable feeling We forgot to post a show at two o'clock.  Let's take a few minutes. Um, are you you are you willing to give any teasers at all on like personal brand Stuff you're putting together right now. I am building a And it's what's funny is I haven't put even put this out yet, but that's that's the point of the podcast and landon asking me questions on the spot Uh, I am building a personal branding boot camp where i'm going to bring about probably super small group 20 30 people to Springfield, Missouri To spend a couple of days with us to talk through everything that we've done Everything that we're currently doing and how you can apply it to your business Cool with takeaway steps action steps everything. Yep complete content schedule complete, you know notes powerpoint One-on-one branding sessions We're gonna probably cover hotel and food and all kind of stuff But but it's something that i'm working on making a reality over the next like, I don't know 90 days or something If anybody wants to raise their hand on that just comment on the video and we'll we'll put you in the queue But I don't think you even have packages put together or anything like that yet, right close Okay, cool. So then we'll email it out or something. Is that what we're doing? Yeah, it's just preliminary right now But I could see it's something that'll take off quick and it'll fill up within a like a week or a few days because It's something that our industry just needs more than we think we need Well, and you know why it's so important is because if typically most people are either building or headed towards building a team Yeah In order to do that You've got to be accessible and you've got to be creating content and have a personal brand If you think you can build a team without thinking that you either already have a blunt brand that you're not thinking about or go towards building it You're Mistaken well two things real quick You brought up you broke down a website that generates about six they write about six thousand Medicare policies a year probably something like that supposedly that's a guess And it's because they have a brand in the market. Yeah, so guess what right? They did that The other thing is most people think well, I don't want to spend, you know a few thousand bucks Five grand whatever on like a bootcamp or a coach or 20 grand or whatever it is um And they don't But guess what having a personal brand I will make hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of my life And maybe eventually a billion Off of the framework and foundation that i've laid over the last four years I agree think about that for a second. Totally. Is it worth investing and trying to grow your personal brand?  What grand cardown says that?  Anyways, you know, it's like that's where I look at it's like she's like If I can invest in myself and something I believe in typically if I can invest in myself and get around people I want to be around that's the gap to me is like it's like a hamburger It's like I got the content is the meat But there's also like a bunch of other stuff and most of that stuff that I love is networking and just hanging out and getting to Know people and building friendships true So all right, man. Well, thanks for breaking it down for us, dude. You got it bro. Thank you guys for being here We're going to shoot another podcast with the room is this week. I'm not sure how often we're going to release that one But we're podcast is something I love doing man. So let's keep let's keep it up It's a ton of fun. Hope you guys can value We will see you again next time on the next eight percent nation podcast


How to read Russian in 15 minutes For anyone heading overseas to teach English as a foreign language, there are many things to consider before departure. Not least, how will I cope with an unknown language? If you have chosen Russia as your destination, then you should take a look at this useful guide on learning to read Russian in 15 minutes. Although it is unlikely that you will immediately be able to breeze through a Tolstoy novel in Russian without difficulty, it should give you a basic understanding of the language before you arrive on the ground.


So ladies and gentlemen, next up we have Xiaofeng Wang, senior QE engineer at Red Hat, and he's gonna talk about performance test methodology. So welcoming him on stage. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm very excited to be here at DevCon this year. My name is Xiaofeng Wang. I work in the virtualization QE team of Red Hat. Today, for my presentation, I'm going to introduce you a new network performance test methodology. I was running a performance test earlier this year with widely used performance test methodology. My job was to do some network performance comparison between amongst three different hypervisors, like KVM, ESX from WMIR, and Hyper-V from Microsoft. So during my testing, some issues blocked my test. So I had to fix them to finish my performance test. When all the issues were resolved, I felt that the solution to the problem can be summarized into a new performance test methodology. I will give you a detailed introduction on these issues and the corresponding solutions. But first, oh, sorry, oh, that's not work. But first, I will show you how I run performance test before. That means with old performance test methodology. The first step is always run the test tools. In my case, I chose the hyper-V. So you can use the net-perf or some package generators and everything else. So I run the hyper-S on the server side and the hyper-C on the client side with some hyper-Options. When the test is finished, the hyper-V will show you your performance result like this one. So the final performance result will be in the last two lines. So in this case, the performance will be 21 gigabit. 21 gigabit. The third step is run more tests and get an average value as final result. So I guess we always do that. The last step, generate the performance test report based on the average result. So this is how I run the performance test before. With all the performance methodology, what's the problem here? Maybe you cannot find any problems. I will show you the problem I just found. The first one, there's no step-by-step traffic. Just send as much traffic as possible. So what's the meaning of the step-by-step traffic? Like this chart, it's a step, step, step, step. For example, if I want to test the 10 gigabit NSE network adapters, I will use the traffic should be start from one gigabit to the 10 gigabit with 10 steps. One step will increase one gigabit. So it's called step-by-step. So what's the problem here without the step-by-step traffic? Because the IProof or NetProof just send as much traffic as possible to against your DOT, means the device and the test. In my case, it's network adapters. So sometimes the system will be broken instantly by exiting the max traffic at the beginning of the test. So at this time, I cannot get the performance result of the system. So I have to do some setup or some things to make the test running. Sometimes it's not running because the system broken. This is the first problem. The second problem is about max value. So you can find, nevertheless, the IProof, NetProof or something else, they just give you the max value. That means that the max performance, in my case, the network adapter can support. But it is just a max value. So the network adapter in my case cannot work well at the max performance for a long time. It's just the max, not the working value. Have you heard about the Intel has a technology called TurboBoost? Have you heard that? Let me, it's a little bit like this concept like I just said. That means that the TurboBoost will, you can use the TurboBoost not for a long time, just at some very special scenarios. For example, one minute or just a short time. That's the max performance of that CPU. But at the normal scenarios, you just use a lower frequency of the CPU. The concept is the same as I just said this. So all the performance test tools, like IProof or NetProof, just provide you a max value. So the max value is able to reach the performance, but the stability cannot get granted with the max value. That's the second issue. The third issue, the test tools like IProof three use mean to calculate the final result. Why not median? There might be a result different between the, different algorithm like mean or median. So what's the best one? I will give you an example and more explanation on this, on the solution section. So the mean and the medium is different algorithm to get the average value. So you choose different algorithm, you can get a different result. This is the third one. The fourth one is there's no way to find a spike from the current test result log. Have you heard the spike in the performance? That means you can find in some scenarios, the performance drop to a deep suddenly or increase to very high suddenly. So if you just use the IProof or NetProof, you cannot find this. You just got a final result, right? The last issue, the report is not a story. The report is not as user friendly as I expected. Just to give you a number, no chart, no tables, just a number. So that's all of the problems. So what's my solution? For the first issues, we need a step load. That means a step by step load to avoid the max or let the make the IProof or NetProof send traffic as much as possible. We give it a limitation. Tell the IProof or NetProof how many traffic you should send this time, how many traffic you should send next time. So in my solution, in this case, I will run the IProof multiple times. Each times I will give it a limitation, one-way limitation. So the IProof will send that traffic as I expected. Let's do step by step load. So I use the step by step load to increase the load until the network or network adapter reaches a point where the performance diminishes significantly. As the load increase, the network will be able to keep up until it runs out of the resource. That means when, if your network adapters cannot support that traffic, the chart will be dropped or keep on that, keep on the line, not increase. Does that make sense? Yeah. How to do that? It's very simple because IProof has a dash V options, which is able to set the bandwidth. It's just the need you run the IProof multiple times. And run, it will be very easy because you can write a loop to set up a read about different bandwidths and run the IProof multiple times. So this is the solution of my first problem. Make sense? Yeah. For the second issue, I use some mathematics, mathematics to resolve that issue. I use correlation and R squared. That's true mathematics algorithm. So I will explain this chart later. I will give you a brief introduction about what is correlation and R squared. For the correlation, correlation is a statistical management of a relationship between two variables. Possible correlations range from one to minus one. And a zero correlation indicates that there's no relationship between variables. And if the correlation of minus one, negative one, sorry, negative one, indicates a perfect negative correlation. That means this one. For the one, indicates just a perfect positive correlation meaning both variables move in the same direction together. I have an example to explain this. I have these tables about two variables. The temperature and the ice cream shelves. From this table, you can find when the temperature goes up. The ice cream shelves goes up as well. So these two variables have relationship. They have relationship, but what's relationship? You have to do more things. I will do that later, right? Okay. We can easily see the warmer weather and the higher cells go together. The correlation in this case is about 95%. Therefore, the relationship is good, but not perfect. High positive correlation. Yeah, yes. Because I did some modification on it. So what's the R squared? The R squared is a statistical measure of how closely a train line matches the date. So in this example, I got the point in the chart. I can get a train line across the date. So the R squared will tell you how close the date with the train line. With the R squared, I can find how the train line can represent this date train. So if it's very closely, the R squared will be 100%. That means the higher R squared, the better mode fits your date. I will go back to this chart. I will explain this. This chart for the x-axis represent the load. Like I just do this. This is the load, the x. So the y-axis is the PPS, means the packet per second. That means how many packets the network adapter can process, can handle in one second. So when the load increases, the PPS should be increased as well, right? But when the network adapter cannot handle that amount of traffic, it will go to the one line. So the load and the PPS, they will be two variables. They have relationships. So I can calculate the correlation value between these two variables. So the blue dot line indicates the correlations. So you can find the correlation is always 100%. But at this time, they will drop because they cannot increase. The PPS cannot increase. So I give the correlation a number 90% is my accepted number. So in this case, I can find here, there is a cross, two lines cross here. So I can find the value in the x for the load, right? And based on this, the blue line, I can get a linear. The linear will be y equals a x plus b, like this one. So if I find x value, I can get y value, right? In my case, the max value should be which one? Maybe this one, the max value, right? But in my case, I don't want that value. I just want a value that can work for a long time. So the value will be here or there should be this idea. It's a very difficult for me to explain it very clearly. So let me explain it again. We have two variables, the load and PPS. When the load increase, when the load increase, right? The PPS, the PPS surely increase as well. So this line, the blue line, indicate that these two variables relationship, they always increase, but at this time, they cannot increase, right? So the correlation value for drop here, right? But I set an acceptable value for the load, correlations, I set it to 90%. So there will be a cross point, two lines cross point. The here, this is the correlation, the dot line indicate the correlation. So I can get the cross line with 90% here, right? So I can get the x value. Right, and I can get a lander based on the blue line. It's called Y equals AX plus B, like this one, the A and B. You can get it by some, in my case, I use the Google Sheet, so you can get it. It will be generated automatically. So now you have the x value, right? So you can get the y value. That means you get what you want. It is not the max value. It's a, that means the, maybe lower than the max value, but it have worked for a long time. Just in my case, okay. For the third issues, it's about the mean and the median. The mean is the average you have used where you add up all the numbers and then divide it by the number of numbers. Right, in this example, the mean will be 9.73. It's called average in the Google Sheet. Google Sheet has a function called average to calculate the mean value. And the Google Sheet has another function called the median. It will calculate the median value. Medial means the middle value in the list of numbers. It's 9. The difference between the mean and the median is, the mean value is calculated. This value, you can not find the value from the list, right? That means that in the performance result, the mean value will not in your performance, a performance number generated by the IPROF. It's just calculated. But the median is, this value is in the array of your performance numbers. So that's the difference. Which one is best? It totally depends on your requirements. So your test result and your requirements. I prefer the median, in my case, because median result always exists in the result, but mean result does not. In this case, maybe the difference is not too much, but in some case, they will be very large. The first one is about how I can find the spike in my performance test. I used another mathematics, it's called sand deviation. That means the sand deviation is a measure of the distribution of a set of data from it mean. Perfect used to find the spike. Do you know that deviation is the, how you can find a mean value, right? And the real, the actual value, how far the real value from the mean value. That means that if there's a spike, if there's a spike, the sand deviation result will be higher, very high or very low. So you can find it. Because you can find, from your result or read, you can get the max sand deviation value, the minimal sand deviation value, and the mean deviation, the median deviation value. If the three value is totally different, that means there must be a spike in your test. Does that make sense? For the last one, it's about the result demonstration. From my perspective, I like a test report with a table. It's a table report with some chart, right? The table report should be clean and simple and easy to understand. And the table report should include most important performance indicator. For that, there has to be some charts. The chart intended to supplement the table report. I will give you examples. Yeah. This is what, this is an example I run the performance test on the ESX. This is the report table. I have the RXPPS and the TXPPS and some throughput and loss rate, average latency and max latency. This is not the final one. I will add more into this. And we can find the RSE, standard deviation with this value. If there's a very high or very low value, that means there must be a spike in my result. And I also include some CPU memory usage in this report. So this is a table report. For the chart, you can find there's some chart for you to reference. For example, this is the chart. Do you think there is this step by step? Yes, this is the result from the IPRF. I press the IPRF result and put it into the Google Sheet. Google Sheet will give you a line to indicate your performance. So you can find, give you an overview of your performance result. Well, the spikes. A lot of spikes, yes. So, the spikes, spikes, spikes. So, yeah. Could you please repeat the statement you made just a minute ago about the standard derivation if the number was too low or too high? Oh. In that table chart? Oh, yeah. You were mentioning you didn't use it, or you threw it out, or you... Oh. That's the standard derivation. Yeah. The standard derivation indicates the spike, right? But, oh, but you mean, you cannot find the very low, very high value here, right? Or did you not include them here? Yes, but this, this table is not, the date behind this table is not the same as the chart. So, they are different. I'm sorry, because, yeah. So, if I draw the picture of the date behind this table, it's very small, no spike. Oh, go back. So, this is the last problem and my resolution. So, that's all about my presentations. If you are very interested in my topic, you can find it from the conference page. But, this page is just for the right-hander internal. So, maybe you cannot get it. But, if you are interested, you can find me and give me your email address. I will make them to the PDF and send you, send you. Right? That's all. Okay, questions? So, is the expert tool, is that available for people? So, is the expert tool, is that available to people outside of Red Hat or is it only Red Hat employees available at this time? The expert, or is that, sorry, sorry. Sorry, the expert is the name of my project. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just call this methodology, but just give it a name called expert. Yeah, it's just a name. Got you, got you, thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No other meanings. Sorry for confusing. Okay, question? When you're doing your testing, have you looked at percentiles instead of doing what average and mean median? Oh, to be honest, I cannot find, you might have. I didn't find too much difference between the mean and the median. But in some, my colleague gave me their test results. I found that, I found that one. But I really don't know what the scenarios they, what the scenarios they use. So, but I think the median one is more reasonable for my perspective. But it's not the, it's not a regulation here. It just depends on your requirement or your test purpose. Right. But in terms of knowing what the throughput of what you're doing, what you wanna strive for is say 80% throughput or 80% of the time you're going to get through or 90% of the time. This is where percentiles will come in handy versus just doing an average or a median. Oh, so from all of the test value, the interval value is from the median. And this comes from the median. I use median all through my test. Not part of, it's mean and part of median. No, it's always median. Yeah. Thank you, okay, thank you. Thank you very much. Just an announcement, we'll be having a party in the evening on the lounge. If you haven't collected your tickets, you can collect it at the registration desk. And we'll also have a keynote speech tomorrow. So if you're, if you check the schedule, you should be there at Metcalfe Large. And thank you for being here. Hi, I'm Francis. My name is Francis. And I'm a supervisor here. So, you're very well, I'm just doing this, I'm just doing this. Oh, yeah, thanks a lot. When I'm off, I'll be there. I'll be there. I'll be there. I'll be there. I'll be there. You know, if there were times when the job load would stop, right? So, that's God's choice. So what you want to do is you want to say, okay, 90% of the time I'm going to be at this room.


Hello everyone, welcome to Linguistics, welcome to SOAS in the Linguistics space today. I'm really happy you have joined us here. So my name is Maria Fluraki, let me introduce myself a little bit. I've been teaching at SOAS for quite many years now. I've been teaching a variety of syntax and semantics modules and it's always a pleasure to welcome new students at SOAS and to show them what an amazing department we have and how exciting linguistics are. So this is what I hope I will show you today with this presentation. But before I start I can see here my colleagues as well, Jan and Justin and of course Valentina, a student ambassador. So maybe they want to say a few words about themselves before we start. Hi, welcome to everyone and just like Maria, my name is Jan Chiang and I'm very proud of our Department of Linguistics, which has a very long tradition and I teach some modules in linguistics for several years already and I look forward to working with those of you who finally decide to come to SOAS. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jan. Okay, hello everyone. My name is Justin Watkins, I'm a professor of Burmese and linguistics. My interests are in Southeast Asian languages mostly and phonetics and linguistics in general. So descriptive linguistics and more recently social linguistics, all sorts of things. I've been teaching linguistics at SOAS for 22 years and I'm very pleased to welcome you to as applicants of what is the oldest linguistics department in the UK. We've been doing linguistics a very long time and we do it like no other linguistics department in the UK. So we have a really amazing focus on languages of the world beyond the UK, beyond English and beyond Europe. And that's what makes us exciting. So you're very welcome. Thanks. Thank you, Justin. Valentina, would you like to talk to us a little bit about you as well? Hi, my name is Valentina Vigan and I'm a first year at SOAS. I study Japanese in linguistics and I'm super excited to have to talk to so many people who are interested in linguistics as well and hopefully we all have a fun time. Thank you, Valentina. Anyway, you will be able to ask any questions you have at the end of this presentation. So I'm sure everybody will be happy to answer any questions. Okay, so let's start. Yeah, so it's the linguistics taster day. Okay, so in order to be able to introduce you to linguistics, let's have some background as well as to what the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics is. So SOAS first of all, SOAS has 100 years of scholarship, which focuses on Africa and Asia. Over 30 languages are being taught. It has a huge library where national research is being done. It has the oldest linguistics department in UK and we are very, very proud of it. Also in SOAS we house the Endangered Languages Archive, which is quite interesting because all the students that are doing field work all around the world, they can collect their material and deposit it in this archive and also any other researcher is able to do so and then it's accessible by everyone. And the students and the staff, they come from over 130 countries and the research expertise in some of the world's key regions. Okay, about the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, it focuses on Africa, near and Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and of course on linguistics. So the degrees that you're going to find in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics is of course the Green Linguistics, which can be combined with other subjects as well. So it's quite popular to have linguistics and Japanese, linguistics and Chinese, of course, linguistics and languages and cultures where you will find languages from Africa, Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia. And also we have the linguistics combined with translation, which is another popular choice. There's of course the degree in Arabic as well, and to the degree in languages and cultures, again, combined with another subject if you wish to. One more combination which is quite popular is linguistics and social anthropology. So it doesn't have to be a combination of linguistics and a language only, but it can be another subject as well. So there is a big variety, basically, and accommodates all your interests. Okay, about linguistics, what exactly do we do in a degree in linguistics? First of all, we look at structural and theoretical linguistics that you have to do with phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. And I'm going today to give you a taste of syntax actually, so as to get to know exactly what it is with a variety of languages. And we have a big language variation, and also we focus on the changes among the languages. So we look at a variety of languages all around the world, and actually the data sets that we are using come from all these languages. We focus on languages of Africa, Asia and Middle East, but there is also additional expertise in European, Australian, and American languages. Okay, so what I'm going to show you now is the major world languages and where exactly we find them, in which countries we have the highest linguistic complexity, what we mean by structural diversity, and what we mean by multilingualism as well. Okay, so the major world languages, according to how many speakers speak them, are the ones that you can see in this list. So we have English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, French, standard Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Indonesian, who do Japanese, Swahili, Turkish, Western Punjabi, Vietnamese, Hausa, Egyptian, Arabic, Thai, Amaric, Iranian Persian. Out of all these languages, the ones that you can see, I'm sorry, the ones that you can see in red are languages that are being taught at SOS. So we teach Mandarin, Hindi, standard Arabic, Bengali, Indonesian, and so on and so forth. Yeah, so it's a very, very big variety of languages. Where exactly do we find these languages? The biggest diversity in terms of the languages is found in Asia and Africa, as you can see from the percentages here. So 34% of the world's languages are spoken in Asia and 31% are spoken in Africa. And of course, afterwards we had the Pacific and the Americas that follow. Now out of all these regions, at SOS, we focus on Africa and Asia. So you can understand that we cover a very, very big variety of languages. Now, where do we find the most the languages with the biggest linguistic complexity? You can see them here on this map with the red spots. And again, at SOS, we focus on these regions where we can find the biggest diversity again. So it's Africa, Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia. Yeah, so these are the regions that we are extremely interested in at SOS. Again, we have all around the world, we have endangered languages. And you can see here there are hotspots where exactly we find them. What do we mean by endangered languages, which is something it's a topic that we are very much interested at SOS as well. So basically they are languages that are that are being spoken by very few, very few people. And they're about to die or they have they're in danger of dying anyway. So this is where a lot of research is being done. Many students go around and do their fieldwork and they try to document these languages. So something to be preserved from them. Or there are different programs that are being run so as to be able to maintain them and incorporate them back into the communities. And again at SOS we focus on these regions where we have endangered languages. Again, it's Africa, it's Middle East, it's South Asia, Southeast Asia. Yeah, and of course you can see a bit of Australia there in the map where I'm going to show you actually today one language that has been spoken exactly that region in Australia. Okay, so 90% of the world's populations speaks one of 100 languages. 10% of the world's population speaks one of the remaining 6000 plus languages. 94% of the world's languages are spoken by 6% of the world's population. And 50% to 90% of the world's languages are endangered. Okay, so these are some useful statistics that we need to have in mind. Now, what about linguistics now? Yeah, what exactly we do at linguistics and the relevant chapters? First of all, we focus on the sounds of the different words. So we're very interested in phonetics, in phonology, in prosody. Then we're looking at the grammar of the language where the grammar actually consists of morphology that has to do with what the words look like, the form of the words in other words. Yeah, we are interested in the word classes or syntactic categories as we call them. Yeah, so here you are going to find categorizations in terms of which words are nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. Then we have the syntax that actually has to do with the structure of the language, the patterns that we find across the languages, the order of the different words, the order of the different phrases, how these combinations happen. And of course, we are interested in first language acquisition. Then another subject in linguistics, it has to do with the meaning that is about the semantics of the words, what the words mean. Then we have pragmatics, which is exactly again what the words mean, but now we put the context into play and we try to interpret everything according to the context. And we had the first language acquisition again. And also we have an implementation of all these, the use of language, how we use the language. And here we are dealing, dealing again with pragmatics, we are dealing with discourse, which is basically combinations of sentences more than one, basically, and what exactly they mean and what are the combinations there. And also language in the social world, which has to do with what we call sociolinguistics. So how language affects society or how society affects the language. So we have this use as well. Okay, so what I'm going to show you now is basically I want you to have a glimpse of what we do in the first year undergraduate module in syntax or a master module in syntax. So basically what you will come across as soon as you come so as what you are going to come across in terms of syntax and the structure of language. Yeah. So what I'm going to show to you is differences in terms of phrase order.  And also differences in terms of case systems. So let's take things from the very beginning and let me start with the language that we all know English. Yeah. And let's explore what we mean by structural ambiguity and why the phrase structure is so important and why syntax is so important. Yeah. So here we have a phrase, the tall bishops hat. Okay. If you will look a little bit closely at this phrase, first of all, it's a phrase because we have a combination of words. They're stuck together no matter where we are going to find that in the sentence we cannot really separate them. So this is really the meaning of the phrase. Okay. And here this phrase is about a hat. Yeah. And the hat has some more characteristics. It can be tall. It can be the bishops hat. It can be specific with the there. Yeah. So we have all these other words that they can actually modify the hat. Now, if we look a little bit closer at this phrase, we will see actually that there are two meanings involved. Okay. We have this adjective, the adjective tall. And we can understand that either the bishop is tall or that it's hat is tall. Yeah. And this is given to us with the two structures that we have in B and C. So we have the tall bishops hat in B, where actually we have the bishop being tall and the bishop has a hat. And also we have the structure in C, where still we have a bishops hat. The hat belongs to the bishop, but it's not the bishop that is tall. It's the hat that is tall. Okay. So how are we going to show this ambiguity? This ambiguity doesn't have to do with the meaning of the words. Tall means tall, bishop means bishop hat means hat that we don't have any ambiguity in terms of that. But in terms of how we combine these words together, we get this ambiguity. And this is called the structural ambiguity. Another example, which is one of my favorite ones, and actually always show it to the first year students, is this one. Yeah. So she fed her piranha fish fingers. So look at here how many different meanings we can have. Yeah. So we can have she fed her piranha fish fingers. She fed her piranha fish fingers and she fed her piranha fish fingers. Yeah. So according again to how we combine the different words together, we can have all these different meanings. And something really important here that you can see is actually the brackets. Yeah. The brackets show the phrases. Yeah. So here we have different phrases according to how we combine the different words. Okay. Now phrase, then it's a very, very important thing in syntax. Yeah. But how can we identify the phrases and how can we identify the components of the phrases? Okay. And first of all, we start with the words. And as I said, the words that belong to different syntactic categories. So syntactic categories are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. Yeah. All these different terms. And they help us to categorize the different words. So for example, in nouns, we know that nouns are all the objects or verbs they may denote actions or I don't know, adjectives, they say have to say something about a noun. Yeah. So they describe a noun. So we have all these semantic criteria in order to identify the different syntactic categories. And that could be a very good starting point. However, look at the sentence. Yeah. The wink is drippner blocked questifocally into the nindim with the pdips. I'm sure that no one understands what this is talking about. Yeah. Yet there is something familiar about it. Of course, it's not English, but there is something familiar about it. It's like kind of English like. Yeah. Okay. We can kind of understand what the verb is. Yeah. Because we see here a word that has this ed at the end. So it's blocked. Yeah. So let's start from this point. So here we have a blocking situation. Yeah. Where somebody an entity blocked. Yeah. And that's somebody that entity that the block was the hink is drippner. Yeah. We have a drippner than here, which is not any drippner. It's a hink is drippner. Yeah. And how did he block the key or she block? He blocked questifocally. Yeah. So we have the manner of the blocking and then we're into the needy and with whom with the pdips. Okay. So again, here we don't really understand what's going on. Yeah. We don't understand the meaning of each one of these words, but yet we understand what's going on. And we see here that it's extremely important the form of each word. So we see this are at the drippner and we can see that it's an entity that is doing something. Yeah. Or we see this L Y at the questifocally and we can understand that these modify says something about this situation of blocking and so on so forth. Yeah. So we we identify the different syntactic categories according to the form according to the to where exactly we find them. Yeah. What is the distribution? Yeah. And all these type of things. But enough about English. Yeah. Let's see what's going on cross linguistically now. Now, the languages of the world fall into different patterns of word order or phrase order. Yeah, as we call it. So 43.3% we find the subject first, the object second and the verb last subject is what basically it's the entity that initiates. Yeah. And we can see that in many different positions in the sentence. The object is what it's actually the entity that receives the action of the verb. Okay. And we can see here all the percentages according to the word orders that we have. And an example that I wanted to share with you is Malay. Yeah. I don't know if any of you know Malay. Yeah. It doesn't really matter. It's a language which is spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and many other regions, many other countries. Yeah. But what we always look at syntax, even if we don't know a language is always the second line in our examples, which is called gloss or glossing. So here we have and the glossing is what it's one to one translation basically of the word that we have. So the first line, you have the original language. The second line, you have the glossing and on the third line, you have the translation. Okay. So here the first sentence says Ahmed eat rice. Yeah, the translation is Ahmed is eating rice. So here we have a situation of eating and there are two participants. One participant is Ahmed. The second participant is rice. How are these two participants connected? They are connecting through the eating. Otherwise, there will not be a connection between the two. Ahmed is the subject that is doing the eating, rice is the object that is being eaten. Okay. We got the second sentence, which is person, this, eat fish. Again, we have an eating situation. A fish is being eaten at this particular case. Yeah, the fish then is the object. And now we see that the subject is the phrase person, this. Yeah, this person will be translated. And in this phrase that has the function, it has the job of the subject, we can see that the order of the words person and this, it's completely different from what we find in English. And this is something really, really important. We are interested in this kind of differences because that way we can give the overall grammar of the language, we can identify the patterns that are there in the language. Okay. And then in the third sentence, a little bit more complex, dog that eat bone bigger. Again, we have an eating situation.  The first participant is dog that the second participant is born bigger. And again, in this phrase is dog that which is a noun phrase because he's talking about a dog, which is a noun. We can see again, the order of the dog and the determiner that being different from what we find in English. And also with a bone and the big, big being the adjective that modifies the bone, again, the order is different. So if we wanted to show all these differences, yeah, this pattern that exists in Malay, the easiest way to do that is through very, very specific rules that we write it down and we show all these different patterns. So basically we show the combinations of the phrases and we show what each phrase consists of. Each language can have its own rules. When we compare these rules, we can very, very easily identify the similarities and the differences among the languages. Okay, let's make things a little bit more complicated. So this is an Uta's Deccan language, Louisiana. And here we have the sentence, the boy tickled the girls. And the second sentence is the girls tickled the boy. Yeah. Okay, we don't know whether this language has a fixed order, whether these components, they are fixed where we find them or whether we have a bigger variation. But what we are interested in again here is the glossing. And you can see the glossing, it's a little bit more elaborate than before, because the word boy comes with the nom, which is nominative case. So here we have the case systems that play a very, very important role. And the nominative case means actually what that this has the function of the subject, this has the job of the subject. So the boy is the one that initiates whatever action, the verb is about. And then we have the girl that comes with the infix pl for plural and the E at the end, which is for accusative case. So we have here another case, which is the case that is reserved for objects. So here we have a situation of tickling. It happened in the past. And we can see that in the glossing. And it is the boy that tickled the girls and not the other way around. And we can understand that from the cases, from the form in other words of the different words. Okay. Now in B, we reverse the situation. Now we have the girls tickling the boy. How do we understand that? Because now the girl is in nominative case. Yeah. And the boy is in accusative. So now the girl is the subject and the boy is the object. Okay. So again, here the glossing is really, really important. Something else, which is very, very significant in this language is that we find the verb being at the end. So the phrase order is in this particular language, subject, object and verb. So we have here an instance of this particular pattern of phrase order. Again, the same language. It has another very nice feature. So here we don't have sentences. We have phrases. The first phrase is the boy's father. And the second phrase is the boys in the plural father. Yeah. So how do we know what kind of phrases these are? So basically, how do we know which one of the two words is the most important in the phrase? We can see here that father has this prefix third person singular. Yeah. Which means what that it is a word that needs to find something in the phrase to agree with. And that's something in the phrase is the boy. Okay. So the translation here is with a possessive noun phrase, the boys father and the father agrees with the boy because the boy is third person, he yeah, and singular number. Now this changes in the second example, where again, we have father, but now it has a different prefix. It has the prefix poem for third person plural. And we can understand now that the father has to agree has to find something else in the phrase that will be of third person and plural. So this something that is being found in this phrase is the boy, which is in plural. And of course, it's third person as well, because it's a key. So it's not the father that is plural. We're not going to translate it as fathers, it just needs to find something else to agree with, which is of plural number. So this is something very significant as well that we need to list in our phrase structure rules, yeah, and also show this kind of agreement that exists between the noun, yeah, father, and it's dependent, which is the boy in the phrase. Okay. And finally, my favorite language will be re yeah, in Australia, spoken in it's an endangered language. First of all, it's in the northern territory of Australia. I keep talking about phrases. Yeah, and then this language comes and destroys everything basically, yeah, because let's see what's going on. And how we can analyze this this language. So we have three sentences here, and they are all being translated as the two small children are chasing the dog. Okay, let's focus on the first sentence, we have child first in the glossing again, I'm looking at the second line, child, which is dual number, which means two, yeah, and ergative case. So here we have a different type of case that we don't come across in the European languages only actually basket has this type of case system. And this ergative case is reserved for subjects of transitive verb. So basically subject that they need to have two participants. So we have child ergative case. And we understand that's the subject because it's an ergative case. Then next to it, we have small again dual ergative. So again, exactly the same agreement as child that we have here. So we understand that these two words they have to go together, small, more defines the child. Yeah, so it's a small child, small children to be more specific. Then we have another word, which is the word capalla, we don't know much about this word apart from the fact that it gives us the present tense and also dual. And then we have dog, which is an absolutive case. And this means that this is the object. So the absolutive case is the case of the objects in this type of system. And then we have the verb chase, which is non past. So we understand that it's it is two small children, which is a subject. Then the capalla is an auxiliary verb. So it gives us the tense are chasing the verb the dog. Now, in terms of phrases, everything is straightforward here. Let's go to the second sentence now and we can see again the child is at the very beginning. Then we have the auxiliary as a second word. We have the object dog as the third word. Then we have the verb chase. And at the very end, we have the small, however small, still modifies the child, even though they are not together. Yeah. And this is this is not something that we saw in terms of the phrases. We saw that when we have a phrase, we have to have their components stuck together, no matter where we are going to find them in the sentence. But here we see that we have these two components completely separated. The one is at the very beginning. The other one is at the end. And this shows that this particular language doesn't have phrases, but this doesn't mean that it doesn't have a structure of its own. Just the order is so flexible that anything can be found anywhere. So the question is how are we going again to identify who is doing what to whom? Again, it's the case system that is extremely important. That's why we have ergative for the subject, absolutive for the object. And the third example, yeah, again, exactly the same translation. But again, all the components of the sentence are all over the place. We have dog now, the very beginning, the object, then we have the auxiliary second child, third chase and small at the very end again. So again, the same translation again, it's the case system that helps us, but the phrase order is completely flexible. How are we going to analyze that? Also the phrase structures will help us identify what goes together with what? Yeah, and also the morphology plays a very, very important role. So that was a very, very small introduction to the structure of different languages. Yeah, this is actually what the very, very first thing that you're going to do in any syntax module in linguistics. Thank you very much for joining us. And please ask any questions you have. Thank you. Thank you, Mary. That was really, really insightful. Hi, everyone, just to emphasize what Maria says, we do invite any questions. I'll be monitoring the chat feed. If you have any questions, you can also pose them via the Q&A option, which is again just below on the bottom of your screen. And you can also raise your hand. If you raise your hand just to give your heads up that what we'll do is unmute you so you can ask your question in person, but you will be recorded on the camera. So that's just to bear in mind. So as no questions are coming in, shall I, shall I fill the silence with it? Please do. Sorry, I can't see it. Anyone at any time, but rather than stare at our zoom screens in silence, I thought I might say a few things about the question that came in about what was the question? Here we are. And so doing linguistics, we learn a bit of all the languages mentioned or do we choose one language that we're interested in? I think if you're doing linguistics, it's quite useful to separate the activity of doing linguistics on languages in general or a group of languages specifically and learning those languages in a way that you would go about studying them in order to be able to speak them. And there's lots of overlap. I mean, linguists tend to be people who learn to speak lots of languages because they just find them interesting, but you don't have to do that as part of linguistics. So learning to speak languages is something that you can do and are encouraged to do as a linguistic student at SOAS, but you don't have to. And as a linguistic student, you will come into contact with a wide variety of languages, some of which you might at some point wish to learn to speak a bit of if you want. But they're rather separate activities. And that's perhaps worth saying. So another question in from one of our participants about the key differences between structural and theoretical linguistics. Maybe Yen, do you want to talk about that, Maria? May I invite Aisha or Lut? Because they're all here as well. I know, yeah. And I just thought, yeah. Yes, shall I speak? That OK. Yes, so the difference. Hello, everyone. My name is Aisha. The difference between structural and theoretical linguistics. I mean, there are different definitions, I think, for what structural linguistics means. But if or if we take structural linguistic to mean that we are going to investigate the structure of languages, then we don't have to be theoretical in the sense that we don't have to follow a particular theoretical framework. We can do this, you know, remaining neutral when it comes to a theoretical framework. That's the difference. I mean, for me, that's the difference, but it's it's a bit complicated to to to explain in in two minutes here. Is that helpful? I would say hopefully that kind of answers some of the questions. I would just say to some of the attendees, if you feel like you'd like to follow up further, I'll leave my email address or get your contact details afterwards. There's a few questions coming in now just to pick up one on the chat. It says how are we assessed on the course? Maybe I'm I'm happy to speak. Hi, I'm I'm Lutz Martin. I'm also in the linguistics department. My interest is African languages. I'm half in Africa, half in linguistics. And I'm teaching a big module called languages of the world, which is really exciting and also historical linguistics and some African linguistics elements as well. And the assessment, I think, is mainly it's usually a mix of assessments that we try to have diverse assessments. It's data data set. So for example, some of the data Maria showed and that could be very good exercise. You get given data and then ask different questions about how to analyze these data. It might be might be an exercise where you find your own data. So find examples of particular structures. And then, you know, that's that's another question in the chat actually about how the language learning integrates with the linguistics. And then one that happens in many different ways. But one of the ways might be that for the assignments, you can draw on the language you're learning. So if you're if you're learning Hindi or Burmese or Swahili, and there is a question on maybe morphology or word order, then you can use examples from the language you're studying and use that for the linguistics assignment. So a lot of the assessment is data related. There's also essays, of course, where you have more space to explain something or explore questions in more detail. And quite a bit of the assessment is quite free. So you can choose your own topic within within the given given scope of the module. And towards the end of the program, there's larger essays like independent study projects which are 10,000 words essays. And so there's quite a bit of diversity. And there's exams as well, not that many, but some of our modules have exams, which at the moment, because of COVID, and these would be open book exams, so to take the exams. Thank you, Lutz. Another question we've had it is what sorts of jobs does linguistics get you or lead on to? I think one of the one of the most exciting things about linguistics is that it's it's a bit of a secret that linguistics prepares you for almost anything in your life because it is for one thing, it's a full of transferable skills. It teaches you to see patterns, analyze data, theorize about real world objects. So there are lots of very, very important abstract skills that linguistics teaches you.  And I guess the thread that would tie them together is that they are interested in analyzing data, seeing patterns, interested in patterns, but also, of course, the beauty of language itself. So there is there are overt language related careers that people go into sort of being diplomats or working in NGOs in parts of the world where they've been interested in in the languages that are spoken there. But also people who go and work for Google and become computer programmers, people who are all sorts of things. I think linguistics. And of course, there are many subjects that are studied under the umbrella term linguistics. So you can go from sort of acoustic analysis and computational linguistics that at one end to something more like philosophy or sociology at the other end and anthropology and everything in between. So linguistics covers a very wide range of sorts of people and disciplines, which can be combined in a unique way. So basically, linguistics is for everybody and prepares you for everything is what is what I was saying at the end. But no, I mean, our students, I'm trying to think of some great examples of what people have gone and done. I mean, working for Google is is one. But students who have ended up in the civil service, people who have become diplomats people who have become translators or language scientists of one kind or another, clinicians occasionally students who've done phonetics or sorts of things. We've got about five minutes. I'm just going to pick up a few more questions and come in the Q&A. Sorry, can I interrupt? Yes, please. Nana, perhaps you would like to introduce yourself as well and. Talk a bit about translation. I think it can be connected to what people can do with linguistics as well. Thank you very much, Maria. Hello, everybody. My name is Nana. I'm a head of School of Language and Cultures and Linguistics, but also I'm teaching a translation studies. We have now a transition pathway and from your second year, you can start taking translation modules, which is introduction to transition theory, machine technology and translating cultures one. And in your final year, you can choose translation project instead of taking BA dissertation. If you have any questions regarding BA translation pathway, just please drop me email. I will write my email address in the chat. Thank you. Thank you, Maria. Thank you, Nana. Yes, like I said, we've got about four minutes left now, so I'm just picking up on some of the questions that are here. What, how would the linguistics translation pathway differ from the main one? There's someone who's able to speak to that. I could answer that. So basically, there are different modules from so the first year, it's common for all linguistic students. And then from the second year, there is the translation pathway. And basically, there is a different set of modules that are being taken that are specific for for translation. So you have introduction to translation, translation technology from what I remember different sets of modules that are specific from that for that pathway. Thank you. And what's the balance like between studying linguistics, a language and do they integrate or studying linguistics plus a language and do they integrate? I can try and answer that. I do Japanese and linguistics and in terms of like a workload balance, it is sometimes difficult just because learning a language in general is quite difficult. But it's pretty manageable. You do get a sizable workload, though. And in terms of integrating, it's a lot easier to study a language if you do have a little bit of work. If you bring in your knowledge of linguistics while you're studying, it just becomes beneficial because you can draw sort of comparisons and see different patterns in the language that you're studying. And it makes it a lot easier to study. Hopefully that helped. Brilliant. Are there any more questions that coming through? We've got about two minutes left. Was anything else any of the academics like to pick up on to kind of speak to you? Yes, I mean, I can just add to what Valentina was saying. I think many, many people doing linguistics are also interested in learning languages and many people that are doing linguistics at Saras will be will be learning a language and they complement each other a great deal. They are different sorts of activities, of course, but the one definitely feeds into the other the way that Lutz has said it's very it's certainly possible to apply your linguistic analysis that you're doing on the linguistic side of your degree to the language that you're learning to speak and understand in the language learning part of the degree. In terms of balance, it rather differs depending which language you're learning. If you're doing Japanese, there's probably more Japanese in your degree than they would if you were doing Burmese or Amharic where perhaps less of the language is available. So that depends on the degree structure and particular combinations. Brilliant. I'm going to wrap up now, guys, just because we've kind of reached our allotted time. So I hope that's OK with everyone. Thank you very, very much to all the attendees and the student ambassador for presenting today and answering the questions. And thank you for the attendees. What I'm going to do is just pop an email in the chat section. So if there's any more questions, I can make sure they passed on to the linguistics team as well. So pleased to reach out. Is there anything I'd like to add, Maria? No, that's all. Thank you very much for joining us. It was a real pleasure to have you with us. And I hope we get to see you in person. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye.