I'm going to start by telling you one thing that I'm hoping you will tell me about. Data can tell some very interesting stories. I'm just going to speak up. Data can tell some very interesting stories and some of these can be pictures stories. I want to share some examples of what can be done with data. This talk is more about just spending your mind hoping to show you some new things. There are some interesting stories that just come up purely out of practice. What I will not be doing is talking about the techniques that are going on behind this. There are a couple of talks that will be talking about how one can do things like this. This is just about examples of what can be done with data. The picture that you see here is a map of the flights in the United States. It shows some of you. If you saw this animation, you would have seen that the flights start from your land into the country while the rest of the country is dark when it wakes up. Then the local flights start from your land. Then the country flies on the Pacific coast. These two stars meet in the back line. This animated visualisation is something that was made entirely in the United States. The only source of every dot on this image was the flight position and the viewing point. Nothing happened there. Let me introduce myself. My name is Anand. I'm a data scientist at the United States. What I'll be showing you is how it works. We'll be talking about some examples of pictures. The earliest example of this would have been for understanding data visualisation. During the 100 years war, she looked at the number of people that were dying because of illnesses which she debited in group versus the number of people that were dying because of war injuries either directly or indirectly. You can see the story that it tells. This was her acquisition to Queen Elizabeth saying, we need more hospital facilities. She got it. This is going to be one of the wonderful factors for England. Sean Snow, in sometime around the same time, prepared this visualisation to show where Kauwara is. At that time he was not known that Kauwara is one of them. He brought in response where families were affected and the pump that they were drawing water from and found a very strong relation. That established quite clearly that water was the source of the disease and end up saving several lives. This was centuries ago. If they could visualise data there, this effectively, we would compute as what to be able to do better. To be fair, we are doing quite an amazing job. This, for instance, is a visualisation of London. Every single dot here is drawn in an automated way. The red dots are places where people have taken photos and photos on clicker. The blue are dots where it meets. You can see that there are the business districts which are somewhat bluish. There are the tourist spots which are reddish. You can see that there is a lot of London. You can see Oxford Street Energy. You can see the structure of the screens. All of this is without overlaying any real data as any map-based data. This is purely proof data and visual. The question is why visualise that part? I thought it would be better. Visualise for a minute that this is why the photo is here. Well, there are some things that visualisation can tell you that you cannot see very clearly with the data. For example, if you take a look at this data set, it shows you for different cities over a year the price and sales of a product. Our first guess would be that the average prices look the same. Nine, nine, nine, nine. The average sales looks the same. The average variance is consistently 10 for the price and the average variance for sales is 3.75. Looking at the numbers, I can't quite tell much. I mean, maybe I can figure out some background. It will take me a while. Let's just plot it. Firstly, the first thing I want to highlight is that this data set looks like four cities are completely identical. They're not. Bangalore is a slightly positive correlation. So, as you increase the price, the sales is decreasing. Really? Increases up to a point that stops. Hyderabad looks like there's a near-perfect correlation but there's an aberration. That might have been an error in the data. And Mumbai. We never bothered changing the price except for one location that we did move. But I will argue that there's not enough data to prove the point. Now, it's the same data set. The conclusion that we're drawing from the picture is extremely different from the conclusion that we're drawing from the summarized statistics from looking at the numbers itself. And again, one thing that I want you to take away is when you get a data set, just plot it. Whatever way you can, whatever tool you have, Excel, paper, pencil, whatever, you are bound to get something that is different and more insightful than you and just look at the data. We were working with the energy utility. We said, look, we have it from We know that data readings are being taken but not quite accurately. In some cases, it's traditional to come. In some cases, it's not. And we have this ton of data which we can't process. We don't know. We have new technology. See whether there's a pattern for all that. So we did what I just suggested. Let's just simply plot it. Nothing sophisticated. Let's see how many people have a meter reading of zero, one, two, three, and so on. And what that looks like is this. It's roughly like a normal curve. But there are a few spikes. The biggest spikes are 50, 100, 150, 200. So that we are here. And those things actually are exactly the slap on this. The person with a meter reading of 150, 100, basically less than a person with a meter reading of 101. That's where the spikes are. What surprises us though is the spikes at 10, 20, 30, 40, and so on. There's no economic reason for that. The unit rate is the same. So if you had a meter reading of 10, it would be just one point. So why were these happening? We were in a chair. This supports the other thought that we had, which is these are not meter readings that were taken and adjusted. These are readings that were taken in the first place. I just put them around now. And they were trying to automate the readings. They needed a case to prove to the unions that there is a reason for automating them. And this was strengthening their case. But then a second look at the data shows a few other things. Now, sure people are trying to reduce their meter reading. But is this happening to the phone? Is it more like, there comes a pay-in-certainty and we reduce the meter reading? Or is it more like a fixed format?  Is it the same set of people for putting a meter reading down or getting to the boundaries? Or is it a very diverse set of people? So why we probably are not able to see if each row shows a meter reading of an individual over the course of a year. And the lady who is in the first row had a meter reading of 200, 200, 200, 200, 200. And that's tough too. In the case of broken people, we were having zero. Except for this... So this gentleman looked at the name and said, okay, I know what happened. But there was a huge knowledge at that place. His guess is the actual reading would have been 5,000. So the diamond would have gone to them and said, please, can I put in my schedule for something like that? But it also varies by job. So, for instance, if you take different sections of the city, the degree of fraud which can characterize as the first rich bump at the last boundaries varies anywhere from, for instance, in section one, it's 70% going all the way up to 100%, which means that there are close to one point pieces, times as many people with a meter reading of 100, as compared to 90. Huge jump. So that section got 5,000 fraud happening. And as you go further down the degree of fraud it's decreasing. You can't see the bottom of the section. The bottom was something like 30% fraud, which is good. I guess one has to deal with some degree of fraud. But here there's an interesting knowledge that there was a big gap here and then almost as if the top could see, this moved up. And checking back with the records looked like that's the time when the section manager moved in there and moved back, moved out of that section. So yes, the data is deeply dependent but in some cases it can also show you the people that are the heads of this data. We were working with the Tamil Nadu Education Department and I can see there was a story around what credits marks so given a child can be find out up front what marks are they likely to get. Purely based on Tamil Nadu so there's gender-maker difference. It does serve communities that have subject-maker difference. And you'd be surprised to find that the child's subject actually makes a massive difference. We're also testing some weird things like does astrology have any significance? Does neurology have any significance? Do people on certain months score better marks? Do people with different first records have different marks and so on? People with different first records there is no statistically significant difference. If you're interested in 2011 the letter Ti scored the highest mark the letter W scored the lowest but not a statistically significant not a very significant increase. Soco-psychic makes huge difference in statistics that I've found is less than 0.0000000 That's what the curve looks like in 2011. That's incidentally what the curve looked like in 2010 and 2009. That's exactly the same curve that you have by subject. That's exactly the same curve that you get by industry. In June, June bonds score the lowest. July bonds, a little higher. August bonds, the other top. September is really much of a difference around, say, all really sorry for June bonds. Also remember, this is the average. There are, of course, the June bonds. There are. But this pattern is repeated in every single way. And it's, I mean, it's quite simple. I mean, it's just, Christmas is more than 120 months. I mean, for some of you, I guess the explanation is obvious now. It isn't as much as the sunset and the age. Children born in June would have, it just becomes six years at a time of automation. And they're the oldest children at last. And at that age, for one year, it makes a huge, it gives a huge advantage. The same pattern was seen with the Canadian hockey team. There are more than a lot of players. We talked about the hockey team having people consistently born in January, February and March. Very few exceptions. The reason I guess is that they cut off for them was that it was a dissensus. So anyone born in January, just misses the cutoff. Therefore becomes the oldest student in the next match and therefore has the best position. So, which is an interesting thing. And a possible indication of this, therefore, is you start splitting sections by age. You can have a different, you pitch differently. But on the other hand, it's probably a bit sad that 12, 14 years of education can't really wipe out this one-year advantage at the beginning. What are we teaching? Incidentally, the choice of subject makes an even larger difference. 18 percentage points. If you had a choice between taking in Tamil Nadu, science zoology versus commerce computer science. He used to go for commerce computer science. 18 percentage points. We want to see really the raciest one-day battle. Who is the fastest and the longest in one-day battle? The data was all there. We had a few innocent in-match and asked the analysis in 1970s that the first match was clear. Let's take a look at it. Excellent can show you some interesting things but we thought we'd just client-seed all of our machine. And that's the result. The size of each of the boxes is the number of rounds that are scored in one-day battle. The color is the speed at which they score. So the darker the red, the slower they are. And the brighter the clean. You can't quite see the differences in the greens very well here. But take my word for it, that's the rightest among the big greens. But actually, you should put on this score a little higher from a strike rate perspective. But then, that's what Sehwag's scored. And then we'll get deeper into the unusual match. So there is a certain consistency factor as well. So Sehwag's consistency, consistently fast as a moderate but also quite inconsistent. Whereas, one would argue the technical has been mostly consistent. It's of course smaller than X. And the Vaskar has had his share of fairly fast innings. Sehwag has had two really big scores. The rest of them were a few small. And while the strike rate is fabulous, don't worry, they give family from two large innings. And you can't really make that score with a person. The thing is, if you read this data set out as a table, it comes to 70 pages. You're not going to be able to pass 70 pages at one time. Part of what data visualization does is compresses information into a very compact representation. And that's the value that's always there. The other thing I missed out was that we did the same thing for the world we can see with the top 100 creators. Again, I'm not sure if you are able to see the colors that well, but the fastest scoring batsman in our range of hatches. By a huge margin, it's just a little bit. 190 strike rate by the second highest would probably cost us 100. Interestingly, there's also an increase in the strike rate over time. So if you look at a person like couple days who batted more than a decade ago, the average strike rate per year was less by about 3 percentage points. So it means less every decade by about 3 percentage points. If you make that adjustment, couple days strike rate compares to that of second. So in this time, it was about as fast a batsman as Zeva was doing. What can we make out of security's pricing information that we get? Can we see any part of the population holding a given security or a set of securities? Are there any specific security that I should be voting more on? Do we risk it? Should I be voting less? Or some of those? Because they will certainly be what I've got. But here's a picture that shows the correlation between second currencies, commodities like gold, silver, and stock indices, currency, S&P, and so on. Square shows you the numerical correlation. So the Australian dollar versus the euro was for the six month period ending in 2011. It was about 68%. And the only visible thing there, unfortunately, is the scatter block. Now, remember what I said earlier, in general, always block. So the number can smoothen many things. The year for this was for the Singapore dollar was correlated against the second currency. But it had a nearly zero correlation. And there are two reasons why you can have a nearly zero correlation.  And therefore, it's averaging over zero. Or because there really is no correlation. And for the Singapore dollar versus that conceiving fact was a bomb. That there was a strong positive correlation each year and then a strong negative correlation which was very different from zero, something close to zero, like the point here. Between the Malaysian rate and what was the rate. But what do you also see? Because there are certain blocks of related currencies. Singapore dollar, the dollar, Japanese yen, gold, Swiss franc and the Chinese yuan. Who tend to move with each other almost perfectly. And there are, there's another block of currencies here. The S&P, the good sea and the VSE. Which also moves within each other. And for some reason, in Pakistan we also reasonably coordinate with that. But these two blocks move statistically with each other. So if any of these these station currencies plus gold and the Swiss franc this block goes down by zero or something. So if you had gold and wanted at least a hedge against it the most negatively correlated against that would be the poor sea. So gold, the British index that's the best hedge against gold. The poor sea, then the best hedge against that. If you hold the city the best hedge is gold. And if you hold the Indian rupee then your possible best hedge against that would be the Japanese yen. But it's not strong. Minus red seven. It's still not good. But before I go on into this one just talking for 15 minutes just keep going. Stopping any time you got any votes. I'll try and wrap this up. Another thing we were trying to do was take sort of like unpopular civilization of flights in the US can we take weather data and plot it. So we took the last 100 years of our weather data for each district and plotted that on a video and first we tried to see whether the temperature was essentially varying a lot. Now unfortunately the color combination is looking a little like this.  But each row is showing you India's weather by district by month. So generally very much they do so on and as it has been called and each row is showing to you by decade. So 1900, 1910, 1920 and so on. What you see in the full color version of it is that there really isn't much of a difference between January 2019 over versus January 2001 whereas it is a huge difference between January 1901 versus May 19, 1910. But also if you play like a video there's some patterns very much. So for instance the northeast and the German Academy are probably two to over a year. So it's the west coast. South-west coast, the Marlborough coast is consistently cool too. But what was most interesting was that there were two places in India, two districts, which have a complicated pattern. You have these areas being cooled by the surrounding areas are hot and these areas hot by the surrounding areas are cool. As you play the video you can come to obviously one of the areas just now. One is Velasco, the other is Shibara. One common thing we could find is the Vodafilms so perhaps that's a significant difference. We don't know. Now the thing about all these visualizations is they can tell you what's happening, not necessarily why. The last question will be about Vodafilms. In this fourth section what's something that we did with triple lighting.  When I say every single activity I mean right down from every keystroke that they like, which applications they were using and so on. There are four means that I have the Gmail password of a feast with the students. They were told by the way that they have the option of turning it off. So each column is a student and each row is an application that they were using. The color indicates the degree to which they were using it. So the browser, Firefox was the most used Microsoft Word on which they were wearing assignments was the second most used. Chrome was the next most popular browser and you cannot see clearly who's using Firefox because we're using Chrome. And in the next few years there is like somewhere where you do use it and we have some strong doubts on why they're using it. This might explain the fifth most used application was VLC. They did have course videos actually. You can see the title of the content they were watching and one group came out of it. We had a solid movie recommendation in the screen. The victims of each of these is the amount of time that they're spending on the computers. So the people out here are spending that much time and we are spending a lot of time. And the person here and the first two top users between them they are among the few people using Half Life. There are four people playing Half Life as opposed to for example Note 5 which is used by faculty or the command processor which is used by faculty or just these four people have managed to push Half Life into the top half of the list of applications and spending 10% and 11% of the time on this. This guy is a solid game. We don't want to have any percent of the time. He or she gets the time. What this tells you is partly who's using what how but it can also go a step further than that. What we haven't done yet but are the process of doing is trying to see how they switch between applications. So when I'm using for instance my editor, do I need to switch the browser or do I need to switch to minus key or do I need to go? So use a video while I'm learning what the patterns are learning how long does it take. The other thing that we're exploring is how long are they spending on a video? Is a video of five minutes too short? Is a video one hour too long? How people will pause it That's another kind of behavior inside that When I was relocating back in the UK one of the things I was trying to decide on was which city to settle in.  Trying to save each channel on one channel independently from another channel independently from another channel. So you have to stop that that would find people. Then try the same thing in Hyderabad to find people. So I said let's take GitHub for those who are not aware because it's sort of like Facebook. And I said let's draw a line that means who is following each other. We filter this network by the who is living in the city and the broad edition to see what the pattern is in the city. I think you're not able to see but that's that's a very large network and I certainly connected the conference so it does mean that if you get one person and there is a batch on that at least on GitHub there will be some other person that you should be able to connect easily. And even if you're not part of the certainly connected conference, there are plenty of precise clusters these are the color it indicates the language that they look at so they may need languages maybe organizations and then once you know this you can also see how this cluster if you connect with this cluster there is some good that come out of it. That's Chennai the second largest community and there is a community there it turns out that I had missed them from there far smaller and it's an emerging community group called Chennai it is emerging now that's probably the third it is the third they just on the not there is most centrally connected there are a few hubs here and there if you go to Hyderabad there are hubs there are three or four clusters all the ones that I could identify were organization these are startups and people there are trying to contact we also did this with Q-Series in the Middle East Sri Lanka, Singapore and so on and depending on which place you are looking at Middle East for instance does not have 3 people to provide help in contrast Singapore has a massive engagement this incidentally explains my choice of location I would be sending an email but not all designs need to be here is a simple redesign that we did before we sent the path for the electricity sometimes something has electricity can be visualized it's really just the number that you want to see how much do I need to pay let's make sure that that's common and once you know that the next thing that you want to know is why I got this so what was my current reading what was my previous reading therefore this month's meeting is not to be last month you should have paid so much this month that's what's needed and also sometimes just tell me how much did I use last month how much did I use a month before then how much did I use the same month last year because there's a huge season of variation the months in which I switch on PI conditioning that's going to make a big difference to the amount of power that I'm trying to find the 45% let me show it to my neighbors and say so many points like three points things like that can be put into an interface and it's a reasonably simple period this doesn't really call much for visualization as much as it does and if you were to pay this is another very simple visualization originally created in your page to show tells you if you had bought had sold the lines if you had bought the lines anywhere from 2008 2006 7 8 9 10 and had sold the lines at this period how much money would you have in this industry so the reds are where you have made a loss the beans are where you have made a profit the whites are where it's somewhere to be and the diagonals in this period you are lost money at best you are bought for recovering if you had bought around this time and sold if you had bought around this time and sold probably early you would have recovered decent bit of your money but if you had sold anywhere from that then please you would have made a loss but also you can see the holding part so if your held for one year does this one year and more you cannot make money systematic investment is great the data for the last 10 years doesn't seem to indicate that much so let me end with four books which you can't read again but it's easy enough to remember then just pick up any book by Edward Dark he's all books by Edward Dark and you'll get a sense what visualizations can do like I said I have not spoken about how you can create these visualizations I will emphasize though that half of these visualizations can be created on Excel you just need a sense of what can be done and need a sense of the story that you can use around it and you need a picture story so let me end I have a quick question for I guess we are a data visualization company we did last year we analyzed in a controversial way and there is a story you can find more about us on our website and on your website I have two questions the first one has to do with clearly there have to be I mean the design that is shown on the front end it's what is also the kind of I mean make it possible for you to display something I mean so basically I just want to understand this dynamic between design and technology and therefore what makes it possible for you to show something in a certain way so that's my first question the second question is sort of still something I am trying to arrive at my own mind but also in terms of I mean I don't know if it's as simple as so this question about this whole process of how do you read the pattern are you starting with a particular question or how is it or is it a problem that's forced to you so the first question was between design and technology design is something that unfortunately comes only to this practice there are a few guidelines that one can pick up but unfortunately even applying those guidelines does take a lot of practice the good part for work is quite easy and many cases that technology itself is the design so if it's possibly easily created it's really difficult to create what it's only for the security realisation plus a lot can't so the good way design is driven by what you can do and therefore it might simply be to keep all the look almost as easy as easy way is to teach how people were talking about this technology but I want to represent something that just technically helped and what is the field that will do another point that are applications like for instance that will be a spot 5 which will value drop Excel 2010 and 100% sure has at least a quick answer therefore the design is just the second question was the part of the how do you know what place you are the part of this course and the experience but one there are two ways of going around this one ask the question and find the answer in which case you know what you may be I think this ability to do that analysis which can be easier the tougher part is if you don't know the domain don't know what to ask and just want to know what's interesting what I found is one simple rule of thumb is data can be divided into any data set that you can take can be taken as an exception it will have a bunch of columns numbers and categories typically read next let's assume you split the columns into these columns have text these are numbers take any one of those numbers that you are interested in and find out how it varies by the time for example we are working with a quality company trying to see what the variation in mortality is for the chicks so one simple automated way of detecting this is to say what are the rules types for each roof type what are the average mortality is there a significant difference for each floor type is there what is the average mortality is there a difference so for every simple every single categorical variable find out what the average is of the number now this is a simple technique it is just saying find the average of each of the segments but about 80% of the analysis that I have seen in all my life comprises just this one thing tell me how a particular variable varies based there any 20% so you can there you probably can go but the good part is this is something that can be done blindly without you calling it Hi I am Laena and let me first congratulate you on a fantastic presentation what I wanted to point out was this is danger of correlations making correlations between various variable and then making a broad generalization out of it especially the birthday made me a little worry how do you protect yourself from making I mean how do you how do you protect yourself from making such generalizations what are the processes you follow within your team to make sure you are not falling into that fantasy Eric Raymond had given the answer in that one he taught us a technique how to find something different it is not necessarily similar process we create something two months later we find out that it is not true and we have found out in such cases when he access to the raw data it is a possibility he was trying to make sure that it is to do the data made for the PS the data has been done yes


InshaAllah today's khutbah I'm going to talk about community and solidarity and say something about the significance of culture as well. Allah SWT says in the Qur'an, Surah Al-Imran, wa atasimu bi habidilahi jami'an walatafarraqu. He says, hold on to the habal of Allah SWT, the rope or the lifeline of Allah SWT, all of you and do not be divided amongst yourselves, walatafarraqu. And this is important. So the ulama say here that the habalullah, the exegits, some of the mufassirin in the Qur'an, they say this is the Kitabullah, this is the Qur'an that we should hold fast to the book of Allah SWT. Wa la tafarraqu, this means you are not allowed to join a firqah and there's a difference between a firqah and a madhab. A madhab is simply a school of thought, a methodology, a school of jurisprudential theory. So if we were to use an example from our context, we would say for example that two brothers, they want to study engineering, one of them goes to UCLA, one of them goes to UC Berkeley. At the end of the day, they still have a degree. They went to different schools, but both of them are still engineers. There's different foci or emphases in the different schools, but both of them are valid. So these are fine. The madhab are ways or methodologies within the hudud, the parameters of Allah SWT in which we understand the religion, nothing wrong with that whatsoever. But a firqah is a group that believes that they have the exclusive truth. They are exclusivists. They're not inclusivists. That they have the truth and everyone else is a kathar. They make a taqfir, they pronounce anathemas on other types of believers. So this is very important for us to understand the difference between ikhtilaf and khilaf, that there's two types of difference of opinion. And ikhtilaf, which is on the eighth verbal form, this is something that is defined as scholarly difference of opinion. And this is inevitable amongst the ulama. And there's actually a hadith of the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, which says that ikhtilaf bayna al ulama, that this type of scholarly difference of opinion amongst the scholars, is actually a mercy from Allah SWT. It's actually a mercy. Somebody asked one of my teachers, why are there four schools of thought? Why are there four madhahib, but not just one, at least four? And he said, because Allah SWT wanted to give us more of his mercy, and he said, what do you mean by that? He said, Allah SWT, he gave us more of the sunnah, more of the normative practices of the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, that these four a'imma have codified in their schools of thought. Difference of opinion is inevitable. So this is called ikhtilaf. And the ulama, when they had difference of opinion, they had amazing adab when they would talk about these issues. Imam al-Dahabi, for example, rakhimahullahu ta'ala, he had difference of opinion with Imam Abu Hamad al-Ghazali, but when Imam al-Dahabi, when he writes about al-Ghazali, he says, yes, we have a difference of opinion, and Allah SWT knows best, but where are the likes of Abu Hamad al-Ghazali today? Why don't we have scholars like him today? So even though he had a difference of opinion, he has great respect for the scholar that Abu Hamad al-Ghazali was. This is the comportment, this is the adab, this is the decorum that the ulama had. This is ikhtilaf, but khilaf is something that is not good. Ikhtilaf is difference of opinion amongst the laity who don't have requisite knowledge. So Allah SWT says, fad yahdaril ladin yukhalifuna an amrihi, an tuseebuhum fitnah, aw yuseebuhum aadabun azeem. Allah SWT says with regards to the Prophet SAW, those who are going against him, they're mukhalifun that go against the order of the Prophet SAW, let them be forewarned of a fitnah, a tribulation that will descend upon them or a painful torment. So Imam Malik Ibn Anas for example, he considered a jidal which is debate amongst the awam, the laity, he considered this to be haram because they don't have their requisite knowledge and they're hindering people from the path of Allah SWT. Once he was sitting in a gathering, some of his students they began to argue. He stood up and he shook his jubba and he said, you all are war and he left the majlis. This was his opinion. Nowadays, we go to universities and we find students in the MSA sitting around and debating with one another, debating salafi ash'ari or maturidi hanafi, this type of debate. This is haram according to many of the ulama to do that because we don't have the requisite knowledge to do that. That doesn't mean we educate ourselves. That doesn't mean we don't educate ourselves. Of course we educate ourselves but we have to have that comportment that scholars had between themselves when they had difference of opinion and leave it for Allah SWT. This deen is a vast religion. It's a vast religion. There's many differences of opinion within the religion that are within the khudud or the parameters of Allah SWT. But it seems like every so often somebody who has no training whatsoever wants to stand up and give a fatwa and this is something that is a disease of our age. Imam Suyuti mentions that the Sahaba, obviously the khayrun nasqarni, the best generation or the Sahaba, only seven of them gave fatwa, seven of the Sahaba. Those who had such close personal contact with the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, the kulal muqtirun, only seven of them. Imam Suyuti relates that once a man came to one of them and said, give me a fatwa and this Sahabi was so reluctant to give him a fatwa because to put himself in that position of authority. They were too humble for that. So he said go to so and so. So this man went to so and so. And then this other companion, he said go to so and so. And this worked all the way around back to the original Sahabi because they were so reluctant to express their opinions when it came to the deen of Allah SWT. So Allah SWT says, wa atasimu bi habidullahi jami'an. Hold on tight to this lifeline of Allah SWT and this again according to the vast majority of the exegents refers to the Kitabullah. The Kitabullah based on another hadith, haditha qalain which is the mutawat al hadith. The Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, he said hold fast to two things. The first one is Kitabullah, hablun mandudun minas samayi ila al-arth. This is your lifeline that extends down from the heavens to the earth. Wa atasimu bi habidullahi jami'an walata farraqu. Hold on tight to the, to the, to the have irtisam to the book of Allah and do not join a firqa. Don't be divided. Don't be sectarians. Wa thkurun ni'matullahi alaykum idhkuntum a'adaan. And remember the favors of Allah SWT upon you. When you were enemies fa allafa bayna quloobikum. And he made ta'leef. He brought your hearts together in love fa asbahtum bin ni'matihi ikhwana. You became brethren by his mercy, bin ni'matihi ikhwana. And interesting here, the ulama say that this ni'ma that is mentioned, this is a reference to the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa la alihi wa sallam, because he is a ni'matul irtima. He is the greatest ni'ma. So here Allah SWT in this one verse, he tells us that unity in creed is based on the Quran. This is our essential aspect and unity, our relational unity in love is based on adherence to the sunnah of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa la alihi wa sallam. The one who brought hearts together, he would convert hearts. This is one of the greatest miracles of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa la alihi wa sallam. And this is why he was charged with being a sahir. They thought he was a sorcerer at the Darun Nidwa when they decided, you know, what should we call him? They said, let's call him a Sha'ir. He's a poet. They said, no, he doesn't compose poetry.  And they said, no, that's not going to fly either, because we call him a sadaq al ameen. And if we say now he's a liar, that makes us look bad. So they said, let's call him a sahir. You know, al walid ibn Mughairah, this was his recommendation. They said, why is he a sahir? Because they said that he has the uncanny ability to divide families, right? So that's all they saw, because this was early in the Meccan period. But in reality, the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa la alihi wa sallam, he brings people together and he changes hearts and this deen is transformative. Amr ibn al-aas, who was a companion of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa la alihi wa la alihi, but he did not convert until much later in the Medinan period. He says that once he came to the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa la alihi, after he became Muslim and he said the Prophet showed him so much love and so much ihsan and so much mahabah and so much care that Amr ibn al-aas thought to himself, I'm the most beloved person to the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa la alihi wa la alihi and that was just the way the Prophet dealt with people. He treated people like they were the most beloved person. So this is what Amr ibn al-aas thought. He was a new Muslim, right? And he had so much attention from the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa la alihi wa la alihi wa la alihi that this thought occurred to him that I'm the most beloved. So he came to the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa la alihi one day, he said, Ya Rasulallah, ayyuh nas ahabbu ilayk. Who do you love the most? And he expected the Prophet say, oh it's you, isn't it obvious? Look how I'm treating you. And the Prophet said, Aisha. He said his wife, Aisha, radiallahu ta'ala anha, Ummul Mu'mineen. Subhanallah, this is something we should think about. He mentioned his wife. So then Amr ibn al-aas, he said, min al-rijal from the men and the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa la alihi said, Abu Ha, her father, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq. And notice he said, Abu Ha, right? Her father, again a reference to Aisha, radiallahu ta'ala anha. And then he said, thumma man qala Rasulullah Omar. And then Amr said, fahad al-rijalan. And then he named a few other men, meaning I wasn't one of the men. But this is how the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa la alihi said that made him feel that he was the most beloved person. He brought the hearts together. Amr ibn al-aas, he said on his deathbed to his son Abdullah.  There was a time when I hated the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa la alihi so much that I fought against him in many military expeditions. And there came a time when I loved him so much I couldn't even look at him in his eyes because I was awestruck by him. And if you ask me today to describe the physical appearance of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa la alihi I couldn't even tell you because I don't remember after I became Muslim, I couldn't even look at his face. This is a transformative power of the religion and of the sunnah and of the character of the akhlaq of the Holy Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa la alihi And I've seen this transformative power in many of our youth. I was in a halaka one time and these two brothers were there, former gang members. One of them was from Middle Eastern descent. One of them was from Asian descent. And they were about the same age and they were talking about the ayam al-jahliyah and they were laughing about it. And one of them said, I remember I was sitting in my high school lunch room.   And then when he said that this other brother, he said, what was the name of your high school? And he said the name of the high school and he said, that's the name of my high school. In fact, I'm the brother who hit you on the head. This is incredible. They're sitting in the same halaka, right? So that was me. And then they looked at each other and I thought they were going to fight. It's that look, it was a tense look.  This is a transformative power of the religion. We have to understand this. We take it for granted. That's why it's taken from us and it's given to other people. And this is the promise of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And part of the problem is we divide ourselves over race and color and culture. I'll tell you a true story from another community, very disturbing story. There were two college students, university students, two Muslims, a brother and a sister, brother and Dean and sister and Dean. They weren't related. The brother was African-American convert. The sister was from a South Asian descent. And the brother came to the sister's house to propose marriage and the sister was willing to do that. And these were beautiful practicing intelligent Muslims. So he goes to the house and the father opens the door and slams the door in his face, takes one look at the brother and slams the door in his face. Why? So he's the wrong color. This must be a Muslim household, right? And then he had an emergency must-jit meeting in his house. The board of directors came to his house and they said we have to start a new must-jit to keep these people out of our must-jits. This is happening, this happened last year in a community in America, this type of jahiliya. You know, one time a Sahabi said something to Sayyidina Bilal that was racially offensive, right? And this is one of the great reasons Sayyidina Bilal became Muslim. This is one of the reasons he became Muslim because the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, said, Lasta bi khayrin min ahmar wa la aswad Inna ka lasta bi khayrin min ahmar wa la aswad ila antaf doolahu bi taqwa or kamaqala You are not better than the red or the black. And by red here, they mean the white. You're not better, he's talking to the Arabs.  This is the measuring stick. This is the barometer. It's taqwa. Inakramakum and allahi atqaakum the best amongst you are those who are best in taqwa. And the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, he said, I am the best of you in taqwa, right? So this is one of the reasons why Sayyidina Bilal actually became Muslim for this reason that Islam has this uniting factor in this other Sahabi because the Sahaba are not ma'asum, he made a mistake. He said something about him that was racially offensive. Sayyidina Bilal, he told the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam and the Prophet said, this is jahliyah. This harkens back to days of ignorance. So this other Sahabi, he heard about that. He came to Sayyidina Bilal, crawling on his hands and knees. He laid down on the ground and he said, Ya Bilal, just go ahead and step on my neck. This is how I'm going to atone for what I said to you. Just step on my neck, right? Teach me humility. And Sayyidina Bilal said, no, that's okay. I'm not going to do that. I forgive you. These were Sahaba, right? The Dean was the most important thing to them. They did not divide themselves over these types of things. I looked for a must-it one time and I found this place called the Afghan Islamic Center. He said, why is it called the Afghan Islamic Center? And I felt, what if I go there? Because I'm not Afghan. And they say, hey, are you Afghan? It's going to make me feel uncomfortable. I imagine a convert trying to go to this place. And sure enough, when I went there, the first thing they said to me was not, hey, as-salamu alaikum, ahlan wa sahlan, or chitur hasti, or sing-a-a, nothing like that. It's, who's your father? But what's the name of your father? So why do you want to know that? Are you Afghan? No, I thought this was a masjid. Inna masajidilillah. The masajid are for Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, right? It's a very basic concept. But we have this ingrained. You know, we bring this baggage from overseas into this country. I mean, it just doesn't, it doesn't fly. One time I was in a masjid and I gave a talk and this brother came up to me because he saw my daughter, who was very young, a child, very young, she was six, seven years old. My daughter ran up to me and she jumped, she gave me a hug and she was kissing my face.  He would have condemned you. I said, why? Back in the motherland, we don't even look at our daughters. We don't even look at them. And if we don't, if we have daughters, we dress them up like little boys because they're a sense of shame for us. Yeah, this is what he was telling me. And then people ask us, how many kids do you have? We only tell them we have boys. If I have three girls and no sons, I say I don't have any kids, not yet. So that's interesting. Are you Muslim? So yeah, of course we're Muslim. Wow, because when the Prophet, peace be upon him, was sitting in the Majlis and Fatima Zahra entered into the room when she was very small. He would stand up and kiss her hands on her forehead. The Prophet, peace be upon him, he'd kiss his daughter's hands and on her forehead. This is the Sunnah of the Messenger, peace be upon him, and upon him, peace be upon him. There was an incident that happened recently. A woman, old woman, she came into the mustard. She was crying, weeping. She was completely hysterical. And the other sisters, this happened just a few weeks ago in another community. The sister said, what happened? She said, oh, my daughter-in-law, what happened? She died? She had a girl. She had a girl, right? She said, well, that's why you're crying, yeah. She had a girl. Turns out her daughter-in-law, after she gave birth to a girl, she started slapping herself in the head. She's wearing hijab. This is a hospital in America. The nurses are going, what is this person doing? They had to physically restrain her. She's wearing her hijab, she just gave birth and she's slapping herself in the head. Whoa unto me, whoa unto me, Allah, why, why, why? This is a kind of jahali and we're dealing with in our community. It's even worse than this. I can't even go into details. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala addresses this in the Qur'an. He said, what kind of man has faced darkens with grief because news of a female is brought to him? And then he meditates. A yumsiku ala honan am yadusuhu fit-turaab, ala sa'ama yahkumun. Shall I retain this news with shame or shall I just bury it in the dust? Should I bury my daughter in the dust? What an evil decision to make. Wa idhaal ma'ooda tu su'ilat bi ayyidam bin qutilat. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says on that day, when there's a restoration of true values, the little girl that was buried alive is going to be asked, why were you killed? Why were you aborted? Why were you buried under the sand? Sayyidina Omar says, there's two things from the jahali period that I remember, one of them makes me laugh, one of them makes me cry. The thing that makes me laugh is that when I was a non-Muslim, I went on a journey and I took a date, I took a date and I said, this is my God. And I put it in my pocket and I started journeying. And then I got hungry, I took my God out and I ate it. One thing that made me cry is that my wife gave birth to a girl, I buried her in the sand. And as I was burying her, she brushed my beard with her hand. And even when Sayyidina Omar was Khalifa towards the end of his life, every single time he would remember this, he would start to weep. Because he didn't want to do it, that was the culture of the day. So culture can be a very, very, very challenging aspect of our lives. There's a brother who, this is quite common unfortunately in our community, we're not immune to these things, spousal abuse. His brother was beaten, his wife and kids bruising them, battering them. So he said to the brother, you know, why are you doing this? He said, you know, that's how I was raised, that's my culture. That's what happened to me, that's what happened to my siblings.  And you need to leave it, right?  Islam does not call to the orph, it doesn't call to the culture, it calls to the ma'roof, right? And if the orph contradicts the ma'roof, you always give precedence to the ma'roof. It's very, very simple. So in your culture, if it's part of your culture that men wear certain types of hats, okay, that doesn't contradict the teachings of our religion. So you can do that. If in your culture, people eat a certain type of food, no problem. If in your culture, people ride bikes and don't ride in cars, no problem. But if in your culture, it says to beat women and children and bruise them or to oppress people or to steal things, that type of thing, be racist, then we reject that part of the culture. We completely reject it. We don't sort of Islamize it because that's what we used to do in other places in the world. So that's what we're going to do here. That's not the sunnah of the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. So three types of sunnah, and this is important, three types of sunnah. The first type is called sunnah-tul-muakkadah, right? Emphasize type of sunnah. And according to the jurists, this is the type of sunnah, for example, praying the four rak'a before salat al-duhur, the fard, right? Wearing a kufi for the Hanafis in prayer is sunnah-tul-muakkadah. If you do them, there's reward. If you don't do them, you're not punished, but it can be blameworthy. So we should try to implement sunnah-tul-muakkadah. The second type of sunnah is called recommended mandub, also known as mustahab or nafila, ghayr-muakadah, right?  If you do them, it's good. If you don't do them, no problem. La bas-alek, no problem, right? The third type is called za'a'id, sunnah-za'a'id. This is actually trying to emulate the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam in something of his cultural aspect, right? And this is done out of love for the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. For example, you wanting to dress like the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. You want to wear the same clothes he had. No problem, this is out of love. If it's out of love, no problem, you can do that. And that's a good thing. Eating the same types of foods as the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. One time, Anas Ibn Malik, he went to a dinner party with the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and a bowl of pumpkin went by. And Anas, he said, no, I don't like pumpkin. Keep passing it. Then he looked and he saw the Prophet took a piece of pumpkin. So Anas said, bring it back.  Mm, I love pumpkin. Why? Because he wants to emulate the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, right? But the problem here is sometimes we get things backwards. And we raise the Zalait over the Muakkada, right? So we look good. Everything on the outside is good. But then we're frowning in people's faces. We have bad attitudes. We're being disrespectful towards our mothers. Like this one brother, he came to the Masjid, he came to the Halakka. And I said, oh, I thought you couldn't come to the Halakka. He said, no, I snuck out. He said, what do you mean? My mom said, I couldn't go. So I yelled at her, it scared her. I went to my room, then I snuck out. So Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, you're coming to a Halakka which is totally optional. And how did you do it? By showing filial or calcuttrance, by being disrespectful to your mother, which is haram, right? So we have to get our priorities straight. With respect to our cultures, we have to understand that parts of culture, there are aspects of culture that are detrimental to the deen. With respect to emulating the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, we have to understand that the farah, it is central, then the sunnah, right? These two have to be implemented. That the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was sent to perfect character. This takes precedence. Inna ma burith yuli utammima makarima nakhlaa. I was only sent to perfect character, right? We have to work on our character, work on our ethics. The prophetic ethics are more important than the dress code of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. The dress code is important. There's no doubt about it. And people are moved out of love to emulate him. That's beautiful. But when we have our priorities, a topsy-turvy that becomes problematic and we hinder people from the path of Allah SWT. So I'm involved with a lot of youth and there's a faith crisis amongst many of the youth. Many of the youth are du'a-chain. They have two faces and the parents have no idea. We see them in the masjid, these youth, they make wudu, they pray, they look like they have khushur, they listen to the Qur'an, they read the Qur'an, then they go to school around the internet and they're atheist. They don't even believe in God. They're actually arguing against the Qur'an on the computer. In the masjid, they're reading a mushaf. In the chat room, they're arguing against the Qur'an. This is very, very common. Why is this happening? Why is there a faith crisis? Well, there's many reasons why. The youth have intellectual curiosity. I met a brother from Afghanistan who's a Christian pastor, Afghan Christian, this is a big oxymoron. When I think of Afghanistan, I think of Islam. Afghan Christian, it's like saying four-sided triangle. It doesn't make any sense, jumbo shrimp. It doesn't make any sense. So why did you become a Christian? He said, well, there's Christian students at my college and they were telling me certain things and I tried to rebut them. I said, well, have you studied Islam in detail? He said, I went to Sunday school when I was a kid. So your Sunday school, he said, what about those Christian guys that were trying to convert you? He said, some of them are seminarians, meaning they have master's degrees in divinity. They're sons and daughters of priests and pastors. And your Sunday school education is supposed to help you in that regard, right? So this is a problem with our youth. Our youth, they don't have substantive knowledge, deep analytical knowledge, know how to interpret certain things, to put things in perspective. Many of them are in what I call in this Scooby-Doo Islam, Scooby-Doo Islam.  That's all it is. His brother came up to me one time and said, I have a very important question for you. Very important, very private question. I said, yes, how do I catch a gin? But this is your very important question? Yeah, I said, brother, do you play fudger? No. Okay, why don't you start with fudger and then we'll talk about gin in a few years, in short. All right. But the same brother, he talks about computer engineering like he's Bill Gates. Very precise, very technical, very articulate when it comes to some dunwai, dunwai, some worldly thing, dunwai thing. But when it comes to the dean, gin story, Scooby-Doo religion, this type of thing. Why? Because they don't take the time to study the dean. The dean is not a simple thing. If you go to, it's simply, it's a religion that everyone can grasp at some level. That's true. But in this context, we're being challenged, right? Like my parents and back home in the mother countries, there was no internet, they didn't meet atheists, right? Everyone was Muslim. The questions were regarding orthopraxis. They're fitly issues. Like, you know, how do I pray? What happens if this happened? What if I'm fasting and I vomit and these types of things? These were the issues of the day in that generation, right? But nowadays, the youth in this generation, it's not orthopraxis, it's orthodoxy. The question is not what is Islam? Or how do I practice? Why Islam is the question now? Why? Is there a God? This is a question our brother asked his parents one time. Is there, how do you know there's Allah? His father said to him, Astaghfirullah, go make wudu and pray and Allah will reveal the answer to you. You can't even give this kid an answer. Why? Give some evidence. This is how he's geared. He's American. He's westernized. He lives in the Occident, not in the Orient. This is how he's been socialized into thinking about aqida, creed, orthodoxy. Why should I believe? He's going online and listening to Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, right? These scholars that teach at Cambridge and Oxford that are anti-Muslim, not even atheists, they're anti-theist. Like one of them said, there is no God and I hate him. They're listening to these types of people. Talk about God, talk about Islam, right? And they go to their father. He says this and this, what do I do? Go make wudu, go make wudu. What does that continue? Go make wudu, don't worry about it. Don't ask these questions, right? Because that's how he was taught when he was back home but that doesn't work. There's intellectual curiosity. They want more substantive answers. And then we have another crisis. And we'll end with this, inshallah, at the right of time. There are some youth who rise above this type of discourse and they engage in deep study and they want to be good Muslims. They have high himmah, spiritual ambition. And then they go to their father. The sister goes to her father and says, I want to wear hijab. And he says, no, you're not allowed to wear hijab. Sorry, you can't do that. He says, no, but it's father Dayeen. I want to wear hijab. And the father says to her, I will answer Allah on that day. I'll take it up with God on the Yom Al-Qiyamah. This is the answer they came from her father. Maqala ladina kafirul ladina amanu It tabi'u sabi'ilana wal na'bin khatayakum It mentioned in the Quran, Surah Al-Qaboot, that the unbelievers, they say to the believers, follow our way, we'll take your sins. Don't worry about it. We'll vicariously atone for you, this Christianity. What are you talking about? I'll answer Allah. You're going to answer Allah on the day when everyone is terrified on that day? You're going to answer for your daughter? Right? You're going to run from your daughter. Ya Ahi. You're going to run. Flee, flee.  Or you get this brother who wanted to study. It is very common. This just happened. His brother wanted to study when he was in high school. He wanted to study the Dean. He's junior in high school. So he went to his parents. His parents said, no, you cannot study the Dean, not even a little bit. You have to go get your master's degree first. Seven years later, the brother gets his master's degree. His parents call me. So you remember that brother a few years ago who wanted to say, yeah, he's an atheist. What do we do about our son now? He said, well, seven years ago, you told him to go get his master's degree. He probably went to some university and listened to these secular professors, talked about Islam in a derogatory way. You should have let him study a little bit back then. I can't do anything for you now. I can talk to him. When we talk to him, he's gone. You know, it's gonna be very difficult. So we have to be balanced people. We have to be balanced people. We have to think about our communities. We have to support the communities. The first thing the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam did in Medina after he took a census of the city because he wanted to know who he was dealing with was that he built a masjid. And the masjid isn't simply a place of sajdah even though that's linguistically what it means. It was a community center. The masjid was a community center where the youth could go and they can ask questions and they can learn. And this is very, very important that we support these types of places, right? Because the youth have answers and if they don't get them here, don't think they're not getting them from somewhere else. The ulamas say you're in one of two states.  That's it.  So these are just some things to think about. I'm going to say these words and I'll wait for you to hear them. And I'll wait for you to hear them. He's the one who's forgiven me.


Put the safety doors on manual override. No! I cannot do that! Open, get out! In my group, we study and develop materials to make nuclear power safer. If you want to do a neat demo, we can actually make some stainless steel from scratch and fire up the arc melter. Yes, I definitely want to do that. Okay. So we have a few projects in this lab. One of them is to produce what I call the fuel cladding of the future. An element that we use to make fuel cladding, which protects the fuel from the water and keeps it all together. At Fukushima, the simultaneous earthquake and tsunami knocked out the reactor and its backup safety systems. So the reactor wasn't able to keep the core cool. The fuel got so hot that it boiled the surrounding water into steam, which reacted with the zirconium and the fuel rods. Unfortunately, when zirconium reacts with steam, it also makes hydrogen gas. And it's the hydrogen gas that exploded. We're developing new combinations of zirconium and stainless steel that don't react with steam to make hydrogen. So this right here is a zirconium steam oxidation facility. We take different alloys of zirconium, cut into little pieces, then put them through hanging on a bunch of strings in this chamber right here, and then send in steam at 400 degrees Celsius to simulate what would happen in a nuclear reactor in an accident condition. There's a second project in which we can measure material property changes as they happen during radiation. Using a technique that's kind of a mouthful, we call it dual heterodyne transient grating spectroscopy. These are critical properties for materials to survive in nuclear reactors. These experiments have typically taken months to years for people to do, and now for the first time we can explore material properties like stiffness and how well heat flows through materials using this benchtop experiment and take an experiment that used to take years and do it in hours. That's going to help us design new materials to make safer reactors. Our lab's coming up with the first way that we know about where we can actually measure the stored energy, tiny, tiny amounts of energy we're talking microjoules that usually you can't even see. We can take tiny pieces of these materials smaller than a grain of sand and using a nanocalorimeter or an energy measurement device on a chip. We can tell how much energy radiation has left behind and therefore measure the amount of damage to the material. So the big contraption you see before you is our home-built and home-building vacuum atomic force microscope. We don't want anything to stick to anything in a reactor because then you might get this, the technical term for what you get is crud, believe it or not. It stands for Chalk River Unidentified Deposits. All it is is it's corrosion products that stick to the fuel rods and get super radioactive. It's one of the big problems in reactors today and we think we have a way to solve it. The atomic force microscope actually brings a little piece of this crud in contact with the material and measures how hard it is to pull it off and that's the stickiness that we're measuring. But we have to test it out in the lab in this sort of contraption to know if we're right.