Let's get over to our mam is the Steve Rhodes as we do each and every Monday at 20 past the hour And don't forget folks Steve doesn't outstanding show here every trading day 11 to 12 Eastern standard time also is a great newsletter a mastering probability now It's very easy to get Steve's newsletter folks. Just come over to our website at TFN We'll rent the newsletters. You can see raster probability on the right-hand side You get raster probability for one month for hundred and forty nine dollars six months to six ninety five Which is savings of a hundred ninety nine dollars or twenty two percent in one full year for eleven ninety five Which is a savings of five hundred ninety three dollars at twenty three percent now They all come with a thirty-day money back guarantee Steve has a huge amount of tools on his site Okay, so when you get the newsletter you get the tools you get the explanation You get the whole ball of the wax and it comes with a thirty-day money back guarantee Steve Rhodes. What's going on? I'm in I'll buy. I'll give it a shot. That's right. That's right. I like it I like it. Yeah, so I know I don't know Did you guys get that the storm as bad as we got it over here? I don't know. Was anybody spirit in Florida? I don't think so Say Pete got a pretty bad. I mean that those flood areas in St. Pete flooded again So they thank God that most of the homes what happened folks is that was it? Ida was just I think Four months ago or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah that they got wiped out on that and then and then this one here though It was about an inch of water, but those folks are gonna be moving pretty soon because it's the wind that we had over here was Extraordinary, I mean it it was like we had a hurricane. Yeah, you know a tropical storm I mean a lot of damage a lot of power outages. Yeah without power Yeah, it was it was just a tough man. That's that's that's the bottom line You know that that water kicks up man and forget it. I I've never heard the wind howling like that You guys must have really good here we we had we had like 30 35 it wasn't you know Yeah, and then and then you know get a love get a love Florida right because you get that storm and whoosh It blows right out of here. You know you got perfect almost perfect weather and the sun comes out No, I know right. It's I'm still chilly though You can see you get you only you get a shirt on I got a freaking shirt and a sweatshirt on here I just took I just took my sweatshirt on I Look cool, but hey so last week when we did our segment there was a tiger that rode in afterwards Yeah, and he asked if the patterns that that you know, we talk about here The patterns that I use and I teach if they're present at market tops So I thought we'd do today is just take a look at the last several years try to answer that question Oh, I'm for this a tiger and so to start with here is the doubt So we're just gonna take a look at the dial you last week. We were talking about the dial that was really what the question was about was the dial and What's the matter? We don't have my screen. Oh That's interesting Me a second your time. Let's see if this works There we go. Okay, so now we should have my screen yes now we can take a look at it Okay, so in 2022 the actual high for 2022 came in on January 5th of 2022 to answer this tiger's question There was a TD 9 count top that was present at that high when we get our normal October Rally out here that came in on October 13th and that came in with the roads meant to mitigate her bottom And now that was not what the question was the question was basically the high for the year At the highs for the year are any of the tools that I use present at those tops And so the answer that question was yes We got a nice real rally really nice rally off that October law that we can see here and that topped out on December 1st And that was a roads meant to mitigate her top So that's got that two of the patterns that we take a look at that were present in 2022 We go back to 2021 the Dow didn't top until November 8th of that of 2021 But the pattern that was present was a TD 9 count top So the answer that question for 2021 is yes at the market to high during that year There was one of my patterns now We'll see my other patterns throughout the newsletter, but I'm just focusing on this a tiger's question Yes, the question of then we take like a 2020 the hiding come in until December 31st out there So in that case there was no pattern that was present at the ultimate high for 2020 We can see TD 9 count tops back here in June that led to a retracement another one in September and that September 1 ended up Forming that October bottom with a by the d-point pattern patterns that you and I discuss if we take a look at 2019 the hiding coming until December 21st. I'm sorry December 27th of 2019 and There was no topping signal or anything that was present at that stage We take a look at 2018 the actual high for the year came in an October 3rd and that high had generated a rogement and indicator top We take a look at the high that came in in January. That was a TD 9 count top We can see rogement and indicator bottoms TD 9 count bottoms at the lows if we take look at the typical October Low that we have much like we've got this year that was on October 29th That was a rogement and indicator bottom so we can say to that tiger. Yes These patterns are present at tops are also present at bottoms in 2017 the hiding coming into until December 18th of 2017 that did actually have a rogement and indicator top that was present at that stage in 2016 the high came in on December 15th. That was a TD 9 count top We can also see during the year We can see two other rogement and indicator tops one back in looks like the April time frame another in the August time frame That's out there. We go to 2015 the actual high came in on May 20th 2015 that was a TD 9 count top We had a nice rally off of a bottom in a in August of that year that formed a rogement and indicator top out there So that takes us to where we're at today So the answer the question is yes my tools are present at tops That doesn't mean when one of those tools triggers a topping signal that that's going to be the ultimate top But they are present at tops But that takes us to where we're at today and when we take a look at where we're at today And they really just kind of follows up to what you were saying at the opening of your show I don't have any kind of a top here in the Dow not today. I don't have a top But there could be a TD 9 count top certain things have to happen between tomorrow and Thursday of next week I'm sorry Thursday of this week. So just to recap here from the 126 years seasonal cycle a Dow has entered It's final we're over on the right-hand side here. Yeah, it's entered its final bullish Cycle here that typically ends right around January the 5th. So this is the average over the 126 year period This is a weekly line chart for the Dow and the semis and if we take a look at those vertical lines You'll see that the Dow is not gonna top without the semis topping as well So it's important understand what's going on there if I take a look at the semis just like the Dow They do not have topping patterns today They could they've got a bunch of work to do but they could form TD 9 count tops by Wednesday This is the Dow is at new all-time highs folks in terms of dollars euros yen pounds and Aussie dollars That's as of this morning. That's a real bullish market because on all those traders desk. They're at new all-time highs They're not sellers their buyers. Lastly. Here's the Dow Here's the daily the weekly and the monthly chart This really is suggesting potential caution as we come into the beginning of the year out there Kind of fits with that January 5th ish type cycle high and what I mean by that is on a weekly basis We're likely to get a TD 9 count top that comes in play at the end of this year. So The mastering probability tools just to answer that question. They are present at top so you know, you know, so cool Steve That folks that all of us we love this business because it's life's a mystery But live not a problem that we saw and that totally that is so freaking cool, man Seriously, yeah, I'm a great one man. Okay. Take your time


Here we are in our example, Form 1040, populating it with LASERT tax software. You don't need tax software to follow along, but it's a great tool to run scenarios with. You can also get access to the Form 1040 related schedules and forms at the IRS website, irs.gov, irs.gov. Our normal starting point, single filer, Mr. Anderson, got no dependence to start with W2 income 100,000. We've got the standard deduction 12,950, getting us to the taxable income 87,050. If we mirror that in our income tax equation in Excel, 100,000, 12,950, there's the 87,050. We then allow the tax software to calculate the tax on page two, that being 14774. We said there was 15,000 of withholding to get us to the 226 down below, but our major focus right now is on the income lines up top and then getting down to this taxable income as we think about the other income categories. So note and remember that everything that you get is basically income, everything that you receive unless exempt by the IRS. That's their general rule. So a lot of that line items are up here on page one of the Form 1040. And then we have other income, if we hit the plus or the check mark in the Schedule One. And we've gone through some of these Schedule One additional income and adjustments to income. Now we're looking at line number eight, which is gonna be the other income line down below. Now, first just realize that when you get a form that's gonna be indicating that it's possibly income such as a 1099 form, that oftentimes if you get like a 1099, the IRS might expect to see a Schedule C. And there's a big difference between reporting something unlike a Schedule C and then putting it over here as like other income, that being the Social Security and the Medicare. So let's just give a quick look at that. If you get a 1099 form, you're gonna have to show it somewhere, have some income that's equal to or greater than the 1099, or you would expect to get an audit of some kind. If you had it as income that's subject to self-employment, possibly that would be the Schedule C. Let's just do a quick recap. Recap the mission for us, Conor. Of what that looks like even though we took a look at this before and we'll dive into Schedule C in more detail later, let's just imagine you had a 20,000 schedules, 1099 that's subject you believe to Social Security and Medicare. The reason there's a big difference here is that if I go back on up and say, now I've got my form 1040, I've got the 100,000, I've got the 20,000 here, that populated into Schedule One up top which we looked at before line three, the 20,000 and then that pulls into the 1040 here. But then there's also an impact with the self-employment which is you can see on the self-employment schedule which is calculating other taxes of 200862. That is significant. That's not income taxes but we have to calculate it on the 1040 calculations because we don't have any W-2 or employer doing the calculation for us. Therefore on page two, we see that we have the normal tax calculation and then we also have this other tax that's been calculated, which again, that's painful, that hurts, that's significant and then you've also got an impact of the adjustment which is half of that and then on page one you could have possibly be subject to this credit and we looked at all those big differences and changes if you add a Schedule C. Now if you're adding something, let's remove the Schedule C now. I'm gonna say let's take that away and if instead it's not subject to self-employment then you might have it somewhere in here as like an other income line item and we'll go through a couple of them down here and in that case, then you might not have that added complication of course of the self-employment. That's a significant difference. Okay, let's go through a few of them. We've got the net operating losses. So we saw with the Schedule C, it's possible to have basically losses that would be accumulated. You would think that oftentimes from like a business type of activity, losses, the IRS doesn't wanna actually pay you for losses oftentimes in the year that you incur the losses. So if you do have a loss, possibly you can take that against your other taxable income in this case, W2 income, but oftentimes if you're full time as a Schedule C business, then you don't have any other income. You might have a loss and then the question is can you, the IRS is gonna say, I don't wanna pay you for the loss. We only want part of your gains, not your losses, but you might be able to get some benefit for the losses by possibly carrying them forward or something like that. And in that case, that's when it might be populated down here. Now note that if you have a situation where there's Schedule C income and especially if there's any carryover of losses or anything like that, then if this was a new client, I would suggest entering the tax return that was from the prior period into the prior year tax software and then rolling it over in the tax software because then the tax software can help you out with those rollover calculations, rolling it into the current year. That might cost more to do that because then it depends on how you're paying for the software. But if you wanna get off on the right foot and you have a more complex client, then it might be worth doing and then you can kind of deconstruct how the software is treating this rollover and see if that's an appropriate calculation. So if I jump over here and go to the NOL and I populate it, there's the net operating loss. We've got another schedule that is gonna be shown here. And remember losses are things that the IRS is gonna be more skeptical of because they're kind of good from a tax standpoint because although it's on the income line, it's a loss and therefore it's pulling into the 1040 as a negative income line. So it'd be like your income statement when you have those contra income accounts, like a negative income account here, pulling down the total income, which is obviously a good thing for taxes. So there's that one.


What's good Josh the Bull rocks back again with another video so we're gonna check out botcha mania Episode 469 man. Y'all know what it is. Y'all know I love me some botcha mania So you know what we're here for we're gonna get right into this one Appreciate all love and support you guys have shown on the channel. Let's get right into this video man You know what we're here for Botcha mania fans It's the last real professional wrestler the veteran jack bond and we both know why you clicked on this video So let's sit back relax grab your favorite black and white photo of stan hansen Let's all slap our thighs in unison and let's watch botcha mania Wow really That's funny Inside We're more than 15 minutes into this broadcast Here we go This match for the AEW all-land championship the rubber match between jay lethal and freshly squeezed orange Cassidy tony I'm in a good mood already. You saw jay duck out around that's good Well, those are the angels speaking to you And this is me. Hello everybody We were talking to everybody I'd love to feed the house on a regular basis It'd be expensive, but I think Stephon Smith has his hands full here, and I've got my hands full with this live read because on wednesday may 10th AEW makes our return to the Little Caesars arena and on wednesday may 17th. We return to austin texas and Oh, jeez. This can't possibly be right It says tickets on sale on This friday. This is what it says. It says this friday may 3rd. Yeah I don't know what that's supposed to mean. Just go to awtx.com ticketmaster.com What you can find all of the This friday may 3rd great read right there. Um, so uh Raquel's gotta turn around here comes in Breaker and here's the elimination Oh, we've seen this one you bought the whole production set down The whole production down Could you check on the board? They're fine The team of Dustin Rhodes and Keith Lee they Yeah, one job Eddie Grosz, uh, senton into the ring there in the same building where Eddie won the world championship so many years ago I was here. I saw that man. You called it. It was amazing Wow That was cold That was cold one week later.  Never played these games Don't get these me Kingdom hearts is simple and clean Whatever No designs are on tv Like sx tricky Add mine cross tv No designs are on tv No designs are on tv No designs are on tv Manual I lost 7-0 I've been talking some smack here, huh? Be careful. Don't talk too much. We talked about this earlier. We talked about talking Everybody knows you love old-school hip hop when I digress got caught Oh my god That's what we all do Wow, they hit them with that You know what and I wanted to actually ask you about why world of sports and abc Real quick and before I do I want to give some love to al-theq with the 4.99 euros So that's a little bit more than five dollars book or three. That's euros from across the pond Um Shook book and brand are you guys familiar with botcha mania? Would love to know if parodies like this go down well with the locker rooms all my love We know about botcha mania. You know about botcha mania, right? We had a reality You got to check it out pulling up in a reality arresting botcha mania spot were We had a tables match And it was the most iconic table The history of reality of wrestling Maybe in the history of wrestling, maybe the history of wrestling, uh, but we we wouldn't get that table From, you know, your local hardware store home depot wherever low But we didn't gimmick it or we didn't rig it or anything like that Because there's just a table.  They're gonna be 200 pounds. Yeah for sure. They're gonna break it I mean, it's good. It's not gonna be a problem. And man, they bounced us that table all night. It seemed like I laugh I'm doing come here. They like I laugh so much For people who weren't there So, you know, they they do the you know, what was supposed to be, you know Maybe the end of the match the big move off the top boom table doesn't break But it felt it felt like it should have broke right, but it didn't So I think one of the legs kind of bent and so everybody looked around like I think that was it, right? That's it, right?  So you restart the match and then they go back and they do the same spot again And it still doesn't break and then everybody's looking around again like wait a minute Then booker gets on the microphone one more time and you say this match will continue until the table is broken And those poor guys probably went to the table five or six times trying to get it to break. Oh my god That's my right. Don't bunch of made of it every time I saw it.   That's just one container. It's pastimania Stop have a quick and healthy meal and you can keep on shopping till you drop because once you eat hulk hogan's Pastimania, not only are you going to get the energy the pythons as you're pushing the shopping cart around They're going to start the swell you'll be able to make more merchandise up off the shelves The kids will be able to carry more toys and then when you get real tired You're going to stop one more time in pastimania before you go out to the parking lot Oh, yeah It's totally different this rap song doesn't sound anything like there and just to prove his point Vanilla breaks it down and sings the dings. That's the way there's ghosts ours That little bitty change it's not the same there's ghosts I can certainly understand Little bitty change It's not the same not the same not the same Name 10 things that aren't right to censor toothpaste pizza lamps right to censor Quick change the channel And you better hope this rumor the dashing daddy's stalling may have survived the avalanches just a rumor Or we'll be worse. They're ordinary.   We're the nook Bottle grunts in demand two pines can I get lucky and fist him tonight?  Please just touch me. I don't want to go to my nephew They might just hurt me last time they just kicked my strings and spat on me christmas turkey He's another spliff and I feel all right, then I hit another line. I can boss and fly If I'd be out left open wide jump from the back of me at some pipe I'm like hello. I'm like hi. Do you want a back club? Do you want to die? Do you want to catch up? Do you want to cry? Do you want a slice of the painful pie? Rice for the best friend her name's Andy. She's for the husband.  Y'all enjoyed that. I had to like the button Let me know what was your favorite part from this video. I don't even know what I just heard There were so many things that was said in that song. I just I don't even know what to say Appreciate all love and support road to 150k and I am still here on the speedy youtube wrestling champion In the clutch whatever they champ appreciate y'all kicking with me See y'all next one. Peace


Yes, I'm Valentine Valentine which are really and I'm a long-term speaker on this Conferences and this time I decided to Talk about more about how one can use postgres in your development infrastructure and Not exactly about how you do things in inside postgres directly So what is salando a very short introduction because we are in the States Probably not many of you know salando salando is very big Retail store we sell shoes and fashion items and We are growing quite rapidly. We have many tech hubs in in the whole Europe and So when I started at salando five and a half years ago the technology department was only 50 people Now it's 1,100 people so you can imagine that that's kind of the rapid growth of the Organization of technology organization made a lot of Pressure on us to improve our processes to make things work nicely so How did we start we started actually as the good old Three tire application The application back-end and the database It was my sequel database. We used PHP and magento as our Kind of for four actually prototyping But we were growing this five and a half years ago we were growing with the speed of more than 100 percent per month and At the moment when I came there to help the team with Postgres We've been the biggest magento users in the world We were patching it like hell. It didn't work anymore. So we couldn't scale it So we decided to do the reboot project. So the reboot project was a very Interesting endeavor we rewrote everything from stretch in Java using Postgres as our storage infrastructure and we went into relatively radical approach The our CTO back then had a lot of problems with other projects using Java and hibernate. So he prohibited using hibernate so We went and also transaction managers and it was quite a nice pressure on Us as technologists so we went on Postgres using very heavily these top procedures and We did it very nicely. I think so this is the typical way how the micro microservices back then worked at salando and Every service at its postgres database some databases were shorted and What we achieved by using the store procedures that actually store procedures give you the possibility to reduce the transactional scope you are your Kind of as a developer you cannot simply open Transaction and then have and then close it half an hour later when you are finished sending files to the ftp server Yeah, so you really have to think differently when you have to work with the store procedures And it also helps you to really do it very nicely in so reducing transactional scope Thinking differently about your business logic. That's what what we achieved actually with this approach. We're also Using store procedures led to very clean data states in the databases because the store procedures were containing more or less Data logic as I call it so it's a more logic than It's more logic than business less logic than business logic of your application But more logic is that just a simple foreign key constraint. Yeah, so And processing is very close to data. So that means you can process a lot of data being directly in the in the database To to support our Java developers. We also implemented sprock wrapper that Helped us to map complex types easily and that helped us To do sharding It also converted our postgres databases into more or less RPC servers. So the from the Point of view of Java developer. You are talking to the database as as if you are calling the functions From from your RCP server or more or less from from another interface I Talked about post about stop Java sprock wrapper Already in previous talks and many times So if you are interested in this just come to me after the talk because this is not the main topic of this We also introduced Debative based schema versioning. I also described it in my previous talks And it also improved the possibility for us to really move fast with our day kind of Schema changes for now for example our technology team is Doing more than 100 schema changes per week in our database Service and it's kind of they really don't have an issue with changing schema adding new columns. I don't know Improving on store procedures But as every fairy tale It comes to the end. Yeah, so we we are still growing we Wanted to wanted to change our organization a little bit more Though we implemented everything ourselves and the architecture that we built Works until now very efficiently We actually have something like this. Yeah, so this architecture was forcing us into into very rigid technologies tech and We started losing Patience of our developers. They want to be cool. They want to use other interesting things but Yeah, so the new era came last year actually to our organization We call it radical agility what radical agility is that every team gets autonomy as much as they can get they get purpose from the company and They have to achieve mastery in what they do and this works quite Good so far, but the problem with autonomy is that actually They can choose every technology stack. They want even our Postgres team is now more or less fighting for Kind of to to convince others that postgres is still cool. Yeah, so and they're doing quite good job It's not so difficult to go to show how good postgres is But still the persistence layer Should be chosen by the teams by themselves and they can work in AWS before that Move we were all all concentrated in our own data centers Going to AWS in Germany was unspeakable for a big company So we are breaking taboos there as well but of course as a public traded company we have to be audit compliant in most cases of course in every case and the audit compliance Brings us to very interesting Things that we had to work a lot to to enable teams to to to to work in AWS. So Anarchy autonomy is anarchy. No autonomy is not anarchy in autonomy. We even have Constitution for the teams where the rights and Possibilities are defined but What we did to support them in AWS we created stoop stoop infrastructure that enables us to comply to the audit requirements from Kind of from from the PCI authorities and from governmental authorities The stoop is not so easy. So I myself have Problems understanding it and definitely stoop is not the topic of this talk. I simply wanted to Say about this because it's kind of the all the tools that we are building. They're based on the infrastructure here and Yeah, it makes it so quite so if you have questions about this, please ask afterwards so Also, one of the big decisions that was made for Supporting autonomous teams and is that we said autonomous teams will be building microservices The microservices the the applications running in the form of of microservices will be communicating with REST APIs and Databases are hidden behind the walls of AWS VPCs What we do in the database then we are not managing the central databases as we did before the database team is consulting autonomous teams and Spillow is our appliance that we built that is using using Patroni as the high availability system can be used to To support Postgres, I will mention Spillow and Patroni later a little bit more But the problem with microservices is that Classical ETL processes are not really possible. I think I'm missing I'm missing some slides No, so and and I will Describe and try to describe why ETL processes are not so easy in the world of microservices So if you are if your organization is running towards the microservices Please think twice about this decision So the classical world everybody is really very cool and everything works nice. So the developers they work with the I even have the junior developers there, you see They they write the applications they come to DBAs for consultancy and the our business intelligence And scientists kind of getting data From the databases that we manage our developers Sometimes even didn't know that the data was transported to the back ends of our BI systems and analyzed and reports generated and This is the classical way of doing the Data warehousing and business intelligence you have the ETL process you extract data from the database and you do the reports With more teams that we had and bigger services so to say we also had the classical ETL process a huge database Everything was fine, but Classical ETL process has some disadvantages as you understand as well because mostly it's a very hand driven process so you you have to write your ETL process by hand mostly and Yes Advantages is of course that you can put everything that you prepared by your hands into that well structured SQL database that can be used by your analysts But the microservices what what is what are microservices there are kind of if microservices lead to fragmentation of your data kind of making even Smaller areas of domains that are separated into different systems and Everything is there are no there is no access to these databases directly for For the data scientists or or business intelligence people Yeah, and our world is kind of Going down. Yeah, so but we have the solution Postgres has the solution for that So what what we are working now on and then in the prototyping stage is that we are building the system that will extract Changes for kind of flowing from the teams Make it available for stream processing making available for kind of archiving in data lake making available and materialization into some kind of automated Dev a TV age process So One of the possibilities is that business logic itself writes data into your kind of collection system Bypassing the database but this problem has a huge This approach has a huge problem and this problem is not visible from the beginning if you haven't thought about it Enough so to say so first of all, it's very error-prone If you don't have to make the way how you push changes that you do to your entities in the database You will be just making a lot of mistakes Another big problem is the problem of Double-write yeah to do double-write into two systems and to have consistent consistent State of your data in your storage and in the bigger storage of the business intelligence people on world You have to do a two-phase commit and doing two-phase commit is usually very inefficient It's very difficult to implement By the end it's very difficult to implement Another possibility is to extract the changes directly from the database This approach has advantages You you cannot miss anything you you write to your postgres postgres commits it and then Generates the wall replication stream that actually contains all the changes that you need to your data And no additional work is needed on the business side so on the business logic side the your application writes to the database as if it was the database and All the information all the changes that are happening to your data Automatically extracted of course there are some can now I'm a little bit lying about the simplicity of this approach Because you still have to map your entity somehow So the the this arrow there could be quite complex, but still this is one central kind of central centrally managed not managed but developed system where bugs can be tracked and fixed in all your Infrastructure and not in every application and every business logic that you have to look at so How to implement it so actually I want to thank Simon ricks very much for Envisioning and pushing the ideas of wall replication in postgres When he when I was talking to him several years ago, and he was pushing this I didn't really understand the whole importance of the of this Feature that is come that came to postgres and this feature is really immense So we have already Pgeological from second quadrant that allows you to extract data from the replication stream There is a bottled water by confluent that extracts data Converting into Considerizing in Avro and pushing to Kafka We also did some work on the bottled water and we patched kind of forked it to extract data in jason for our purposes and We have a tab on System that we use for parallel snapshotting so you can extract the whole existence database Into your stream and then go on fetching data from the logical application stream How Does it work so you have the streaming plug-in so you can use either of Two or hopefully more plugins that are coming in the future You do is the snapshot of your data when you're starting your process Into the queue and then you use the stream processing application to go on sending data Into the queue this way another project of ours is a I'm Really scared to say this it's kind of rebuilding the enterprise message bus It's a small broker on top of Kafka to enable us to Kind of monitor better and to Keep track of these structures that we are pushing into the Kafka But this is also out of the context of this talk so you you can you are more than welcome to ask me Questions about this and I will be really very interested to discuss this topics for anybody with anybody who is actually related to Messaging buses and event sourcing and all this things and stuff This is this are very interesting topics, and I will be really very glad to discuss these things with Yeah, try it yourself so We worked very hard To push the possibility of Decoding logical replication stream. It's kind of fetching logical application stream in Using psychopg unfortunately the pull request is not yet Merged but everything is done. So we're just waiting for the committer to to push to to merge so you will be able to Experiment with data streams that are flowing from the From the Replication logical application slots and rewrite it or push it into Kafka or push it into Send it to the moon or whatever you would love to to do with it Yes, I wanted initial snapshot export tool as I already said and Yeah, the projects that we are doing are all open source other projects that we do You can have a look on on them at these tools that I mentioned on in previous years There are other tools that are available in our GitHub account Yeah, I'm somehow very fast I Usually I trained to to to do to do it faster, but Yeah, it's I usually need 35 minutes to do to say that okay, maybe I was talking too fast or There were no questions at all. Yeah, so but now you have the possibility to ask questions. Yes Yeah, mm-hmm. I Didn't understand the question Stoops this the So the question is I think the this stups you mean stups in structure Yeah, so what what stups into structure is doing? Yeah, so the stups into structure actually manages so what AWS is usually is the The audit log of what you do so from the point of view of auditors you always need to know so when when something is running in your AWS account you always have to have a possibility to say that the Okay, this application is running. What is the version of your code in your? Versioning control system that is running it and Who made the change that is responsible for this? Kind of for this application. So that means that there there should be From the audit auditing perspective at least in Europe What the requirement is that you have to always have a possibility to say that any Merger in in the production code should be done using the four eyes principle and So somebody should be reviewing it and this should be documented who reviewed it and then rolled out When you roll it out you have to have a possibility to track from from the version of the application and runs to to back to the commit message that was kind of Leading to Emergence of this application that this is application These are requirements when you start to think about how to implement it It's not so easy because you have to really track all the services that you have you have to track the versions and You have to somehow register the versions and so on. Yes. Yeah Yes So actually there are the systems that Manage the Security so you we have the we use OAuth for all the authentication for all the rest services that we that we have and We have Also, for example, when you are rolling out your application, we have the special Sensor plugins that are using cloud formation to roll out the changes Kind of to to package and in it in a we use docker as well So you your application is packaged in a docker and rolled out in specially prepared Linux version so to say that is rolled out on the on the EC2 instances and this Linux version includes underneath the integration with Logging services like Which which logging services I think locally and it integrates with our other systems that are kind of Sending out the kind of storing the audit log smallest and the whole system is open source. You can actually replicate it but You will definitely need to Read documentation a lot to understand how this thing works and it it makes sense only for big organizations I don't think that for smaller organizations. It makes sense to add this additional complexity For for you for you to kind of to work Yes Yes, yes, so this is the project that psyche team is doing so this this bi team that is here so this this team so the Automated entity modelization engine what we what we do is the that we We try to have the registry of all the entities that are flowing into into our Kafka system and Using this registry of events or registry of types so to say to Materialize them from Jason into Tables kind of tables in our Deveha system and then bring the Entities that are spread across different services Into one materialized super entity. So for example, if you have customer information customer payment information customer address information customer I know Risk scoring information so all these Topics could be actually merged into one super entity because we know that all these entities use the same primary key as Customer number so you can actually merge them into one big structure That will be much easier to use by the analytical by the analytics Teams then just having many different entities so this is the We're now experimenting with that and Yeah, I can show you some prototypes if you if you're interested Yes the the question is Why do you want to why do we want to do analytics separately from from the machines that? So why not to do analytics directly on them on the databases themselves? This is actually very close to the previous question the problem is that Microservices keeping the databases separately They don't have the full picture so you cannot do analytics on Data you cannot actually correlate data between different systems If you don't have access to different systems, and this is more or less the reason why we're trying to collect Data from different flows and from different applications Yes, yes the question is that Or the claim is that microservices Usually so people who write microservices Are not using Relational databases, yeah, so quite often I don't know if it's a property of microservices because I think it's just Happens so that people who happen to write code during the era of microservices don't like Relational databases So what we do we talk to people and explain to them all the problems of That they will see with non-relational databases And we have several teams that went to Cassandra and then went back because the modeling is so complex and it's Actually, you need Cassandra only if your application should scale really Really really very much and that will not definitely fit into Postgres interest so world so We talked to people we try to understand what their real use Real usages are and we also train people to to understand better how Postgres works so in a salando we have the whole set of trainings for our developers to kind of for understanding how Postgres works What sequel is and what are the? Advantages of having one master for now Then What one master and not kind of classical non non no no sequel database Yes The question is how much Logic is extracted away from the database to a business logic I think that there is a tendency of the developers to Bring the logic into the zone of comfort So they tend to extract as to put as much business logic as possible into the Environment where they feel most comfortable and these environments are usually not PLPG SQL store procedures So we have a very strange situation that it's kind of older people who know very well how PLPG SQL works because they work with them they they tend to keep business logic and data logic there and people who are kind of new and Haven't had all this experience. They are tending to push business logic into the into the application I Personally think that there is some there should be some kind of a golden Yeah golden average and I started as I said talking about data logic and I ask people to put put the Logic that is related to consistency of data into the store procedures or into SQL and Yeah, do the calculations in Java He didn't I think we didn't roll out the PLV 8 on our Classic on our old databases. Yeah, but now I think spillo appliance that the database guys Developing includes all these store procedure Languages and they're also experimenting to include the site as DB for example into the appliance. So Yes Yes, the question is how the infrastructure people are distributed between the teams. So we It's complicated question. So the the thing is that we are coming from the Organization where infrastructure teams were centralized. We had the platform team so to say where the database team was also part of that was doing all these infrastructure related things and Database if somebody wanted to install a new database, they were coming to database team If somebody wanted to install new Redis system They were coming coming to database team if they wanted to I don't know to bootstrap new Apache machines Tomcat machines. They were going to the system team Now the database team and system team are more consultancy teams. Yeah, so they still also take care of the old vintage applications But the the idea of DevOps is kind of we support this idea So we want people to learn themselves how to manage their services and AWS helps a lot because in the WS you don't need to think a lot how to Bring Redis system up. Yeah, we just we just bring it up And but this is a good question. Yeah, how how to What is the balance there? So but I think that the it's quite difficult not to have a centralized team that Maintains the know-how and We we want to keep this for these People with knowledge that will that are working as consultancy for other teams any other questions I'm really I really feel stupid that it was so short I actually actually I have another 40 slides because I Thought that there will be some questions that there will be and kind of showing and going on Answering that the questions are going into the other direction Yes The question is if one can compare microservices and the old way of doing it, I think microservices leads to For lead to the process of rethinking of what what is your What are the borders of your domain model and what are the borders of your application? I Think it's it's a good direction, but One has to consider the problems that that you you have with it Having in monolith is not inherently bad I Have completely different ideas about the I personally have completely different ideas about microservices I I personally think that Microservices is just another step to something better And lambda architectures are rising and I Think that it still the development of the Architectures will go into something that is more Kind of data and analysis driven so where you have the execution plan for the whole application and the Execution planner will distribute the your code on different machines and so on so but but it's my crazy ideas that But this this actually happens already with the lambda architectures if you look on the AWS lambda and all other big Cloud providers are working in that direction It's more or less happening already You can write your application the whole application can be written in different languages in the form of small lambda Snipplets and then they will work together and what what is still missing is the execution planner that will Understand and measure the flows between these functions and then make decisions where to put them How to run them because theoretically you can put the Yeah, but as I said, this is a More I would love to discuss these things with people who are interested in it Yes Yes, I think I think this is a side guys now That that goes into that direction. Yeah, so automatic scheduling automatic understanding what you need and how to distribute the things I think in the future and relatively close future we will have something like Actually now we never think about how the Processor is distributing Processor commands between the course. It just happens without our knowledge So this should happen also for the for the bigger scale for the applications So we have still a lot of time for questions I hope it was not too short or too boring


And the purpose of the series is to intellectually develop the field of engineering for global development. Each month, we will host a new research institution to learn about their work advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Today's seminar will set the stage of the current state of the field and propose a roadmap for moving forward. My name is Yana Aranda and I'm the president of Engineering for Change and I'll be your moderator for today's seminar. The seminar you're participating in today will be archived on E4C site and also on our YouTube channel. Both of the URLs are listed here for your reference. E4C members will also receive invitations to upcoming seminars directly. If you have any questions, comments, or recommendations for future topics and speakers, please contact the E4C team at researchandengineeringforchange.org. If you're following us on Twitter today, I'd also like to take a moment to invite you to join us in the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C seminar series. Now, before we move on to our presenter, I'd like to tell you a bit about Engineering for Change. E4C is a knowledge organization, digital platform, and community of more than 1 million engineers, designers, development practitioners, and scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities around the globe. Some of those challenges may include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy, improved agriculture, and more. We invite you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to news and cell leaders, insights on hundreds of essential technologies in our solutions library, professional development resources, and current opportunities such as jobs, funding calls, fellowships, and more. E4C members also receive exclusive invitations to online and regional events and access to resources aligned to their interests. You can visit our website to learn more and sign up. E4C's research work cuts across geographies and sectors to deliver an ecosystem view of technology for good. Original research is conducted by E4C fellows annually on behalf of our partners and clients and delivered as digestible reports with implementable insights. We invite you to visit our research page, the URL is listed on the slide here, to explore our trend analysis, research collaborations, and review the state of engineering for global development broadly. If you have research questions or want to work with us on a research project as a research fellow, please contact us at researchandengineeringforchange.org. And I'm really excited to share with you today a new challenge on E4C, which is focused on expediting solutions related to the United Nations SDGs for zero hunger and clean water. The Innovate for Impact Siemens Challenge aims to nurture breakthrough ideas and apply human-centered design approaches to engineer innovative hardware solutions that help achieve SDGs 2 and 6 by 2030. We invite you to learn more and submit your ideas on our dedicated microsites at engineeringforchange.org forward slash Siemens Challenge. Applications will open in February to all E4C members. Now, some very important housekeeping items before we get started. We'd like to take a moment to practice with you using the WebEx platform. So I'd like to invite you to please, right now, type into the chat window what part of the world you're joining us from. The chat window is located on the bottom right of your screen. If you're not seeing the chat window, please just take a look for the icon, which is in the bottom middle of the slide. I'll start us off here already. So again, if you're not seeing the chat window, look for that icon in the middle, bottom, the middle of the slide. So we have folks here joining us from all over the states in New York, Denver, Oregon, New Hampshire, as well as abroad, Rwanda, Belgium, Indiana, Washington state, Minneapolis, UK, and so forth. So glad to have you all join us today. Please do continue to share with us where you're from. I do see some folks also answering in the Q&A window. Please note that the Q&A window is intended for actually questions from the presenter so we can keep them all organized. So please do answer that question in our chat window. Welcome everyone from Berkeley, more from the UK, Chicago, India, and so forth. Thank you so much for joining us today. As I noted, the chat window is for comments, concerns, or issues. I just want to talk to other folks who have joined us today. Any questions so we can keep track? Please put them in the Q&A window. We will address all questions and have a discussion at the end of the presentation. Now, with this, I am so thrilled to introduce to you Dr. Jesse Austin Brennan, who is the assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. He earned his PhD in mechanical engineering in 2014 from MIT. He also holds the NSM in mechanical engineering and a BS in ocean engineering from MIT. Before his academic career, he worked as a development engineer in Peru, working with rural communities and alternative business opportunities, and with local doctors offices, or sorry, groups on medical device development. He also spent two years as a high school math teacher in Boston, Massachusetts. He currently serves as the director of global design laboratory in Michigan, and a group focuses on developing design processes and support tools to help multidisciplinary design teams think at a systems level when performing complex systems design tasks. Jesse also serves as the co-chair of the engineering for global development research committee at ASME, and we're thrilled that he is kicking us off on this exciting initiative over to Jesse. Alright, hopefully everyone can hear me, which was good. Alright, so just thank you again, everyone for joining from everywhere and taking time out of your day to do this. I'm just going to, I think, did you make me the presenter so I can do the slides now. Yes, I will take care of that right now. Thank you, Jesse. There you go. You should be all set. I'm the presenter. Great. So I think I can do this. Alright, so just going to, I'm going to give a quick talk on some preliminary work we're doing that one of the outcomes is this seminar series that we're participating in right now. So I want to thank all of you for doing it because this has been an idea that has been sort of kicking around for over the past couple years. And so to actually have it be in provision and have a lot of people attending from all over the world is really, really exciting and we'd love to see it. And I think this is an important step in growing our research community and really working together towards a poverty-free or, you know, alleviate global poverty in a substantiative way and achieve the SDGs, like we're all trying to do. So what I'm going to talk about today is some work that we've been doing around the research community itself. And so the title of this talk is just engineering for global development. Where do we go from here? And I really want to, I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking and I really wanted this to be more of a discussion. I want to introduce why we're doing the seminar series. Some of the research that we're doing that we're going to submit to journals relatively soon, but I wanted to sort of workshop it with you and really present sort of the type of style of talk that we are looking for in sort of the seminar series. So this really is a chance for us to communicate more frequently as a research community and really, really get to know what other people's works across the fields are. So let me just get into it as to why we started the seminar series and why we're doing the research that I'm going to be presenting to you today. So the motivation really is that we've been talking about doing something engineering for global development, design for the developing world. There's lots of different names for it. We've been talking about it for a long time about using engineering to try and technology to try and improve quality of life and alleviate global poverty.   So if you just look for I have five examples here as the guest editorial from winter and Madsen and the journal mechanical design sort of arguing for engineering for global development as a research area for engineers. Evan Thomas was the co-chair of the research committee did a great paper sustainability this year, talking about a field of global engineering towards that that we should be working towards the school and having a discipline around global engineering. And then also sustainability of this year engineering for peace and diplomacy by. I don't want to mess up people think I'm a day. You know, really again, talking about how we should be using engineering to try and reach these these goals, right, and calling for sort of a new field new research into this. And so based on that sort of motivation my sort of view of it if I had to summarize, they all have different tax and different focuses. But if I had to summarize that I would say that current engineering research is about the development of analytical tools, empirical models and design methods. Right. So we're trying to create original scientific knowledge that allows us to, to use these tools to make predictions and to make physical systems. And then we try and apply these in the EGD context and this global development context and I think, you know, we just import these design methods, these analytical tools, these empirical models on problems, you know, to try and solve the, you know, you know, sustainable development goals or achieve those goals or do other things like that. And I think what we found an experience is a lot of times these fail in some way. Right. So the design methods don't take into account user needs appropriately, or there's something about the context in which the predictions that we make about how effective these technologies are going to be doesn't really work and that can be in the implementation that in a lot of different ways that many, many of us and, you know, all of you attending here either have experienced or have written about or research. So I think what we're talking about with these papers are really talking about is we need new research. We need engineering for global development or global engineering. We need a new research discipline in which we can create analytical tools and empirical models and design methods, which really give us good predictions and help us design systems in a way that is going to be effective in these contexts. And I think that, you know, that's sort of my goal, my understanding of what those papers were sort of trying to motivate us as a community to do. So to achieve these goals, we need to develop the field intellectually and grow our research community, which is why I'm so excited that there's so many of you here. I know you're already out there all working on this really hard and I just want to get us more together more cohesive and I want to sort of talk about what does this mean so when I think of engineering for global development as a discipline. I don't know if you've had this experience, but I certainly have this experience a lot is and I don't know how well this shows up on people's screens, but we can this is just my representation of a number of the fields and there are more, but a number of the fields so energy, design, health, transportation, agriculture, sanitation, water, architecture, ICT, right so all of these supply chain, all of these are fields in which engineering for global development work is happening. Right and the problem is, is that I continually am surprised where I find some some work that's really, really interesting to me and I'm in the design field. I'm a design researcher. I find some work that's very, very. I'm on the app, but can't see the slides. Okay, we can. Can that true for other people? I just want to make sure that I'm referencing the slides people can see them. We can we can address that separately, Jesse. So when we're looking when we're looking at all of these fields, what I'm seeing is that there's engineering for global development work happening in them, but we're not necessarily communicating all that well across these different subfields so I'm finding someone who's been working on, let's say transportation engineering global development and transportation for years and I haven't read the work before because I'm not reading those journals specifically, and I run across them in some other way and now that happens all the time. But I think that in each of our own fields were sort of in our in the subfields we are, you know, trying to talk to our home community in a way in which we may be the outlier, and that there's a lot of lessons that can be learned by other people that are working in energy that are working in health if I'm in design by learning from them and their methods and so I think part of the reason for the seminar is to try and the seminar series is to try and increase the frequency of the communication between these different ones. So, you know, sort of based on that motivation and seeing all of those papers that kept, you know, every three to five years somebody writing hey, we should have a discipline that's designed for development or global engineering or engineering for global development. Really wanted to understand what is the current level of maturity of the EGD research community so if we look at engineering for global development as a discipline, what is the level of maturity of that discipline and what factors should be improved to develop the field intellectually so we want to move forward and again the name of talk is where do we go from here. I think we're all in agreement that we should be doing this work and that new work needs to be done new scientific knowledge needs needs to be created, but how do we do that as a research community because we can't do it on our own. So, two great reports help us do that so, so Yana mentioned them earlier, but the state of engineering for global development by region so the C4C report really amazing work just and I see it as a first step towards really understanding what is going on in our field communally in our research community. And I really the link is in the slides up above. I believe these will be available later so you can see it, but I would encourage everybody to go read that report I find that fascinating goes through all the different programs that are both courses or degree programs, but also a first stab at who is in this community that's doing research in this community what what faculty members are doing research in this community, but researchers are doing it. The other one is the 50 breakthroughs. I believe the link is also up above but but maybe not, which is, you know, a report on what are the 50 breakthrough technologies so this is a start towards this idea of as a research community. What are the big questions that we should be trying to answer and this is giving us an idea as to okay, what are some of the technologies we should all be trying to work towards. And those are listed here is to really make a breakthrough towards the sustainable development goals. So I took that as the first step and I said okay well let me look at what what does it mean to be a discipline and to think about the maturity of a discipline and what is necessary to try and improve it so that we can create scientific knowledge that's useful from an engineering perspective. So if you look at Krishna in 2009 as a paper and this is sort of a model a conceptual model about disciplines as a whole scientific disciplines is that scientific disciplines at the end of the day are about an object of research so there's some objects that the discipline is dealing with in our case I would say that's physical artifacts or or machines if you're a mechanical engineer although there's some some discussion about that within this one and again is all about building consensus and having things that you can build on each other's work. So you need an object of research you then need specialized disciplinary knowledge that you are using to examine or investigate that object of the research. And that specializes plenary knowledge consists of theories and concepts languages in terms specific languages in terms specific research methods that are common to your field and institutional manifestation so courses degree programs etc. So when I think about engineering for global development. Yes, I think it was good. So we want to predict technical performance and in the agd context for these physical artifacts or services. And what we're looking at what we've done and sort of this preliminary work that we're working on that we will be will be submitting to a journal soon is to look at the methodology to look at these four areas listed by Krishna and say, what is the state of engineering for global development research in each of these four areas. So thinking about theories and concepts of the theoretical foundation for engineering for global development we're looking doing a descriptive review of the literature. So that means sort of that meta analysis where you you look at all of the papers and the literature survey. We try and code them in different ways to see how to measure what are the theoretical foundations of the field. We looking at an analysis of keywords from the literature in terms of see, do we have common specific languages and terms are their commonalities against across people that are doing research in the space. We've looked at literature that has looked into research methods so you know we're just building on what other people have done. So thinking about where their gaps in specific research methods for engineering for global development, and then that he for C report that I mentioned earlier we're looking at that for the institutional manifestations. So for counts of you know how many degree programs how many courses, how many programs can you see that that that are specific to this discipline. And there's a lot of those so I think we're doing quite well in that area. So in the descriptive review and I'm just going to give you a few numbers here before I get to the recommendations. There's going to be more on this and the paper that we submit, but I just wanted to give you again sort of works up with with you guys. It's some feedback and really have a discussion around this is I took the E for C report and this is just a sort of a picture it's not a complete table. So the people that are in mechanical industrial and systems engineering that do work in engineering for global development and it just had a list of them. So we took that, and we use that as a basis to go scrape Google scholar for all of the papers and conference papers, journal papers that there were citations by these by these authors that we could find. We took that that database and then selected out cut down to the ones that were specific for engineering for global development. And just some preliminary numbers so of those and now this is not a comprehensive review because it is only the authors listed in the E for C report. Obviously, there's a lot more work that's happening that's not captured in that E for C report, but we found 364 journal papers and book chapters 421 conference papers and a lot of other patents and technical reports that are are captured in those numbers. So what we found is that 12% and this is again a preliminary number because we need to do sort of the inner radar agreement. This is just one person coding right now about 12% of the journal papers are theoretical and the most cited are from. So yes, so that's a great point. So we're, if this was the E for C report on North America, so it is not global. So we haven't looked in French or Spanish and I know that the European sources are much more developed in my opinion. Again, this is why this is just a preliminary one and that's a great point. So, thank you Virginia for pointing that out. I don't know if that was everybody. So the question was, are we looking at non English sources? And the answer is no, we're only looking at American sources at the moment. So the research community on this in America in the Americas. All right. So, and the most cited ones are from the energy subfield. So the point here is that most of the papers that we found and this is sort of the big result from this are results from field studies. So there are descriptions case studies of field work. In my experience, the majority of what I read and what I see people performing. So there's not a lot of generalizable theoretical work being produced from those that are specific to engineering for global development. And this chart is smaller. I guess maybe when I imported it to the large when it didn't grow, but this is just a growth over time. So you can see that over the years that we've been, we've been growing in terms of journal papers per year in this particular group has been growing over time. In terms of specific languages and terms. So these are just all of the keywords that are talking about engineering for global development. You can see here, just a number of the ones that are being used. And I think one of the outcomes of this, we haven't done a statistical analysis of it yet, but it's pretty clear that there aren't a lot of common keywords. So people are own language when they're tagging it in the journals, and that makes it very difficult to find. So there hasn't really been a consensus built over time that we should call it this. And this is how you can go and find it. Now, these all terms have different focuses, I would say, but I think the point remains that we don't have a consensus built on specific languages and terms. To give you one great example. You know, there's been a lot of discussion of what it means to be resource constrained. So, so just engineering for resource constrained settings is a common term. But what that term means is, you know, has not really been defined. Are we talking about less than $2 a day $5 day $1 a day. There's lots of different ways people slice the population and use that term. So, even when we're using a common term like resource constrained settings, which not everybody uses, but of the people that use it. When we looked into it, we weren't getting a lot of commonality on even what that definition meant. So, in response to sort of our feeling this way we went and did a pilot workshop in in New York at impact engineer in last October. And we had 30 or to 40 participants discuss what is the main research questions to be addressed by the community. What does it mean to be rigorous. And again, that talks about the theoretical foundations, the specific languages and terms and the specific research methods. And then what is the community trajectory. So, where should we be going as a research community to try and grow this spoiler alert having a seminar series where we all talk to each other once a month was one of the recommendations. So, we're already on checking that box, but I think there's plenty of other work to be done. Here are some of the sample responses that you're going to we're going to have a fuller picture of in the paper, where we talk about what people said at this workshop in terms of theories and concepts languages in terms of research methods and institutional manifestations. Some of the big things that came out of it is how do we create generalizable work so if I have a very context dependent result how do I understand that I have someone working even in the same subfield, but especially across the field so someone's doing an energy project in Rwanda. How can I what lessons can I take from that in a generalizable way that I can then use when I'm doing a water project in India, right, or I'm doing a water project in Michigan. Right. You know, these are some of the questions that we want to be able to answer if we're going to be, you know, a very useful discipline. And so the recommendations from both sort of the preliminary work that we've done on this paper, but also from the workshop was that we believe or at least I believe that we should be moving up in the research categories. So Friedman has this research categories where he talks about basic research applied research and clinical research. And so that would be, you know, field work versus application versus theory. And I think we need to be moving more towards the spectrum of basic research, where we can start to make some generalizations that say, when we're doing engineering for global development. These are some of the things that you want to think about, you know, and understand how context affects that. But I think that currently, the majority of the work is just reporting, this is the context that I'm in. This was my result. And it's, and it's hard to take lessons across discipline across subfields, but also across context. And even at that level, it's hard to know how people define each of those contexts. So I think we need a lot of work to try and build the consensus. So I am very excited that you're all here and I'm very excited that we're having this type of communication. So we can start to work together to answer those kinds of questions. And then the final recommendation that I think everybody talked about and really came out of our paper was again, this lack of frequency of communication, mainly because we're in these silos, where you would expect that, you know, citing in other people's work in journals, but that builds this consensus over time. And it may be that engineering for global development is just not been around long enough. But I would argue that we've been around since the 40s, or, you know, worst case the 70s. And we still haven't built consensus over that time and other fields have. And so I think that what we need to be doing is building structures that allow us to communicate across these silos and and subfields and really get into a place where we can be citing each other, learning from each other and creating generalizable theories so that we can be a mature discipline and a useful discipline. And I think that that was my last slide, if I'm correct. Yep. That was my last slide. And I really just wanted to, you know, that is sort of the motivation for why we're doing the seminar series. And it's some preliminary work on a paper that we're putting together right now about the maturity of our field and where we need to go as a discipline. That's looking at a descriptive review and some other statistics to try and make a case for we should be communicating more frequently and building consensus in these areas. I'd like to open it up for questions or comments about where we should be taking it. And before I do that, can I plug it there? Yes. Next month's presenter is Professor Ritza from who's the vice provost for creative inquiry at Lehigh University. And, you know, I had a great opportunity to meet with him and impact engineering and speak with him. And I'm really excited about his talk and I just want to encourage all of you, you have work that you're doing. It doesn't have to be finished work. Obviously, I haven't presented a finished paper today in the seminar. I really want this to be a way that we can talk to each other and learn from each other and improve the quality of research that everybody is doing. All right. So, you know, do you want to take back? Yeah. No, no need to give me control for now, but I did want to invite our listeners to submit their questions so that we can post them to Jesse. So we already have one up specifically. Are there examples of other fields that communicate across silos to build consensus and have become a mature useful discipline? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, I think any discipline that you look at has gone through this process, right? So physics, this happened 300 years ago, two to 300 years ago, and has continued to happen. But more recently, if you look at, say, aerospace engineering coming out of, you know, mechanical, if you look at public health, which came out of medicine and some other statistical work combining those in an interdisciplinary way to create a new discipline. Say, more recently, and perhaps more, more focused within our realm of experience, I would say ICTD. So, information and communications technologies for development has gone through this process more recently. And it's something that has sort of mainstream journals and a healthy research community in which everyone knows these are the main conferences we go to. These are the journals that you publish in. And there's a, I wouldn't say complete consensus because that's never all that useful, but a strong consensus in the sense of these are the norms as to what is rigorous research within that field. I don't think that those norms have migrated out of, say, schools of information or from CHI, the CHI conference over to other conferences like IDTC, which is where I go in the ASME universe. I don't think that we're necessarily reading and citing those papers or using those norms. But I would say ICTD is something where they went through this process relatively recently and people that I've talked to within that community described how just a few people got together and said, let's have a special issue. Let's have a conference so we can start to have a place where we communicate and generalize from each other's work. Right. Another question relates to that. Is there a sense of why the EDG community has not developed generalizable theories from the 40s or best from the 70s and some of the key inhibitors to that? Sure. So, I mean, there's a complex problem, right? So, I think part of what we're trying to do in this paper is to try and identify what are those obstacles, right? What is lacking in terms of a discipline? Because I think there are a lot of institutional manifestations, for example, right? There are a lot of courses, a lot of degree programs, right? And you would think that, okay, I have a degree program. I should have some theoretical grounding for why this degree program exists, but I think that it's very experientially based, right? So it's very practice based, which is okay, right? Like, I'm not saying that you absolutely have to have a theoretical foundation to do anything. I think that there's some, yes, I'm going to answer Bob's question in a second, but just to finish this thought. I think that there's some parts of it are looking at how the funding has happened. So, you know, if you don't have a funding source, you know, funding drives a lot of how scientific research happens, right? And again, you can't give a unified presentation to funders if you're across in all these subfields and trying to convince funders in those particular subfields that your stuff is important, right? And I think that we're seeing a shift in demand from students and demand from funders and also research outlets to try and do this. And I think that that has been an inhibitor in the past, but also these, you know, global development work is, in my view, inherently interdisciplinary, right? So, you need, you know, a good understanding of the entire structure, so you need social scientists, you need economists, you need engineers in order to really make predictions about whether a technology is going to work or not be adopted. And I think that that's always a much harder problem than it is if you're just within engineering trying to do tensile strength, for example, right? Everyone's in the same discipline. We all sort of agree. This is the problem. This is the approach. And when you're doing interdisciplinary, I think it just becomes harder because the language becomes harder. You have to spend more time. It's slower. And I think that those don't lead to the incentive structures that we have currently set up in research communities. That would be my answer. Yeah, that I need some new approaches, new techniques, which is entirely what we're going to arrive at. So, another question that came up relative to strategy, right? Yeah. Loading that strategy always answers the question, how? So, have you given some thought to the strategy for how we might reach across the silos? And you've spoken to a little bit of this already, but maybe you want to expand? So, the first thing that I would say is the seminar series, right? So my idea just in terms of what I could do on a personal level was I was like, I really want to hear from and talk to and hear about the work from people that maybe I've read or come across. I just want to do it on a more frequent basis than once a year at IDTC, which is how I was doing it before, right? And I wasn't getting all those people in the different fields. My decision was to create this structure here as a seminar series so that I could, if I came across somebody that I was interested in the work that was in a different field, I could just invite them and say, hey, come give a seminar. It doesn't have to be finished work. Just comments once a month. It's at this time. Sign up for a slot. I'd love to hear what you're doing, right? So that's one way of communicating across these silos. I think the other thing that came out of the workshop and also in the literature is sort of because it's inherently interdisciplinary, you know, outside of engineering, but also within engineering, I think that these institutional manifestations are one way in which this is happening, right? So if you look at, say, the Blum Center at Berkeley or, you know, what we're doing here in the Center for Social Engaged Design at Michigan, right, is we're reaching across and using these institutional manifestations as a way of, you know, and teaching students as a way of getting these collaborations. I think that what we need to do and what came out of the workshop was across institutions and making it specifically about research. I think a lot of, even the publications, when you look at these journal papers, a lot of them are about the education aspects. So teaching students how to do this and not necessarily just researching how to do this to how to work in this space. And so I think in terms of answering the strategy question, I think what we need to do is build structures around and perhaps this is through me or other ways. One of the things we're talking about is do we have a special issue for a journal in which everyone submits papers through a conference, everything from that conference gets automatically submitted to the special issue. So I think that's one way that happened in ICTD that was told to me. So I think that's one possible mechanism with the seminar series is another mechanism and then building those things into research collaborations across institutions. I think it's going to be important. I think also trying to turn these I think we've because it hasn't been mainstream have gone into the education space because students have been demanding it. And I think that we need to now continue to say, can we do this in the research space? And how do we build funding streams and other things there and share knowledge across that so that we can really make something that's effective. I think those would be the things that I would say. Those are excellent points. And of course we want to invite, you know, those of you who are listening, if you have examples of your own that you'd like to share, you know, we'll welcome them either via chat or as follow up via email. You know, it's ultimately we're not suggesting that we are the keepers of all truth. And all all data, it's obviously really dispersed multidisciplinary fields. So there are a lot of things going on that we're just not yet aware of. And this is our attempt to start to aggregate that information by person foremost, talking to all of you. So, you know, we will be stronger in our understanding with additional data points. So, and on that note, Chris just noted in our chat that special issues are an option for the, if you're no mechanical design of which he's an associate editor to do special issue, typically 40 submissions are needed and roughly 20 are accepted. And I think we can talk about some of the challenges associated or the kind of the realities associated with doing special issues of any sort. And this is this is kind of a concrete, you know, aspect of the work is that, you know, it's inherently heavy left. Yep. Any, I don't see any additional questions from the audience. I just want to give it one more minute. We did want to our intention with a seminar series was to keep it quite brief and not not be the typical academic event where people drone on no offense to all the academics, obviously here. So, we are looking to wrap this up in a few minutes. So if you have any burning questions, please put them in. I see some stuff coming in. So, give me just a moment to get to that, but we will wrap in about five. So, someone requested just a repeat of the name of the magazine or special issue. I think if you look in the chat, please do look above. You'll see that it's listed there. If you're not seeing the chat. It is a semi journal of mechanical design. That is where there are special options as where there are options for a special issue. One more question. How can you, how can we include researchers and students from developing countries? They are much more intimately connected to engineering for global development problems than academics in the United States. That's an excellent question. Yeah, so it's an excellent question. I think that there's a bunch of initiatives, for example, through the design society. I know one that just started, you know, designed by Africa, Africa design. There's a lot of research happening in universities overseas. The overseas from my perspective to be clear. I think that we have invited for this seminar, people from from other universities, including in other from a variety of countries and context. I would say that I think that it's a really important question to think about who is doing the research, who is on the research team. And what does that mean? Right? How is that interpreted in the results? And I think that I would say that, you know, that is something that we need to focus on. And we're trying to do it in our own, you know, in this seminar series by inviting people. If you know of researchers that we have not invited that you would like to suggest to us from particular university. As Yana said, the whole purpose of the seminar series from my perspective when I came up with the idea was to meet as many people as possible and learn from them. Right. So that's a cross context across universities. We're trying to make our presenter list representative of that. And anyone that can help us do that, we would really appreciate it. So I think that's one step. I think the next step is meant to think about how do we have, you know, our own research. I haven't presented my other research. So I, for example, I'm doing research in Thailand where I'm collaborating with the school public health here and collaborators from a Thailand university. So, you know, in my view, we're always trying to have collaborators, academic collaborators from wherever we're working that are really going to help us. I know Michigan does that through the Ghana program. You know, I just think that that's what we need to do is to build those research collaborations so that we're all learning from each other. Absolutely. And one of another questions come in. One of the points from our listeners is there, there are a few other areas where you might want to think about building out the strategy, namely language codification, which I think you're also noting in terms of terms, process standards, funding measurements. And just war stories in the sense of, you know, failures, I think is really what this listener is thinking about. So another question is recommended. Are there any recommendations to overcome the problem of language differences between disciplines? Those are the causes of many of the silos. Yeah, so that definitely may be a cause of the silo. As I said, interdisciplinary work. So research into interdisciplinary teams has, you know, has sort of said, this is a one of the inhibitors of interdisciplinary work is you have to spend extra time trying to learn those differences. I think one of the things that I found in reading a lot of these papers as I'm doing this, this descriptive review is that there isn't necessarily a norm. A norm around defining the terms very precisely. So you might read, I've read a lot of papers that say this is, you know, designed for resource constrained settings, but then they never define what do they mean by resource constrained settings in their paper. Right. In the way that they might define, okay, like I'm talking about, you know, these are my symbols and my equation and I'll define those for you. Right. So I think that what we need to do across disciplines is start to really be precise in our language and reporting what we have in that. And if we can make it a norm. So, for example, if we do a special issue and say JMD, then we could make it such that everybody ahead of time when they're submitting knows, hey, you need to have this glossary where you report these things. And I think that's the discussion. What should we be reporting? Right. About the context that we're working in so that people can understand it. And I think that, yes, it takes more time. It's harder to do. I think that there are mechanisms for sort of enforcing that if we do it in a single place where we're publishing. But I think, again, each in our own work should be really thinking about and reporting as precisely as we can. What do we mean by each of these things? Great. Well, I think this is a great note to end on. Jesse, we do want to point out that in the chat, there's also some really great recommendations. There's one last question that I'm just going to throw out there just because it's not such a good point. And then I think Bob to close it out, which is, are you only interested in learning about research in this area? Or do you want to talk with organizations who are working in this space, specifically in the health field? Sure. So I think that my particular research is very based on on practice and I think design research in general is. So I'm always interested in talking to practitioners and understanding what is the research that we need to be doing in particular to the seminar series and to the paper that I'm presenting. I'm talking just about research and the narrowing the scope from how do we do engineering for global development to how do we create original scientific knowledge within engineering for global development. But by necessity that scientific knowledge to be useful, I think certainly all sorts of organizations and stakeholders that are within this space should be working to try and define that research agenda. So I'm not saying that other organizations need to be doing research, but they certainly should have collaborations between the academia and the rest in order to transfer that knowledge and also to define the direction of where that knowledge is going. What questions should we be answering? That needs to come from practitioners. So, so absolutely I'm interested in hearing from everybody. In particular, I'm talking about research because that's what I am and I tried to narrow the scope as much as possible. But certainly I think that there's, there's a spectrum of what we could be talking about here. So, thank you so much, Jesse. And with this, I definitely have to close out our seminar. I want to thank all of you for attending. It's been a really fruitful discussion and we're looking forward to having you join us for our next one as a reminder. We will be having another seminar in February specifically on February, the 12th at 12 p.m. should be really easy to remember 12 at 12 with con John from the university and his work is really compelling. So the conversations will continue. We actually had responses from our research community throughout the end of 2020. So lots of exciting topics ahead. We will be sharing with you the list of our upcoming presenters and the dates through email. With that, I wish you all fantastic and productive afternoon, evening or morning, depending where you're joining us from today. Thank you so much. We'll see you on the next one. Have an optimal rest of your day guys. Bye. Bye now.