In today's video, we are going to talk about the best cat breeds for first-time owners. Getting your first cat is both an exciting and overwhelming experience. Although adoption and rescue are always recommended, taking home a cat from a rescue or a shelter means your cat will most likely not be purebred. If you do choose to add a pedigreed cat to your family, you should try to look for a breed that fits your own character and personality. Hence, it's of the utmost importance for new cat owners to look at a cat's grooming needs, energy level, vocalness, adaptability, curiosity, degree of affection, and appearance before adding the furball to their household. It's important to remember though that every cat is unique and therefore might not exactly match the physical traits and personality characteristics of its breed. Of course, it's those little differences that make cat owners love their hairy companions so much. Here are the lists of the best cat breeds for beginners according to experts. 1. Persian cat. If you're looking for a cat with a relatively low activity level and long flowing coat, the Persian might be the right cat for you. With big round eyes, a large round head, and a massive body with short legs, the Persian is a great cat to come home to after a long day. Persians communicate with their soft voice and expressive eyes. They are playful but will not demand to play or be loved. They will not be ones to jump high or perform extensive climbing due to their body shape. 2. Russian blue cat. Russian blues are sweet-tempered and loyal cats, known for their silky, short blue coats and large, green brilliant eyes. Russian blues are pretty quiet except when it's meal time. Russian blues are devoted and affectionate to their family but can be shy around strangers. Noting that these cats are also susceptible to their human's mood and will provide comfort when needed. Russian blue is also one of the most intelligent breeds. 3. Maine Coon Cat. Maine Coons are perfect for owners who like dogs but want cats. They're curious, gentle giants with long, flowing coats who like to follow you around like a pup. The Maine Coons' size and distinctive coat are the breed's most easily recognized characteristics. Like all long-haired cats, Maine Coons benefit from frequent comings due to their uneven and shaggy fur having three different lengths. They also have large tufted paws to provide protection when walking on the snow and large ears to hear predators and pray. 4. Siamese Cat. The Siamese has a distinctive voice, a raspy yell that can be loud, and they're not afraid to voice their thoughts. They're also very loving and very persistent in getting their wants and desires met because, with their loud purr, you can't help but indulge them. The Siamese is also known for its sleek body, wedge head, colored points, muscular grace, long legs, and a slender tail. They're also recognizable with their short and silky coat that comes in a variety of colors and deep blue, almond-shaped, and slant positioning eyes. 5. Scottish Fold Cat. Besides those distinctive ears, Scottish Folds are known to be sensitive, expressive, and active. Scottish Folds are sweet and affectionate cats that have a very soft and gentle voice, noting that they aren't vocal often. They love human companionship and aren't afraid to request it in their quiet way. They're also very comfortable in both a loud multi-person household and a quiet single-person household. Scottish Folds are generally intelligent, quick-tempered, calm, and easily adapt to new people and situations. 6. Ragdoll Cat. Defined by its pointed pattern, the ragdoll has a long coat, although not as long as the Persian or Maine Coon. With plush and silky fur, the ragdoll requires minimal grooming, noting that a ragdoll's appearance is well balanced without any extreme features. Ragdolls are very docile and gentle while playing as well as great cats for a busy lifestyle due to their easy care and well manner. They are affectionate and will ensure to greet you every time you return home. They can be taught different tricks, including fetch and comb. They're a best buddy kind of cat. Hello. This video is sponsored by Beemix Pets. Are you looking for high-quality cat collars at an affordable cost? Check out BeemixPets.com. Use coupon code KittenLife to get 20% off. 7. Exotic Shorthair Cat. Although exotics have short coats, their fur is still thick, dense and plush, helping to give them a teddy bear look. In terms of their personality, an exotic shorthair is a quiet, peaceful, very playful, and loyal companion who, although extraordinarily affectionate, will not follow you around the house and giving you some privacy. These cats prefer colder areas to sleep. Therefore, you might not find them in your bed at night. This cat enjoys a grooming session once in a while but also enjoys play and interaction with its owners, so it's made for owners who want that exotic touch and playmate too. 8. Sphinx Cat. If you're looking for an energetic, acrobatic cat with an unexpected sense of humor, the Sphinx might be the cat for you. They're best known for being the hairless cat. The extra wrinkling on their head also creates different facial expressions of displeasure or frustration, adding that their eyes can also be very engaging and wide. The Sphinx is also known for their clumsiness and desire to always be with their human companion, noting that they're often full of energy and getting into trouble with their naughty behavior. They love curling up in their cat sweaters with their owners on cold winter days and love basking in the living room under the sun's rays during the summer. If you want a laid-back but loving breed, go for the Sphinx. 9. Bengal Cat. The wild, leopard-like appearance of the Bengal is incredibly distinctive and makes sense for such an active cat. They're easily recognized by their vivid spots of vibrant color and contrast, glossy coat, wide noses, and prominent whisker pads. When bringing a Bengal into the household, be ready for a confident animal who is also very devoted to its companions. Bengals will keep you busy with their curiosity and athletic nature and their need to play and learn tricks. These affectionate cats love water so much that you might find them joining you in the shower or helping you brush your teeth. 10. Norwegian Forest Cat. The Norwegian Forest Cat is perfect for someone looking for a more reserved and large cat with a semi-long haired coat. With a triangular head with flat planes, a large body, and large, almond-shaped eyes, the Norwegian Forest Cat has front paws that point slightly outward to allow the cat to go headfirst down a tree, something no other breed can do. This large breed also has a water repellent outer coat. Norwegian Forest Cats are very independent and operate on their own time, noting that they will come to you when they are ready for affection. They also love to be high on a scratching post or cat tree to visualize their landscape. 11. Siberian Cat. Siberians are smart, active, and well balanced. They have a triple coat with medium to long hair and a massive body, since they hail from Russia and needed to endure the cold and northern winters. They come in a wide variety of colors. They love to interact and be with their people, they actually insist on it. Easygoing, personable, and fearless, Siberians are very keen on humans' needs and moods. This trait makes them ideal for a person that needs emotional support and comfort. They are also enthusiastic acrobats when it comes to playtime, executing aerial somersaults with ease, as well as very adaptable to changing environments as not much disturbs them. 12. American Shorthair Cat. If you're looking for a very powerful and pleasant companion cat, then look no further than the American Shorthair. Selectively bred to maintain a muscular stocky and working body, the American Shorthair has a wide variety of colors and patterns. Because they're easygoing, affectionate, family-oriented cats, they're great companions and playmates for families with children. Along with their loving personalities, they are low maintenance and healthy cats rarely needing medical care other than their annual checkups with your veterinarian. Remember that there is a breed out there for all cat lovers, whether you're just starting your cat family or making room for one more. If you enjoyed this video, kindly press the like button. Also don't forget to subscribe with notifications on, so that you don't miss out on videos like this. Thank you for watching.


OK, good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. This session is a new stucco load. I'm Lu Jingzhang with China Economic Weekly. So it is a really white choice you choose our session because we all know now it's time for dinner, maybe. After a whole day meeting, I wish you can find something interesting and useful in our session. I think we have the most diverse panelists in our group. Although they have different backgrounds, they share something in common. They have a very unique experience and perspective in culture. We all know that the Asian stucco load created a brilliant history of trade and culture. Nowadays, China introduced a new stucco load that is a belt and road initiative in 2013. How is a new stucco load redefined by China and how does the outside world see the BRI? We'll invite our panelists to share their opinions. Now I would like to introduce our panelists. Mr. Bruno Marquis. He is currently a senior advisor at Flint Global in London and also a senior fellow at Renmin University of China. Next to him is Rina Effendi. She is an awarding winning social documentary photographer and a photojournalist. Next to her is Zhao Ning, executive director of International Guoshu Association. He has been active in preserving culture heritage in China and Hong Kong since 2003 or even earlier than this time. Last but not least, Mokina Makita, professional architect, urbanist, founder of Maki Design Lab. Very welcome of our panelists. First, let me ask Mr. Bruno Marquis. I read some expert of your book, The Dawn of Euro-Asia, and I found some very interesting views. To be honest, I'm really admire you have like the six months, six months long journey you made along the historic and cultural borders between Europe and Asia. And you quote that the political scientist Charles Coupachan has argued, the new swing of the pendulum is going to lead a world where no one will be dominant. And how do you think of this view, since many other argues that the world is dominated by big countries, such as American, European or China? Thank you so much. Thank you for reading my book. It's always a pleasure to find someone new. Is it has a Chinese version? You will have next year, 2019. Yes, I think this is the novelty about our world that there will be no dominant power. The power of the West for the past 500 years was so dominant, so absorbing. It really created a situation for other countries where you had to assimilate, or you had to always pretend that you were trying to become Western. This situation now, where I think the West will not be dominant, but China will not be dominant, is from the point of view of culture much more promising. During my trip, I could see how there's a return to old forgotten cultures in Turkmenistan. For example, I talk about this at great length in the book. There's a possibility now to either recreate old cultures that had been lost, or to create new cultural forms, precisely because you are not under this permanent, exfixiating influence of the West. I don't think it's a problem that there are many different poles of influence. In some cases, there will create very interesting combinations of cultures. For example, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan is another example. Kazakhstan is a country that is comfortable with Chinese influence, comfortable with Russian influence, comfortable Western influence, and also going back to its old nomadic traditions. This way of combining influences, of recovering what has been lost, and also of creating new things, I think is a bright possibility that we have in our future. Many thanks, and I'm looking forward to your Chinese version. Thank you. And we move to Mr. Rina Effendi. I always say to my colleagues, sometimes one photo is powerful than a thousand words. And Rina followed 1,700 kilometer long pipeline through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey, collecting stories along the way. This work was published in 2009 in her first book, Pipedreams, a Chronicle of Lives Along the Pipeline. I'm sure she will have some stories about the social impact on people's lives by mass infrastructure projects. Thank you for this introduction. I don't know how many of you in the room have read the book or seen the movie The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And I don't know... I don't know if you've seen it. Do you remember, of course you remember, the Vogons announcing to the earth that they're building an intergalactic highway and Earth is in the way. So it's subject for demolition immediately now, right? So in a way, when I think of these mega projects, these multi-billion dollar, multi-stakeholder projects, I think of the Vogon Sphere. Because the governments and the corporations are so focused on the macro picture that they tend to be disconnected from the reality that's on the ground. In the case of the Bakutbilisi-Jeyhan pipeline project, oil pipeline project, it was going through three countries and it was hailed as a project for the greater good of the people. It was also promoted by the West as a project that would provide an alternative energy corridor to counterweight Russia's energy influence in the region. So a lot of people bought into that and a lot of fantastic promises were made to the local populations. But unfortunately, in reality, very few of these promises were kept. As I traveled along the route of this pipeline, I met Fisherman in the Mediterranean Bay of Jaehan who lost their livelihoods because they could no longer fish in the water due to increased oil traffic, oil tanker traffic. And then they had to take new jobs in Iraq as toilet cleaners, like literally 400 fishermen. So these stories are not often heard because the voices of the people are muted by the blow horns of this machine, PR machine of governments and corporations. So in a way, that's, I think, something that we should be aware of, especially in this context of multilateral mega-projects. Thanks, Rina. And when I saw your picture, I really felt touched. Sometimes the political status I'm seeing and our truly the people they are, maybe not feel happy. Yeah. Often left out. Thank you. Thanks, Rina. And the next is Mr. Chow-Hee. Mr. Chow arranged several events to protect the Chinese culture and especially of protect the intangible cultural heritage, such as Orange and Culture Heritage Preservation Project and the Hong Kong International Kung Fu Festival. I heard it's also an exhibition of orange, orange king, a minority group in China. And the culture which the exhibition has already prepared for more than 10 years. So maybe let Mr. Chow to give us more perspective on cultural protection. Thank you. Just a word of self-introduction. I'm based in Hong Kong. However, I've been running heritage projects in Mongolia and Northern China since 2004. And for the past 10 years, I'm also heavily involved with different aspects of heritage, including built heritage, but more particularly, intangible cultural heritage in Hong Kong. What brings these two things together? Hong Kong, the far north of China, is that we're both, from the perspective of Beijing, from a geographic perspective, we're located at the margins of China. In the case of Hong Kong, at the southern margin across the sea, if you like, where little island. And in Mongolia, until the 1990s, the early 2000s, this is an area, particularly in the Hulumbur, that is completely sealed off from the outside world because of a very sensitive political relationship with Russia, which only started to lessen over the past 10 to 15 years. Like Mr. F&D, I bring perspectives from the field over the past 10, 15 years. I've conducted more than 100, I believe more than 200 oral interviews with villagers, nomadic hunters, gatherers and herdsmen, as well as kung fu practitioners in these two extreme parts of China. And what I find in these frontier areas is that if we step away using Beijing as your perspective from a moment, but look from the perspective of the other countries, other places that these places come to contact with, in the case of in the Mongolia, particularly Hulumbur, if we adopt the perspective of the Mongolia Republic, if we adopt the perspective of Russia, if we adopt the perspective of other inner Asian countries such as Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, et cetera, or in the case of Hong Kong, through the ocean, our connection to Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, England, et cetera, we are also at the center of cultural interaction. And one will argue that these are the places where that constitutes the middle ground for cultural dialogue and true engagement and which could facilitate, as Hong Kong has facilitated, the soft power of China, where the West and the East come together to engage and produce new forms. And I think this is a very important lesson for us to learn as we adopt and embrace the Belt and Road Initiative going forward. Thanks. Thanks and let us move to Mr. Mokina. Mr. Mokina is the most well-known for his refurbishment of Cape Town railway station in time for the 2010 World Cup. My understanding is his work often focused on transforming the imposing fortress-like architecture of apartheid-era buildings into dedicated ones so people can truly appreciate the beauty of architecture while using them. His subsequent proposal for development of the area is called Cape Town Station 2013. Mr. M, you once said, how do you democratize a building that was not designed with democracy in mind? Can you elaborate further on this interesting perception? Thank you, thank you for the question and to the audience for being here. I, you know, democracy is a very interesting question and for me it's not about a particular political project, but it has to do with how do you get citizens to participate in the realization of their future and for them to actually have a real say in terms of their present and in some extents to be able to claim different parts of their past. When we have cities, ancient cities, our architecture often freezes a particular view, a particular power relationship, a particular set of forces and when we talk about democratizing space, it's about how do we allow citizens to be able to really reframe that narrative for societies to come together, whether it's at the scale of a village or a community or even a nation state or even a region, to really begin to articulate for themselves what they need to be and I think the role of the architect in that instance is really to be a provocateur, sort of a stagehand, if you will, where the theater of life can play itself out. So design is really about allowing these different voices to be surfaced, but I wanna also spin slightly on your question and talk about the power of the line. So in architecture, we deal with this question of what is a line? So from outer space, if I draw a line on a map, that thin line might actually be about 100 kilometers wide. If I'm in a helicopter and I draw that same line above a site, it might be 200 meters wide. So what always intrigued me about this silk route was the question of how wide is that route and how do we deal with the issue of marginality? Who falls within the line and who falls outside of it? And how do we define those sort of fuzzy edges? Because it's in those spaces of contestation where you can begin to see how do citizens on the ground participate and what does it mean? So I come from a continent that in some ways could be argued as on the margins of the line. The maritime silk route goes through Nairobi, but one could almost argue that Africa is peripheral to this conversation. It's outside of the line. But that's maybe from a historical perspective. You could argue that in the future, given this possibility of a Eurasia sort of configuration, that perhaps the thickness of that line needs to widen. And that therefore raises the issue of what is a democratic type of conversation that happens between very asymmetrical correlations, poorer, richer countries, various different cultural links, but somehow wanting to participate in the potential of this route. And I think that that's what I... How do you create fuzziness? How do you create a space that needs to be scratched? How do we find a new language, if you will, but retaining our culture, retaining our perspectives, but also dealing with the uncertainty of the future? That democratic question by its nature is a messy one. Thanks, and Mr. Am just told us that the architecture is not only function of beauty, they can give us more. Yeah. Indeed, indeed. I mean, for me, it's really about creating a scaffold that allows people to interact and to create their narratives and their dreams and to play themselves out. And I think that's what good architecture does. Thanks for all the panelists. And we have like several interactive panel questions. And then we may open to our audience to give more questions to you. And first, we know there is an argument that the globalization forced us to live together. And yet we all have very different visions of what this common world should look like. It has been five years since the Belt and Road Initiative was first announced. My question for all panelists is that how do you think the potential for BRI China proposed be received, accept, or maybe otherwise by other countries in the world? Yes, that's a difficult question. I think Belt and Road so far has been, of course, very much focused on infrastructure. The dimensions of culture, of people-to-people contact haven't been so important. And we all hope that in a second stage that it will become more important. But I think, you know, I like this idea that in fact, to create a scaffold, to create a framework might actually be enough rather than giving a direction to cultural development. And in that sense, the Belt and Road has opened new stories, has started new stories. We don't know how they will end. On the border between Kazakhstan and China, there's a new city rising. And new adventures will happen there. People will move. It will be a very multicultural city. Their new lives will become possible there. In some other cases, countries are being connected. They were not connected. Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, perhaps there will be a railroad. This fact, rather than actually trying to determine what the culture of the future will be, just creating new connections, creating new possibilities, and then waiting and just see what will develop there, I think might actually be better than having a cultural policy for the whole of Eurasia. That would not be a good idea for China to develop that. And it would not be accepted. I'd like to speak more about the social impact, because that's something where I sort of have firsthand experience working on the similar infrastructure project of the BTC pipeline, oil pipeline. Once again, the complexities on the ground are often overlooked. And in the case of the BTC pipeline, for example, when the project was in the public relations stages, they hailed it as something that would promote social equality and economic growth. But what has been overlooked is the countries involved and the situation on the ground, the political situation on the ground, for example, authoritarian regimes that will prevent the civil society to thrive and will prevent promoting the cause of freedom in these places. So how can we really narrow down our vision to be more inclusive and to bear in mind these complications when we deal with these multicultural, multi-country projects? There are two points I would like to make, whereas people outside of China or even Chinese people tend to look at our own country and say, China is a fairly culturally homogeneous place. For a continent-sized country, we have the Chinese people and there are multiple dialects, which are variations of Chinese, if you like. This is actually not true. 66% of Chinese territory are officially recognized as autonomy regions, where there is a not certainly numerically dominant, but there's an ethnic minority or a nationality where their customs, their language, their history, their awareness of themselves as a distinct people are recognized and where they exercise a certain level of autonomy. To what degree it's being implemented or respected, it's to be argued and I would say that it changes over time. But certainly, first of all, China is an incredibly diverse country. And if we look at China's border with Kazakhstan, for example, the last nomadic Kazakhs actually lived in China rather than Kazakhstan, the same argument can be put forward with Russia. China has the longest-running border in the world with Russia. And again, on both sides of the border, there's the Buryats, who are the Mongolized Russians. At the turn of the 20th century, a lot of these people actually came to China and now residents of Hulumbur and a lot of them are my close friends. And same with Korea and the same with Thailand, for example, the people who created Thailand, the Dai people, migrated to Thailand several hundred years ago from China. So we must not forget the historical link that connected China with all its neighbors, not only by culture, not only by economic means of exchange or domination, but actually they are blood-sized, which run very, very deep. The second point I want to make is democracy and the democratization of space. If we look back into history, what facilitated the Silk Road, whether it's the Overland Silk Road or Maritime Silk Road, it's a relatively stable order across a number of different nations or states. Now, you need stability, political entities provide that stability, but the means by which people engage with each other whether through economic exchange, coming up new forms of architecture, cultural fusion, artistic fusion such as witnessed by the magnificent caves, which have been created over a thousand year period in Donghuang. This is conducted by people unregulated by states. So I think China and all the other people and states that participate in the new Belt and Road Initiative must have the cultural confidence to allow the people to get on with it. Sorry, what if there's no political will on part of the countries? Then what happened? Then unfortunately I think we'll have a different type of Silk Road, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, as my colleagues were speaking, I was struck how historically if one was building a house or a public building, a certain percentage of the money would be set aside for public art, right? So one could almost argue that if you thought of the Silk Road as a mega house with significant traditional infrastructure projects, is there a certain percentage that could be set aside for social infrastructure, right? Whether it's the museum, the art gallery, et cetera. Now the question is, at what point does it become prescriptive, which is my colleague's cautioning? And at what point does it really become a catalyst for other sorts of dialogues to emerge for the precise reason that you point out? And maybe there's an opportunity to be said here that the new Silk Road is underpinned by traditional flows of infrastructure, water, sewage, electricity, et cetera. But maybe there are other flows that are culturally related that might be activated by citizenry, but what are the catalysts that allow those things to happen? So could we say that for every billion dollars spent would 100 million be set aside for artworks across the region, done by local artists, which would possibly facilitate democracy, dialogue, debate, et cetera. So on the one hand there's a traditional heavy infrastructure but there's also the role of social infrastructure. And the social infrastructure is actually key to keeping the type of cohesion and stability that you talk about in the absence of using muscular forms of control, right? So, which we prefer, right? We certainly don't want another Mongol invasion in the 15th century. But, so the question is how do we create stability through discourse, right? And through common agendas, even though local specificity might have very different needs and that's maybe my provocation to Silk Road 2.0. But that goes back to one of the questions we raised earlier, is whether there is actually a role for a mega or transnational cultural policy that will allow nations to engage and to collaborate and indeed build up the social infrastructure, which is not something that the private citizens have the ability or resources or necessarily the interest to do. Yes, so I talked about how the city of Horges and on the border between Kazakhstan and China, whether it will be a completely new story that we haven't seen before or whether some of these cities will actually become cities without culture because they were not built for that because they are about business. I think that's a valid question to ask. Sure. Yes, sure. And I remember in your book you said even in the old Silk Road, the old Silk Road is not only for trade only, it's also for the culture. So maybe we should use this for our new Silk Road. Yes, that's actually a good point. The old Silk Road that lasted maybe a thousand years was essentially about culture. The trade was very limited, very small, never traveled all the way, traders never traveled all the way from China to Europe in small segments and a tiny percentage of the trade volume that was happening in the world at the time. It was mostly culture that shaped the Silk Road, religion, ideas, civilizations. There's a danger that the new Silk Road, the Belt and Road will be the opposite, will be about trade and with little culture. So worth thinking about that. I don't think that will happen. I think many things will happen to the Belt and Road that will change it. But the first five years, of course, the focus was on trade and infrastructure. So maybe I ask one question and I leave the floor to our audience. We all know the concept of soft power is created by half the scholar Joseph Nell in 1990. It is referred to as a means by which a country gets other countries want what it wants in a peaceful way. So what do you think of soft power in your country? Well, that's a tough question. So let me just say about China. Chinese soft power is already very visible along the Belt and Road. In a country like Uzbekistan, let's say in Adijan, for example, you take a walk and you see that language schools, they are equally divided between Russian language schools, English language schools and Chinese language schools. In Pakistan, many, many people are learning Chinese and of course with Chinese come a lot of things. Yesterday there was a very interesting panel here at the forum about science fiction. Chinese science fiction is taking over the world and is in fact, I think, shaping more than Chinese culture. Modern Chinese culture is so turned towards the future that it's almost as if science fiction is part of everyday life and this is different from how the West experiences life and culture. So let me just make this point and not to take up too much time that we're also talking about how new cultures will develop, not just about how Chinese traditional culture will become common parts of the world but how China will develop the new modern culture and is already doing that and looking for different traits like, for example, this enormous importance of the future in modern Chinese culture. I would like to present a complimentary by a different view. First of all, from Hong Kong, we have a long history, relatively speaking, of cultural engagement in the modern period, particularly from the 1950s but more particularly during the 1970s to the 1990s where Hong Kong really was a great exporter of cultural content throughout Asia but also to places like the United States. Kung Fu films, Hong Kong popular music. I did an exhibition a few months ago and one of the amazing discoveries we made was a lot of beautifully hand-painted posters from Africa. African people embrace Chinese martial arts and this has all happened because of one place, because of Hong Kong. Not because Hong Kong is particularly brilliant but Hong Kong being a relatively open society and where new ideas, different ideas from China could come together to really engage or be engaged in a creative and non-pristogritic way that allows culture to develop into new forms. I think for China to really come into zone as a major exporter of soft power, China also needs to be more open-minded and less imposing of a dominant discourse. For Chinese films, for example, to be really embracing the world and for the outside world to engage in China to engage in a less red-taped rule bound sort of way.  So you mentioned that my work on the World Cup in 2010 but that also came after the Olympics that happened in Beijing. So what was intriguing from the African perspective was being on the outside looking at China's evolution, revolution and also ability to project itself on the world stage and you're absolutely right in terms of the kung fu phenomena and as much as it might be pop culture, soft power comes from aspiration and quite simply coolness, right?  And to your point, to be cool, one has to be open, one has to be diverse, one has to be fairly agile culturally and there are many instances where I'd say from an African point of view and all the cautionary goes there, 50 to four plus countries. So I'm not talking on behalf of Africa but I can definitely say that the impression of China is very much around the elements that you mentioned and there's much more currency in that vein of discourse than a much more let's call it derivative instrumentalist sort of a developmental aspect. So when we begin to use culture as a bridge for dialogue you'll actually have a much more sustainable long-term impact than the prestige project signed by two ministers, right? To put it simply, yeah. I want to make one further point as for China to truly take stock and cognizance of the sheer diversity whereas today China has embraced certain elements of its cultural potential, Confucianism, Chinese language, Chinese food, either martial arts as examples, there are many, many other symbols that China share together as neighbors which are not properly being promoted, embraced and celebrated. Chinggis Khan, for example, in Mongolia where I spend a lot of time, it's worshipped in every household and it's a cultural symbol that China not only shares with Mongolia Republic but with the Mongoloid people, the Turkic people of Russia and indeed within Asia. If China can start to embrace all these plurality, these all these different aspects of cultural identity so that it's not singular, it's not driven by a singular discourse, China can't be so much more. Forgive me if I overstepped the mark but I want to connect your two points with Bruno's because this notion of a multi-polar world is so critical. Particularly for Africa where either you were caught between a sort of Soviet world or the West and the narrative of cultural expression was very limited, that what's interesting about China right now is that it shows the world that you can have commerce, development and culture from an entirely different perspective and this unlocks other people's courage to find their own voice in the world. And that's an important component which I'm not really sure that perhaps China is aware of that it's setting a tone of a third or a fourth or a fifth way of being on the planet. Well just one more point I want to add. I think China is at this moment in time perhaps more history-minded or historically-minded than we have been for a long time. As we use the word New Silk Road we are actually referring back to the past and I think there's a lot of important lessons to be learned from the history of the Silk Road. The successful examples of Chinese dynasties that constructed meaningful relationship in trade, in commerce, in political diplomatic relationships with its neighbors, the Qing dynasty, the emperors Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong being prime examples, even within China itself they use different forms of culture when they engage in dialogue with different people, when they engage with Mongol, when they try to impose more of a religious form of control over the Mongols, they use Tibetan Buddhism. When they come to southern China where there's a lot of resistance to Manjuru they adopt it and indeed celebrates the local diverse religious contents and elevates it, a local fisherman, goddess, the mazhu into the celestial empress Tianhou. So these are examples, the rulers and policy makers of China would do well to learn from. Hello, Rena. I mean, I so much said that I have very little to add. Sorry. As someone who grew up in Soviet Union I experienced the power, the power of soft power. First hand, we were very much in isolation, we had no knowledge of the West, yet we were tuning into Voice of America. We were translating the Beatles lyrics which were forbidden, not the music, just the words. And we were distributing them among friends. So there's this thirst and almost greed, like human greed to connect. And I think that's where our horizons will expand, our prejudices will disappear and our emotional intelligence will rise. And that's how we can work together. Excellent. So now the floor is open to our audience. So I suggest please identify your name before you raise a question. Do I have a microphone here? Yes. My name is Jack Sim, the founder of the World Toilet Organization. So I'm from Singapore. And just now you mentioned maybe some of the country will have no identity of cities. I come from Singapore, where everybody comes from outside. And we almost feel that we have no identity. And we are now 53 years independent as a country. But we don't really know who we are because the Chinese has a Chinese tradition and the Malay has a Malay tradition. The Indian came from many, many traditions. But we don't feel that we are part of China. And it's a little bit lost. But we're economic power. So if this One Belt, One Road is going to be trade based, would you create a lot of this kind of cities where people don't know who they are? And will we also ever found out who we are? Who will take this task? Maybe you'll help me find who I am. Oh, actually you can take it to audience. Jack, I don't know if I'll answer your question successfully, but coming from a young continent with lots of young countries post-1945, so this question of youthful identity is something that's interesting about Africa because it's an ancient continent but politically quite young. I think the reality is that our definition of what countries are going to change for the next 100 years. I think the notion of city-states will probably become far much more emergent. I think national boundaries are being contested in many respects. I mean, cities are far much more important than countries. And I think the question is more what does it mean to be local is going to be far much more important than what does it mean to have a national identity? Unfortunately, there are strong forces now that are going against migration across national boundaries. There's all of these issues about national identity and the muscular nationalism that we're seeing in many parts of the world right now, which is contesting the fact that people are moving. What intrigues me about the Silk Route is the question of how do you move across it, right? So it's one thing to discuss the nodes along the route, but can one move freely from one end to the other when you have EU post-Soviet section. So for me, that's the interesting question, which is movement and mobility. And I think the identity will be much more around our ability to move than about where we are fixed. We also have a bit of a bias towards the past, right? We tend to think that culture has to be very old, very traditional, and that a country like Portugal has had the same borders for 900 years and almost the same culture compared to Singapore. It's a very new country. But you have to think about 200 years from now, we'll look back to Singapore and find a very rich and very complex culture there. Culture is always being created anew, and we shouldn't assume that a culture that has been, in fact, for me, it's more valuable, a culture like Singapore that is being created now than a culture like Portugal's, I hope this is not being taped, that it has been created in the past. So I'm more interested in what is happening in Singapore, and I really don't believe that no culture is being created there because human beings are culture-creating animals. They always do it. I would echo what you're saying. I think, in a way, identity is a very fluid concept, and it's something that develops with time. Again, back to my own experience, I was born in one country and now this country no longer exists, you know, Soviet Union collapsed. So what is my identity? Is it Azerbaijan? Is it Soviet identity, perhaps Russian identity, because I'm a Russian speaker? Because, you know, as I was growing up, you know, I didn't learn my own language because good education wasn't available in that language. So, and then now I live in Turkey and I'm a global citizen, and there's all these other influences on my own, you know, identity. So I think that's the same, in the same way, countries and cities are shaped by these changes in their lives, and it's almost like an organic process, you know, in a way. Hi, I'm Chai, I come from Malaysia, the neighbor of Singapore. Actually, I have no questions, but I still like to share my own feeling and my thoughts. Okay, I'm 47 years old, okay. I was born in Malaysia. I, in my whole life, never thought that I have any link to China because we were born in Malaysia, but being Malaysian-Chinese, we are a little bit different because we have been given the opportunity to obtain Chinese education, language. So we had three primary languages, Basel, Malay, English and Chinese. And I actually have travelled to several countries in the past for my work, and this is my first time to enter China in this country. And as I mentioned, I always think that I am Malaysian-Chinese, nothing to do with China. It's very true, nothing, nothing. Even though I have an uncle in Guangzhou, you know, my mum's brothers, you know, but we haven't met for about 15 years, since my mum last travelled to China. But recently, I felt a little bit shocked and touched when I came to China for my first trip here because I came here a couple of days ago, and I took the advantage and the opportunity to travel around in Tianjin. I travelled, I went to the... Beijing? Not Beijing, I haven't reached Beijing. I just went to the cultural street, you know, Guwenhua Street and Gujie Server Street, you know. I saw some of the things. And this is the first time that I travelled to an overseas country that I see everybody on the face. It's exactly like how I look. And I even went to the market. I feel like so close to my own. It's really shock me other than Singapore, you know. And then in Singapore, even Singapore is like developed in a way that quite developed country, you know, commercially. And if I go to Singapore, everybody speak English like a very high end. Come to China here, go to the market, it's different. On the street, everybody is the same. And it's shock me. And just because of my education background, I can speak Mandarin. And the local people in China, they are way too shocked. You can speak very good Mandarin. While they speak direct to a certain extent. Some of them are a little bit different Mandarin, you know. So it shocked me. And one of the very impressive things that I also realised and I saw that when I was in this Guwenhua Street or Gujie, Gu Lou Fujin, okay. There's one of the men, you know, holding the hand of little boys' kids on the street. You know, maybe the father teaching the son. They are reading this Di Zi Kui. What do you call it in English? So it's just a question. We will get to the question right. Yeah, yeah, no, because the father actually has been training the son, you know. The son walking around the street, you know, and then has been like spelling out all these things. That's kind of Confucian's principles in life. That actually it has never been introduced daily in my life. But it was introduced in recent years to my children. I learned that when my children learned. Oh, that's why I was shocked. In China, children, they are also learning this. And exactly what they are learning and what my children are learning in Malaysia, you know. It made me feel like, actually, we are quite close and somehow we are linked from that aspect and culturally. Thank you very much. Okay, so no questions. Yeah, it's a conversation. Yeah, yes, there's a lot of stories. So give us a question, okay. Yeah, so it will be a question. So Javi and Tooth have thrown a bit more complexity. Okay, so my name's Fai. I'm actually from Singapore, born in Britain, Singapore, but I have a Malaysian passport. So my question is a young sort of, and I'm based in the UK, so my question to the panel would be that, how does China view cultures from around the world, be it Western, be it Eastern, be it Southeast, be it African, and how do we deal with these sort of multivariate sort of histories, really? I think you're most qualified to answer, aren't you? Because you're the only resident in mainland China. Yeah. I think I quite agree with your idea that from the outside world, this is Chinese as a saying, but to be honest, that me and Mr. Chua are totally different. If he says something in Cantonese, I can't understand him at all. So maybe that's the reason we need to, like culture embraced. We need to embrace more culture. And yesterday, we have a closed meeting and lots of political leaders in that meeting. They said the One Belt and Road Initiative may be proposed by China, but it can only be success, not only belong to China. They need to embrace different culture and belong to the world. Okay, and sorry, sorry, I need to, because due to the time limit, I regret that I have to close our session. And many thanks to our panelists today and for sharing their interesting views. And thank you for all your attention and have a good evening.


Okay, I'll try to rein it in. For those joining us in the future on the video, you missed the intro, sorry. Okay, so I think of the process like this. We have a question, then we write some code. Then we have code. Then we run the code and we have results. We interpret the results and maybe we have answers, maybe we have more questions. So here I have these kind of, these are ways that we hold these things that we have. The question is in our brain, then we have our code. Our code is going to be, Python, Pandas is gonna be some text. And then we have our results, which run on the computer. I think there's some more seats over here, whatever you guys wanna do. So a big challenge with this, I find, is the interfaces. So this is where the work is actually getting done in these arrows here. So this first arrow, we have the interfaces going from brain to text, going from our brain to the programming language. Next we have text to computation and then we have figures, text to brain. So these are a lot of steps and we can think of this as a pipeline. And what do we wanna do as we're engineers? We wanna optimize our pipeline, right? We wanna look for the area that's the slowest.  This, in a lot of cases, is actually going to be great. It's going to be, basically we can write better compilers and for small data sets, maybe not for giant data sets where we need to do, it's gonna be really fast so as soon as we can write down our code, it runs almost instantaneously. So today we're gonna talk about optimizing this part, optimizing the interface from having our question to having a programming, having some language that represents that question in a way that the computer can understand. Now it looks like almost everybody in this room may have used pandas at some point to go through this process.  So pandas is fast and very powerful but I found that it can be a little overwhelming at times. So here you know import pandas, foo is a pandas data frame, foo dot, here all the attributes on foo 219 and this sometimes has me feeling like that. So I'm gonna go for a second to the Zen of Python, if you open up your console and type import this, you'll see a beautiful little poem and here are two lines from it. Simple is better than complex, sparse is better than dense. So recently I learned this great library called dplyr which is really fantastic but it's in R, it's not in Python and I love Python and I think many of you in this room love Python. I found that dplyr maps a lot better onto the way I think about data analysis, making me much faster at writing code to analyze data. So the goal of dplython is to bring the ideas of this package dplyr to Python. All right, so when I was saying it was Zen or it's simple, it's because there are really only six main things you do in dplyr or dplython now. I'll read these out, hopefully everyone can see these okay, but these are sift, select, arrange, mutate, summarize and group by. And for those of you familiar with SQL, a lot of these will sound kind of SQL-ish as well.  I'm assuming here for data that every row represents say an observation and columns might be variables of that observation, so this is called tidy data format. So you can remove some rows, you can select specific columns, maybe you don't want all the information, it'll look a lot like a select statement. You can sort by different columns, add new columns, these columns derived from previous columns, summarize, which collapses columns to one value, so if you're finding the mean of a column, maybe you'll summarize that into one value and group by, which will have your operations done on groups instead of overall, so if you want mean for a few different categories of objects, then maybe you would group by before you summarize. And now there are a lot of different mathematical functions, different things that you can do inside of all of these, but these are the way that we are manipulating our data. Okay, so I'm going to give a few examples of this using a data set of diamonds. If you're familiar with the ggplot2 package from R, I think this is built in with it, it's used for example visualizations. So each row is a diamond and there are a few different columns to describe it. So carrot is a measure of the size of a diamond. You have the type of cut, you have a type of color, and you have other attributes, which I don't know much about diamonds, so I don't know much about this. So let's talk about sift, this is a really simple thing, which says, okay, we only want to select a few things. So let's say I'm just interested in really big diamonds. I just want the diamonds that can make me rich. So sift is a function, the first input will be a data frame, and now this is going to look a little funky, but the extra inputs, the additional inputs are going to represent columns and operations on columns of your data frame. I'll describe in more detail some of the guts, like what's going on behind the scenes here, but basically X is kind of a stand-in for diamonds. I'm going to take a second to run this in the console. That is way too small. So here's our data frame. So lots of different columns, diamonds, and now we can call sift on it. And yeah, thank you. I thought I'd be better at one-handed typing, but. Okay, so now we've filtered, and we've just gotten the rows where the carat is greater than four. Now we can also do other operations on carat. So for example, maybe, I don't know why you'd want to do this, but you only want the square of carats to be greater than four. So we see a lot more because anything over two carats is going to be displayed now. So we can do other operations on top of carat. And now this is a particular thing to sift. We can do, I don't know, other things here. So say we want to build an additional filter. Okay, x.cut is ideal, so now all the rows that we've gotten will have cut be ideal. So that's idea one, is to break every task into these little verbs that do one thing. The next idea is piping. And this, so the x thing might look strange, a little funky to all of you Python experts. This piping might also look a little funky. So rather than just have our function call like before, what we can do here, instead, I'm gonna put the mic down and be loud, can do diamonds and pipe it into this. And that'll work as well. So we can just not have the argument for the data frame and write this pipe instead, and it'll go straight there. It'll do the thing that we want to do. And you'll see the reason for that in a little bit. This might also remind a lot of you with Unix command line. Okay, so here we have select and mutate. And now maybe you can see a little more why it's nice to have this piping. So I'm just gonna copy and paste this into the command line. And do that. Okay, so select just like a SQL select, or there are ways to do this in pandas, as many of you know, we'll just select certain columns. So as you can see here, I'll blow this up a little more. Can everyone see this okay? Okay, excellent. Sorry, you can't see the bottom? Yeah. Okay, thank you everybody, takes a village. So this is a little messy because we lost indentation, but you have your diamonds, you pipe it into select. So if we just run that, this is just going to select the two columns. Just care it in price. Now what I've done is mutate. Mutate adds a new column. So say I'm interested in the relationship between carrots and price. I wanna know how the effect, like if I get a much bigger diamond, is that gonna be, you know, am I gonna be much more rich? So here I've added this new column. And again, you can't see that. So I will hit control L. And we have USD per carrot, X dot price divided by X dot carrot. And head just shows me the first five columns. So I don't have to keep scrolling up. Or the first five rows, sorry. So now we have carrot price and we've added a new column, USD per carrot. So the reason this pipe operator is very useful is that it helps with being able to compose these operations together. And when I think of what I wanna do to the data, I think of it very sequentially. Maybe not everyone thinks this way, but I think of it very sequentially. I wanna, I'm only interested in these two things. I wanna make this new variable. Maybe I wanna summarize, et cetera. And I've always found that each thing I wanna do maps really well into one of these six verbs. So we'll go through a few more examples here. So now this is summarize. So we have the same thing we did before, USD per carrot, but now I'm curious about what's the average? What's the average dollar per carrot? And maybe I wanna know the standard deviation in the median. So that takes what we had before. This is just what we had before, select mutate. And now we summarize x.usd per carrot dot mean. This is this new column we created. Take the mean of it, take the median of it, take the standard deviation of it. And it gives us a data frame output, three columns, one row. And these are the values that we are curious about, that we wanna know. Okay, but wait, my diamond retailer comes to me and says, well, color has a really big impact on diamond prices. So let's say we use group by. This is where group by comes in. So again, we take the data that we were just using and now we did this little group by. So I'm making a new column here, which is called bin, or actually I'm sorry, we won't do the color example maybe later. This says, I wanna know if this is different for different sized diamonds.  So x dot carat, I'm integer dividing by one. Basically I'm just breaking, I'm cutting off fractional points of carats. So is it gonna be at least zero carats, at least one carat, et cetera. So with just adding this little group by in here, we now have these bins, which is the rough size of carats. And now we can look at this and see mean and median and standard deviation. Okay, and I'm going to go back into presentation mode. We can also import external code. So say I wanna visualize something. Right now this is a little clunky, I'd like to improve this, but you can just call this as a decorator or a function that you can call on a function. So I'm importing PiLab to do plotting. I run this decorator on the scatter function. And now I can pipe my code directly into this. Sample frack just samples a fraction. So this is sampling 10% of the diamonds. And then this is a scatter plot where the x-axis is carat and the y-axis is price. Here's another example of this. So ggplot is a, now a Python package, it's a port of the ggplot2 library in R. And this is just to show the same thing. We can pipe our data into other, we can run transformations on our data and pipe it directly into plotting lines of code. Okay, so maybe a lot of you are saying, what is going on? What is this x? What is this piping? How are you doing this? This is black magic. It's actually, the ideas behind it are actually fairly simple. So this isn't exactly our code, but this is a baby version of what's going on behind the scene. So how many, let's get another show of hands here. How many of you know what operator overloading is? Can you just raise your hands? Okay, so looks like about half. I'll explain that really briefly. If you have a custom Python object and you want to use like the plus sign or the minus sign, if you want to use operators on it, you can do this, you can do that. And it's actually pretty simple. All you do is write this method, underscore underscore add, there's a special one for each operator. And that will let you do custom code for adding. So if you want to make a vector and you want to do vector addition, that's how you can do a lot of this nice stuff in pandas or in NumPy. If you have a NumPy array and add one to it, it'll just work. So here, what I've done later has a queue. It's a queue of functions that are going to happen to it as soon as it gets data. Whenever we do something to it, so if I say x.carat plus one, add gets called. Other is going to be one in this case. We create a little lambda, which is x plus one, and we append it to a queue and then we just return ourself. So x plus one, we just return the same object. Then later on, when it's time to actually, when we have the data present and we actually want to run it, we can call this evaluate method. That will take our objects, so in the case of de-Plython, that'll be a data frame. And then for all of the lambdas or functions in our queue, we just keep running those on all of the output. It looks sort of like a reduce for those of you familiar with functional programming. And then we return the output. So you can copy and paste this, and this will run in your console. Foo equals later plus 10. This is our input. It'll give you the right thing. And these are reusable. Okay, I'm running a little short on time, so I'm gonna skip some of this. For piping, it's kind of the same thing. We just overload the R-shift operator. And we have a lot of other features that are very useful, such as joins. You saw the head statement, implementing a lot of what's in de-plyer for those familiar with de-plyer. All right, the future. So we have, de-plython is working right now. It's up on GitHub, and there are things we want to do still. So it's very close to Panda's speed in a lot of cases. I should also mention that this is using Pandas in the back end. So it's gonna be very compatible with Pandas code. It's, the data frame we're using is just a subclass of the Pandas data frame. We're not trying to replace Pandas or anything like that. We're just trying to build this additional API on top of it. So I didn't mention that earlier, but I'm mentioning it now. So we're very close to Pandas in most cases. When we have a lot of groups and you summarize on those groups, it's a little slow at the moment, but we're working on fixing that. So that's one goal, get it as fast as possible. We'd like it to be a little more usable, more seamlessly integrate with code with the built-in Python functions like Max, Min, et cetera. And full features. So for the R fans, Tidy R is another great data manipulation tool. We'd like to implement some of those features. There are other features inside of Deplier that we're not done yet. So these are some plans. It's actually being used a few places. So I've heard from people at Square, people at Twitter that are using this currently. Hopefully you're the next person to use this. I don't know why it's all Jack Dorsey startups. Maybe he's a fan. Who knows? And yeah, we're up on GitHub. You can just Google it pretty easily. I'll show the link at the end of the slide. So in conclusion, go back to this first slide. Have a question, have your brain. Your brain needs to turn that question into texts. Hopefully Deplython is a great way to do that. With that, I'd like to say a big thank you, particularly to the Deplier people, to the Pandas people. They do extremely excellent work to our Deplython contributors who have been an awesome, awesome help. And to you, the audience. And with that, I have a few minutes that I saved for questions. Thanks.


We've got the inventory. The inventory, we can track different ways. We're tracking it with a perpetual system within the QuickBooks system. Kind of the more sophisticated way to be tracking inventory, but it takes a little bit more setup process to do. In the inventory account, we would expect we have these starting amounts. This is when we set up the inventory balance to just start out with. We're going to buy the inventory with checks or with bills or with expense forms, and then we're going to sell the inventory with invoices and sales receipts. That's what you would expect to see in the inventory account. It goes up when we buy it, we buy stuff with check forms, expense forms, or bill forms, and then we sell the inventory with invoices and sales receipts. It's going to go back down, and then we might have inventory adjustments that need to happen periodically to tie up the inventory to the physical count. Remember that the inventory also has a sub ledger breaking the inventory out by units if you're tracking it on a perpetual inventory system.