I'm giving you a chance because you picked the wick. So I'm just warning you, you got a few minutes. This is about stereotyping. In the session I had yesterday on how your brain works, one of the attendees said, it was interesting this session. But there were some things I learned about how people are that made me feel a little uncomfortable. So this talk will do that. You'll learn a lot, but it will make you feel uncomfortable. If you don't get a chance to ask me a question about it, or talk to me at the conference, you've got my e-mail address, and when I get home, I'll be happy to answer any questions that you have about any of the research that I'm going to talk about. Because this is not an academic presentation, but it is about research. If you would like to read more, or if you'd like to have the paper, I'll be happy to send it to you. So you've got my e-mail address, you've got my website. Oh my gosh, an old lady on Twitter, who would have thought? This is the opening, the doors for a museum in California. It's called the Museum of Tolerance, and it has two doors. Can you read what's on top? Here, this one on the left, the red door, there's a sign across the top. Can you read it? Prejudiced. Prejudiced. On the right, the green door, it says, yeah, unprejudiced. One of the doors doesn't really work. You really can't get in that way. Can you guess which one that is? It's amazing how many people have been observed pounding on that door, trying to get in. But only one door opens. Which one is it? That's that red one. That's the only way in because that's what we all are. And in the research that I'm going to talk about, there's always a control group, and they ask the people in the control group after the experiment when they've been looking at prejudice. And the people in the control group always say the same thing. Oh, not me, not me. I'm not prejudice. Harvard University is looking at prejudice. And you can go online and take a little test to find out if you are prejudiced. And I have a lot of friends in Nashville, Tennessee, where I now live, who are black. And they have taken that test and they have found out that they are prejudiced against black people. Oh, but you wouldn't be. I'm gonna tell you a story about some research that was done quite a while ago. In fact, in psychology, it's called a classic experiment. It changed forever the way psychologists thought about prejudice and stereotyping. It was done in the state of Oklahoma in the United States way back in 1954 by a psychologist whose last name was Sharif. And he had the idea of rounding up some young boys, they were about 12 years old. He got 22 of them and he put them in two balanced groups. And that means that essentially those two groups were the same. The two groups of boys had pretty much the same characteristics, same background, same year in school, apparently normal, although they did live in Oklahoma. Lower middle class, Protestant, just seemed to be normal. Well, he put them in two different buses and he took them out to a Boy Scout camp called Robbers Cave. So the name of this experiment is the Robbers Cave experiment. You can Google on it. I think there's a nice Wikipedia article about it. Remember, it's a classic. In the experiment, there were several phases. In phase one, each of the two groups was given a separate cabin. They were off in the woods in this nice Boy Scout camp and they had their own places to go. They had their little nature trails and their swimming holes where they spent a lot of time just enjoying themselves, doing what young boys do out in the woods. They pitched their tents, they hiked, they cooked. And they also did something very interesting. It's a phenomenon that we now look for in all small groups. They began to develop an identity, an us. They weren't instructed to do that, they just did it naturally. They began to form an us. They had a name. One group said, well, we're gonna call ourselves the Rattlers. And the other group said, well, we're gonna call ourselves the Eagles. And they wrote a song. They made a flag. And they started using that pronoun, us, we. We're the Eagles. We're the Rattlers. And they did it in a matter of just a few days. Formed a group identity. The transition to the next phase is when the camp counselors who were really graduate students began to make each of the separate groups gradually aware of the other group. They would arrange a hike so that they would come close to but not ever see the members of the other group. They could hear them off in the distance. And they began to talk about the other group using a different set of pronouns. They started saying, those people, they. And I hope they don't come over here. I hope they don't hike on our trails. I hope they don't come to our swimming hole. Remember, these two random groups were identical. They were two groups of 12-year-old boys with almost identical backgrounds, had never seen one another, but were already making assumptions, already labeling the other group as them. They are not like us. They even began to call them names. They said, those niggers. Phase two. They introduced the two groups to each other and they said, we're going to start having some competitive games. We're going to play softball. We're going to have tug of war.  And the winner will get prizes and recognition. And of course, the graduate students were doing this for a very good reason. They were trying to bring this prescient us against them to a head. They were trying to increase the amount of division between the two groups. They were doing that intentionally, recognizing one as the better, or the stronger, or the faster. The winner. And they said, we're going to get prizes and they were all eating together and people could see, well, who won the prize? Who was better? And of course, this caused the already pretty strong tension between the two groups to become, well, it was like a war. And after one incident, the Eagles captured the Rattler's flag and burned it. And the next day, the Eagles flag was burned in retaliation and this fight broke out. After one particular contest, the Rattler's launched a night raid on the Eagles cabin. Next morning, Eagles took revenge on the Rattler's. Both groups began to store weapons of mass destruction in preparation for all-out war. These are 12-year-old boys with similar backgrounds. They were essentially identical. And in a very short period of time, we already have the outbreak of war. For what reason? Phase three. Now the staff was instructed to try to resolve the conflict. Let's find some way of bringing these two essentially identical groups together. Well, after all 12-year-old boys from similar backgrounds, this should not be too difficult. Why don't we do some fun activities together? Have you ever been on one of those team-building activities where they haul you out into the woods and they say, we're going to build a team now by doing some common activities. We're going to catch each other as we throw ourselves off a tree branch or cross a river helping one another. Have you ever been on one of those? How was that? Did it work for you? I never have. I've read about them, but it seems to me that they really wouldn't be very successful. And in this case, they weren't successful at all. In fact, the more they tried to do things together, let's do some fun things together, the more the aggression built, the more fighting, and since they ate together, sometimes those fights involved food. Imagine 12-year-old boys and hot dogs out in the woods, a lot of aggression, a lot of hot dogs being flung at one another. Well, let's leave them in the middle of their food fight. Here's what the evolutionary psychologists tell us that based on this and many other experiments, it doesn't take very long before this group identity emerges. It seems that it's something we do. People, humans do that. We develop a name sometimes. We start calling ourselves a name that reflects the character of our group and we start talking about us. Would that ever happen in software development? I once sat next to a guy who loved the programming language fourth.  Would programming language choice bring out aggression? What do you think? Would process choice bring out aggression? We, Agile fans, those... Of course, you're not one of those people who would do something like that. You're unbiased, rational, and realistic, aren't you? Let's take a poll. How many smart people in the room? Yes! Okay, I can see lots of smart people. Therefore, you are rational, logical. Of course you are. You don't make decisions based on emotion. You're here today because you looked at some controlled scientific experiments that told you that Agile was better than the alternative. Isn't that right? He was all scientific, wasn't it? Isn't that how we make decisions in software development? Cold, calculating logic made by smart, rational people. Yes? Did you read any of those controlled scientific studies that showed clearly that Agile is better? Did you read any of them? I'm glad to see that there are no hands because there aren't any. None. All we have are stories. Somebody tells us a good story. In my company, on my team, we're using Agile, and oh, it's really working well. If the drug company picked your favorite, made decisions the way we do, it would be a little like this. Hey, I've got some blue pills that really help me. I'd be happy to let you try it. Would you like to try it? If it comes with mushrooms. Yeah, it works for me. It works for me, so obviously you should at least try it. You should give it a try. Now, I've been in software development a long time, and that is always how we have made our decisions. Just like the little blue pills. And now it's a little blue pill. Tomorrow it'll be a little red pill. Next day it'll be a little orange pill. So apparently we're hardwired to do this kind of thing, to divide the world up.  So here we are at a conference and we're meeting new people. And what your brain is doing immediately when you meet somebody new is you're classifying. I'm American and you're Indian. I'm old, you're young. And we all do it. We all do it all day. We do it for ourselves. We do it to other people. Who's taller, shorter, lighter, darker, smarter, labeling other people. Labeling ourselves. Oh, it keeps us very busy. And we've been doing it for a long time. It meant survival at one point to identify clearly which are the proper foods, which are the aggressive people, which road should we take? We're hardwired to do it. That's a sad piece of news. I'm sorry. I know you don't have time to look up this wonderful broadcast on PBS about a very interesting experiment that a young woman did in her grade school class. The day after Martin Luther King was assassinated, she was thinking to herself, how can I convey to my white students in Iowa what it must be like to be a black person in the United States and to be treated differently? How can I put that across so that these children will understand what it must be like for them? She had a brilliant idea. She came to class the next day and she said, I've been reading some interesting research. And this research tells me that I've been doing a bad job of teaching. I'm going to change. I'm going to try to do a better job now based on this new research, which tells me that brown-eyed children are smart. Blue-eyed children, well, blue-eyed children are nice children, but they're just not as smart as those with brown eyes. So we're going to divide the classroom into two groups. I'll put all the brown-eyed children over here and I will spend most of my time talking to the brown-eyed children, helping them learn because they're smarter. The blue-eyed children, well, we'll find some activities to keep you busy, but you just don't have the ability to learn like the brown-eyed children. Oh, and over recess and at lunch, I don't think it would be good if you mixed. Stay together. Brown-eyed children, stay together. Blue-eyed children, stay together. I think that would be best. Oh, one other thing, just so we don't forget, I have made some little collars for the blue-eyed children.  So they can all see who the blue-eyed children are.  I still feel that. So we know that when we label someone in some way, we can actually create what we expect.  We can create an environment that meets our expectations, especially if we have any kind of power like a teacher over a young child or a manager over a team. I read some research that said, you know, managers make up their minds pretty quickly about the people who join the team long before they've had a chance to see real performance. They've already decided who the good guys are and who those who are not so good. They've already made up their minds. I didn't believe that. So I was at a conference. I saw a table of managers and I sat down and I said, you know, I've just read this interesting research about how quickly managers make up their minds about people on their teams. Tell me, is that true? Any managers in the room? Well, one fellow at the table said, oh, Linda, well, yeah, maybe it is true. But we are always right. Of course they are. Of course they are right. If you expect that someone is going to be a good contributor, that's what you will see. And you will change the behavior of that person by your expectation. If you expect that someone's not going to be as good, that's what you will see and you'll create a poor performer. So if you have power, you're especially able to create an environment that meets your expectations, but we all, in a sense, have that power over others and ourselves. We know that stereotyping or labeling is a bad thing, but maybe we didn't realize until now how bad it is that, of course, you lose the contribution of someone if you stereotype them as being, well, not as able to contribute, but I don't think we realized until a lot of the research came out that said, you're actually creating. You're making that expectation come true that we can all do that. Something I care very deeply about is not seeing enough women in IT or science or math. That's where I've been all my life. So I was really interested to look at the research around women in math. So the experiment goes something like this. They had two groups and they gave the women in the two balanced groups a really, really challenging math test. And the two tests were exactly the same. The only difference was one small little box before the test where your name and other information is at the heading of the test. In one version there was a little tiny box that asked you to check it indicating gender, female. The other version exactly the same except no little box. That couldn't make any difference. What are you talking about? A little box over here and no little box over there. Are you going to tell me there'd be a statistically significant difference in the performance of those women on a difficult math exam? Is that what you're saying? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And when the women were asked, did you notice that little box at the beginning that said female, they didn't even remember. They didn't remember the box. They didn't remember checking. But clearly looking at the differences in the scores, clearly, clearly at least unconsciously they were aware of that.  You're just not as good. They put a little collar around their own necks and said, well, you know, women are just not as good at math and science.  They're just not as good. And they set their own low expectations. And they're created their own result to verify that. And their scores went down. That's frightening. We're doing it to ourselves. We buy into that stereotype. So I'm a member of so many stereotype groups now. I've lost count. I'm a woman. I'm old. I'm from the United States. Strike three. And I believe a little of that myself. Oh, well, Linda, you're really getting old now. I'm always asked at conferences, are you going to keep traveling at your age? And I feel myself getting a little shorter and you have to be careful about that because the research is very clear. If you buy into the stereotype, even for yourself, it affects your own performance. Oh, I forgot to mention this one. This is a new study in using video games with avatars. Players of both sexes, if they chose a female avatar, they gave up sooner and performed poorly when playing against a male avatar. I was in a class that Michael Hill was teaching about agile coaching and team management. And he said something that I have heard a million times, but I had just been working on this talk and going through the research. So when he said it, somehow bells went off in my head. He said, rule number one for good management, catch them doing something right. So that means the manager is setting expectations that he will see the kinds of things he wants to see or she will see to say, if you suspend belief for the sake of the retrospective and if everyone on the team does that, that over time what you're doing is raising those expectations, setting the belief that we're all doing the best we can and that's what will emerge. That will be the emergent behavior as a result of that belief even if it's just pretend for the sake of the retrospective because your expectations will create a team where everyone is doing their best. So managers especially, I know I've talked about a lot of research but I'm going to actually cite this, look at the date, 1988. It's a study by Harvard Business Review on something called the Pygmalion Effect where it was clearly observed that if managers believed certain things about their teams then that behavior resulted. If you have not read that paper, send me an email and I will email you that paper because you should read it. It's about the power you have over your teams. If you haven't seen it for yourself or you haven't realized it or maybe you just don't believe me and that's okay but you should believe Harvard, right? Oh my gosh, I forgot about those guys fighting with their hot dogs flying. Whoa, we better go back and see if we can help out so the graduate students had an idea. He said, well nothing has worked up till now let's find some other activities. Let's find an activity where there's a real big serious problem that affects all of us and the solution for that problem is going to require the effort, the contribution of all of us or we're going to be in big trouble. So the first experiment was uh-oh, the water. The camp's water was cut off. Staff said we don't know what the problem is but we suspect there's a problem somewhere in the waterline. Well the waterline is a mile long. We need both the rattlers and the eagles to walk along that line and look for a problem, a leak possibly. Something is wrong there. We're all going to have to dig in otherwise we won't have any water. No one will have any water. So it was a problem that impacted everyone. A serious problem. In order to solve it we're all going to have to contribute. So the eagles and the rattlers started walking up and down and they found a clogged valve. And when they did they said we. We found it. It was actually an eagle and a rattler together. We found it. They all celebrated. Together. They found a tug of war way of removing a big tree that had fallen on the mist tent. It took the work of all the eagles and all the rattlers together to move that big tree. And then they noticed that the truck that brought in the food got stuck in the mud and all the boys together had to pull it out. So the characteristics of these new activities that successfully brought them together were some serious real problem that affected all of them and the solution required that they all had to contribute. Okay Linda. Sure but you know really remember these guys were all alike. You were able to bring them together but you know they weren't that different I wonder what would happen if we took some groups that were really really different. I wonder how this experiment would go under those circumstances. So the good thing about many psychology experiments is that they're repeated over and over and over again. You don't just see one but it's replicated many different environments. So let's look at this version. This was done in 1963 in Beirut. We're still talking about young boys. The experiment's been repeated lots of times with adults but I happen to like these two comparison experiments. We've got eight Christians and 10 Muslims. And not only that but these young boys have been raised in religious schools and they live in a place with a lot of history of conflict between the two religious groups. I wonder what would happen here. So they did the same thing. They divided them into two groups. They formed a group identity. They were called the blue ghosts and the red genies. When they got to phase two that was the aggressive let's ramp it up a little bit phase. They had some serious serious conflict. In fact at one point we have three genies threatening a ghost with knives. Things got so bad that they decided to go ahead and stop the experiment. They didn't want to take the risk. Well okay. You know religion that's serious. Religion does make a difference. Remember our other groups were all Protestant so we could expect that maybe things wouldn't work so well if you have religious conflict. That's what I thought when I read the experiment but I had to read the fine print because the two groups were not defined by religion. If you thought that you made the same assumption that I did. They put the Christians in one group and Muslims in the other. No, no. That's not what they did at all. There were Muslims and Christians in both groups and the conflict that broke out broke out because of the group identity not because of religion. In other words the loyalty the identity they felt with the small group they had only been a part of for a few days was stronger than religion. The three genies that had the knives were Christian and so was the guy they were going after on the other team. Christians were going against Christian. So the experiment has been repeated with religion, with politics, with any one of the how many things that divide us and what the results show over and over again is that in a small group we develop pretty strong ties pretty quickly and we feel a sense of identity with that small group that can override our history that can overcome our affiliation with a religious group or a political group or a geographical group we feel a stronger tie to this little group that we've only been a part of for a very short time. So this is the counterbalance we've got two hardwired tendencies on the one hand we label everybody and we're equipped to categorize especially based on external features and there's nothing we can do about that we do it all day labeling, labeling, labeling but on the other hand we love to be a part of a small group that somehow has a sense of identity we love that we're hardwired to be a part of a small group it's the way we've been for thousands and thousands of years and the identity extends to the extent that it can overcome those stereotyping labels other associations that we have these are two conflicting forces within us on the one hand to stereotype everyone on the other to have a close connection with a small team it's got to be a special small team it's got to be a team where everyone is working together everybody plays a part everybody's important as soon as I began to read the descriptions of the kinds of things the psychologists were looking for in these small groups I immediately thought of Agile is that the secret sauce? is that what Agile has to offer that pull, that evolutionary tendency that we have to want to be a part of a small group that works together collaboratively is that the heart? is that the essence? is that what makes a team an organization? Agile, that sense? we know we see it in the practices the daily stand up you're promising you're collaborating pairing, collaborating time box iterations if we don't all work together we won't be able to deliver on that end date we all have to contribute retrospectives what can we learn together? what can we learn that will help us all be better? I think especially in the United States we get this feeling confused with friend I've worked on many great teams with people I did not like but I respected them and I trusted them and I knew they were going to do a good job and I knew they respected me and trusted me even if we don't go out for a beer afterwards it's a different thing we've got to be really careful about that because I think especially in the U.S. we get those lines a little blurry and they're different things so here's what collaboration is according to the psychologists is everybody is a part of what's going on everybody's important I can't do my job unless you do your job and what we get out of that is what I just said trust and respect and I think if we had to make a list of the things we really care about really want out of life I think respect is at the top so until he retired a year ago my husband was a software developer and he knew because we'd been married a long time and still are when he came home he knew that he shouldn't bring me flowers or candy or jewelry the thing I loved when he walked in the door at night was when he said I am stuck on a really tough problem bring me a problem said I've been working on this all day I don't know what to do could you help me I'd like to hear what you have to say when I hear that my brain does a little translation and what comes out is I love you so much and think about it Agile teams have that all day long will you pair with me what held you up yesterday what did you learn I want to know what you think I need your help we all want that I still want that even at 71 years of age I still want somebody to say I want to know your opinion what do you think help me out they call it social interdependence well I like collaboration better and I said already we don't do a good job of experiments we don't but they do and they have measured the benefits of small teams that have this sense of interdependence and they show that the team members share common goals everybody's outcomes are affected by the actions of others I can see that I can reach my goal if and only if you do yours and so we all work in this cooperative environment the measurable impacts are increased effort to achieve not only for the individuals the team members but for the team itself many times when teams work together you see a psychological effect called social loafing which means people don't do as much work because they know there are other people on the team who will pick up the slack on a team where you have collaboration or social interdependence what you see is everyone does more the team is better more positive relationships give and receive social support and I have to be friends improved psychological health increased self-esteem decreased anxiety and depression no wonder agile teams seem to have it if you've ever been on an agile team that's a special situation you can feel it you pick up that sense that everybody is working as hard as they can because they have bought into this social interdependence now we have a name for it so I feel like maybe I've been a little discouraging up till now I've told you some bad things about the way people are and that's us, by the way all of us so I want to close with some positive things I just finished reading this interesting book on trench warfare ooh, that doesn't sound too encouraging, does it? during the first world war there was a giant, huge trench and the men who were fighting in those trenches spent month after month after month after month in the mud and the blood and the rain and the snow and what the studies show is that in those trenches you could look across no man's land the little tiny space between your trench and the trench of the enemy you could look across no man's land and you could see the enemy in fact you could see the enemy so well that you knew when the wounded were carried out when meals were brought in when new fresh troops arrived you knew pretty much the life the daily schedule of the team on the other side and as a result of that something very strange happened along the miles of trenches little tiny pockets of peace broke out I know when they're taking out the wounded so we won't fire on them during that time no one signed an agreement we didn't tell them that we were not going to fire but they noticed and so when we took our wounded out they also did not fire when they're bringing in fresh troops serving meals we won't fire and they noticed so they won't fire when we're bringing in meals or fresh troops we'd have little pockets of time when there was no war there was peace oh come on Linda that's a stretch what are you talking about here how can that be collaboration remember that list of requirements what was that very first thing there on that list it said something about common goal well that's the enemy they're the enemy how can there be a common goal what is the common goal survival it wasn't my idea to be here probably not your idea either I sure wouldn't have elected to spend many months of my very short life in the mud and the blood and the rain and the snow wasn't my idea I just want to go home I want to go home so do I that's probably the biggest common goal we all have isn't it survive I just want to survive it's never happened before or since something about those trenches and the fact that those men spent so much time so close that they could really get to know one another even though they never really shook hands just little pockets of peace I thought it was so encouraging and of course most of you who have heard me talk before know that I love animals especially primates I have an interesting talk I give about bonobos and agile development so let's look at some animal experiments so this one was done with two kinds of monkeys the first are the reces well the reces monkeys they just are nasty nasty bite don't get long they're violent and then the other group of monkeys called the stunt tails who are so easy going so friendly peace loving so some psychologist had an idea he said let's take some very young animals the young aggressive reces and the young easy going stump tails and let's put them together and let's see who teaches who how to solve problems will the reces monkeys teach the stump tails how to be nasty and aggressive or will the stump tails teach the reces how to be calm and easy going interesting interesting experiment well the stump tails as you might imagine the name stump tails they have no tails just have a little little stump the reces on the other hand have long silky soft tails well the stump tails resolve aggression by grooming they don't fight so when the reces began to be aggressive well the stump tails do what stump tails do which is groom and they groomed the reces the young reces and especially because they don't have tails especially those long fluffy soft tails they loved those tails and the reces thought hey you know this is kind of nice having somebody groom my tail maybe we should all try that I don't know how we would do that in agile development maybe we could have a practice something to do with grooming your tails would be worth an experiment what do you think so at the end of the experiment the reces had become peace loving and they began to resolve differences by grooming so if we wanted to say there was a winner and a loser here we could say that the peacemakers won they taught the aggressive reces a better way I think that's an encouraging hopeful thing because we know there's a long line where we were all together so their tendencies really stayed with us maybe we could learn something from the reces and the stump tails so there's a picture of some stump tails the alpha male always gets fed first but the others are not aggressive they're not fighting they're all waiting they know that at some point they'll get their share of the food so I think that somehow embodies the stump tail view of life we're all in this together I think that's definitely reason for hope so hope it hasn't been too discouraging are you okay did you survive all of that with the little blue-eyed and brown-eyed you're okay and all of the information about you that you are a stereotyping animal but that you also love to be in small groups and you have a strong identity to the people that you work with and collaborate with is that okay so was it a worthwhile hour and whatever okay thank you


I hate this question. It's like what is EOD? I hate that question. When people hear the word like EOD tech or bomb tech, you know, they think about like stuff they see on like cutting wires and stuff like that. I always get asked about the cutting of the wires. Oh, you want to cut the red wire? I'm like, I'm very rarely cutting wires. You can parachute, you can scuba dive, you can shoot every gun in the U.S. arsenal. You shoot, we jump, we dive. Like, I don't know. It sounds funny, but... I think when you're faced with an explosive hazard or something inherently dangerous, when do you play? You can call. So Navy EOD, we deal with getting people from point A to point B in a safe manner, dealing with any explosive hazards. So you have surface, which goes into a lot of your IED type problems. You have the diving mission set, anything water-based, mind counter measures. We're versing chem and bio hazards, your nuclear hazards. Not to mention we're capable of jumping, shooting, maneuvering, that kind of thing as well. Lots of robot training, and then at some point you can't get a robot in there.  Proficient and demolition, which is very important. Proficient shooting. Hold that one, let's say up there as well. Must be able to be a good diver and then attack whatever mission set comes. And then if you throw all these things together, it becomes what EOD is. It's not just one thing, it's all of it. The mobile unit is kind of the heart and soul of it. The mobile unit, they're going to have the platoons that actually push out to do the work. So we are mobile unit, and every mobile unit has a different breakdown of different platoons with different specialties. We have these eight man platoons. We'll go off and we'll do our specific mission sets. And there's about 12 platoons at each mobile unit that will comprise the EOD mobile unit. So generally all the teams are going to have roughly the same training. And then you're going to go into your mission specific stuff. We are set up to do an 18 month workout and a six month deployment. And you're training pretty much for that entire time.  A typical week is structured where at least three days are dedicated to training pretty hard on one of these mission sets. I like shooting, so naturally anytime we go shooting it's great. So it is very important that we are proficient in small arms. So the number one thing, we are a combat support unit. So we support units like if you can't be safe with a weapon, you can't be competent with a weapon, you cannot support those weapons. So at a bare minimum, you have to be able to flow competently and safely with any weapon system that you might have to pull. Shooter stand by. There's a lot of times where it's weird to me that I'm doing activities as part of my job that people either pay really good money for or can't imagine that that's what I'm doing for work. Things like jumping and diving and not sitting in an office all day. Every week it's a new mission set and you're focusing on something new so it doesn't really give you time to get bored. We're in sunny Key West right now. Our platoon came down here to get our deep dives that we'll need for our RFRP. So yeah, it's a good time to get good training because we can't get this depth or clarity in Virginia Beach. So this is a good little getaway from there and get some good diving and good weather. It is fun. I mean there's always a lot of work with diving, especially the pre and post. It's a lot of work, but you do all this work and then you actually get some good depth and good dives. The places where it's going actually have some pretty cool spots to see. So yeah, I'd say it's worth it. Alright Dan, let's do it. I enjoy it. I like to dive. I'd say it's probably split 50-50. A lot of guys that were in the Navy, but they'd rather be on land. Yeah, I think most of my team gets pretty sick, including me. Both Rocks, I'm ready to pee. Yeah, it's just the name of the game. I don't know. I've always been this way my whole life. Yeah. Super, super easy to get sea sickness. A miracle cure for sea sickness. Ginger bits. That's not bad. Yeah, so I think the big thing that distinguishes us from Army and Air Force and Marine Corps IODs is the fact that we are a premier maritime IOD force. And that just basically boils down to the fact that we have undersea capabilities with the Mark 16 diving, the scuba capabilities that we have. Again, that's very broad for some of the more specific things and operations that we can do under water. But like I mentioned before, we're more just facilitators for that freedom of maneuver and we have the capability of taking that undersea. I mean, our major threats are going to be any mine that any ship couldn't possibly come across them because the damage of that could be catastrophic. Part of our mission set is clearance of routes for folks to go through. And so that's why we're diving this route. Yeah, you'll have your long days and sometimes you might have shorter days. So if you end up with that time off, you use it. Personally, I like to go skating. That's my thing. So I'll blow off some steam at the skate park. Just kind of get my mind off the work day and relax a little bit. Say it's a very physically demanding job so anytime you can tie your hobbies into things that also increase your physical fitness, that's a win-win. You need to enjoy sweating. You need to enjoy running and lifting weights because that is a standard that we have. You've got to be a good runner. You've got to be a good swimmer and you've got to be strong. I think it's one of the most important things. And I'm not just biased because I love to work out and it's mostly what I do every time. It's an expectation and people hold themselves to high standards and I think physical fitness is a part of that. It's basically built into our days to go work out and be in the best shape that we can be so that you don't have to worry about that. Ordnance is heavy. This kit is heavy. The bomb suit is heavy. The robot is extremely heavy. Oh yeah, that bomb suit is insane. I don't put that in there. But you need some physical stamina to be in that thing. It's going to get hot. It's going to get annoying. It's going to get heavy real quick. So you need to be able to have that strength and longevity. This is important. These guys on the front side are taking over. Remember we talked about your tanning button. I wish everybody's tanning button for you. It gets in my way forward. And then when you come up, those tips aren't going to get all the way through because it's such a claw-down exercise. So don't go as low because the reform is fine. So the strike program is a brand new program that they've introduced to the EOD community and it basically focuses on teaching us physical fitness in a healthy, productive way so we're not injuring ourselves. Not only do we have great facilities to work out in, but we also have strength coaches that are teaching us the appropriate way to lift, to work out, to train our bodies. We have physical therapists and athletic trainers that are basically at our whim to just make us better and fix what's broken and help us continue our job. This is a great program for dudes to walk in, get fixed, get help and then be ready for the next chapter. So yeah, it's been a really good program so far. I'm happy with it. For the old guys, it'll get us back in the fight and for the young guys, it's going to keep them in the fight a lot longer. We've already come across two booby traps, so we're just going to go ahead and go set up a charge on it and get rid of the ordinance where it lies. When I started the pipeline, I was going through EOD school. There was a senior chief that told me having a platoon is like getting the keys to a Ferrari. And I didn't really understand what that meant until I got here and got my own platoon, but these people are really intelligent, want to work hard, very driven individuals, and when you put a group of individuals like that with a multitude of experiences coming from different walks of life with a ton of different backgrounds, and you manage that effectively, you see something come together that is like driving a Ferrari. The platoon is built on trust. If you know that no matter what level a person is out on the platoon, that you trust them to do what they need to do when you're in a high pressure situation, then there's nothing else that you can really ask for, and I think that that's what the community itself is really built on. You have to really trust each other. You build that bond. That's why we spend so much time together, is you need to trust that guy, you know, with your life, essentially. One of the mottos of the community is you'll never die twice, because we're not going to forget, and the community has a great job of remembering those we've lost, and even as new guys like myself come up and come through the pipeline, we know everyone that has passed away from the Navy EOD, and I think that that's really important, and we understand the gravity of it. I train and I want to learn as much as I can so that I can be an asset and a help to my teammates if I were ever in a situation like that, and that's what we train to. And I think that that's what, when you train that way, and again have that trust with the people that you're standing next to, that ultimately becomes instinctual when you need to be in a situation like that. Everything that we do out here, there's a lesson behind it, and those lessons were learned in blood. So if you don't take this serious, and nobody catches the fact that you're not prepared, and you make it out the door, you're putting your life and the people who you're supposed to be protecting's life in danger. When you have really high stress jobs, really high risk jobs, you generally picked that job, you volunteered. I can't think of a single example of a high risk job that you can't just walk away from at any time, including this one. Even myself, if I wanted to today, I could drop this body armor, rip the badge off my chest and walk away.  You prepare for it, so you're ready for it, but you don't really think about it. I do have a family, I have three kids, so at some point we're going to deploy, and I won't be able to go home. Today we're going to embark on a three hour tour. The weather starts to get rough. This tiny ship will be lost. One of the main reasons I joined the Navy is to fund the dream trip. We've got about four years left, and if everything goes well, this boat's going to turn into a bigger boat that we can all live on. These kids are going to get to see the world without the contractual obligations that I was under when I saw the world. So Thomas, the middle one, he asked me why I always had to leave. So Sarah, my wife, she told him, he's got to go make money so you can get your gumballs. Then one day I was headed out the door and he told me, he said, Daddy, I don't need gumballs anymore. So when I'm home, I'm absolutely home. And when I'm at work, I'm absolutely at work. It took me a while to learn where that line is, but I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing. There are not a whole lot of places to where you get a familial bond with people who aren't your family. There is a high standard to what's expected. Not everyone is suited for that, but I would recommend the community every day of the week. I think that the UD community is some of the best quality of people that I have ever really seen. And the people are what keep me wanting to be a part of the community, so I would definitely recommend it. Look at how healthy we are. It's a place where you'll absolutely be shown that you could use your brain and body more than probably any other field out there. It takes a person that has a strong mental attitude as well as keeping it positive all the time. How strong is your will?  How strong are you? And do you want to be stronger? Do you want to strive for that every day? If it happens to be in your cards and you survive the selection process, then you've got a pretty cool job waiting for you. Just knowing the people that have come before me in this community that have done amazing things and knowing the sacrifices that they have made and the things that they have done, and I think that's why I can take a step back and just feel like this badge means something. It really is an honor to be a part of the community, and that is absolutely because of the people that have came before me and the people that are working alongside of me. And that's what makes me proud to really wear the badge. I was leaving the jump zone yesterday and I was just like, you know, it's really cool that on a Thursday I was jumping out of planes and that that's what I had to do for work today. And you take it back and you're like, it puts it in perspective and it makes it even more worth it.


My name is Christina Armstrong. I'm an occupational therapist with Edmonton Catholic Schools. In the classroom we work on a lot of movement skills. We try to build independent skills with children, expanding their their muscle control, and being able to pay attention so that they can basically learn their elbows. Can everyone show me where your elbows are? Show me your elbows. One of the examples of strategies that we often use is using a variety of positions to build motor coordination. So we might have children lying on their stomachs to be doing drawing, we might have them standing to be doing painting or drawing, or even just doing different activities throughout the day that they would be doing normally, but we would have them in different positions while they do it. In the classroom we do a lot of actions to books. So throughout all the books that you're reading in a typical day it's easy for teachers to add a movement into something they're already doing. So embedding the strategies into their regular routine is probably the easiest way to get movement into the day. We took a look at their needs and we noticed that efficiency of movement and their hand use were two main areas we wanted to focus on and they were really interested in building and bridges and construction. So we're gonna put our legs wide apart to make a bridge. So one of them was to turn our bodies into bridges so that they could understand the concept of a bridge goes over something, things go under bridges, turn their bodies into a bridge, and then also using the movement to really have to work your muscles to kind of go under and crawl under that bridge. Accomplished a lot of broad-based strategies in a really simple quick kind of activity. So you only get to use one hand. Pick which one you want. When we're working on muscle skills we can work on them with anything that the children are interested in. So coins is something that they were very motivated to play with. So basically getting them to be able to move an object within their hands, developing the small muscles of the hand that they need to do all their daily activities, but doing it in a coin activity that they seemed motivated to do. So we were working on using one hand to move coins from their palm to their fingertips and strengthening that fingertip pincer grasp that they will be using when you do writing. One of the other activities that you can see the kids doing is standing and painting by having larger canvases. We set them up so that they're going to be doing the movements that we want them to do and strengthen those muscles. So trying to find a good match between an activity and a child's motivation is usually the best way to get kids to push their own skills to the next level. So one of them was a swordfish and that was really really tight and tall and one of them was jiggly and wiggly. What was that one? Sometimes you'll see we do activities that they look like fun little games. It might look like the game we played where we turned into swordfish and then we were jellyfish. So they're tightening their bodies, they're loosening their bodies, they're tightening, they're loosening. They don't realize they're doing something that's helping them kind of regulate and calm down. And then using activities like blowing up an imaginary balloon are ways that we can teach children how to regulate their breathing. Often we use small spaces for kids who get easily overstimulated or overwhelmed and they need a little bit of a break.  It's a great opportunity to go and spend a bit of quality one-on-one time with her, teach her a skill, work on the drawing with her and it's a little bit of a space where she can focus easier because there's less distractions. Often we'll introduce a strategy and we'll introduce it with the whole group and then we might assist that child who has difficulty completing the activity. We're helping that child to do it well but it might be something that could be done with all the class or it could be done in a small group.


Hello, hello, writers. I'm Christine Kiefer, author of fantasy fiction and creative writing resources, and you are listening to the Well-Sturried podcast, where I share insights, encouragement, and actionable advice designed to help you craft sensational novels and build your best writing life, always in 30 minutes or less, so you can get back to writing, of course. Ready for the show? Let's get talking. Hey writers, welcome or welcome back to the Well-Sturried podcast. I'm your host, Christine Kiefer, and today's episode was an article originally published on November 13, 2015. Today's episode is titled 19 Ways to Write Better Dialogue, and if you'd like to read along as you listen in, you can visit well-sturried.com slash dialogue. Now let's dive in. For years, I struggled deeply with the dialogue in my stories. I didn't have a natural knack for writing conversations that felt real and true to character, and I let this weakness deter me from striving to improve. But stories need dialogue, and my own was suffering for a lack of attention. Finally, I decided that enough was enough. I began reading every bit of advice on writing dialogue that I could get my hands on. I studied the novels that I read and I rewrote the conversation in my stories again and again, until at last I began to see improvement. More importantly, I came to understand dialogue as the complex literary powerhouse that it is. Unfortunately, it's this very complexity that can make quality dialogue so difficult to craft. That's why I'm breaking down 19 steps for writing better dialogue in today's episode, beginning with 10 tips for crafting richer, more nuanced conversations. Tip number one, every line of dialogue must serve a purpose. Dialogue shouldn't exist simply to give your characters something to say. Rather, effective literary conversations serve many powerful purposes. They can explore characters, advance the plot, ramp up tension, reveal context, establish mood, and so on. If you can remove a line of dialogue from your manuscript, or worse yet, an entire conversation, without impacting readers' understanding of your story, then there's a good chance your dialogue lacks strong purpose and direction. Tip number two, don't keep it real. Writers are often encouraged to craft realistic dialogue, but in fiction there is such a thing as too realistic. Just think of all the fluff that fills the conversations in your day, the small talk, the stammering, the simple statements repeated three times before they're heard. These moments certainly have their place in fiction, but only when the author is trying to make a point. The most realistic dialogue isn't that which mimics the language you hear every day. It's that in which your characters' voices ring true. Speaking of which, tip number three, developing voice is crucial. Choose three characters from your story and write a conversation about whether pizza is humanity's greatest food, all without using dialogue tags. Would readers be able to tell which character says each line? Voice is a term often applied to the verbal and non-verbal ways a character communicates given their personality, experiences, beliefs, self-esteem, worldview, and cultural influences. The stronger your character's voices, the more authentic their conversations will be. Tip number four, people don't always say what they mean. People are complex creatures. Rarely do we say what we want to say in the way we want to say it. Instead, we tailor ourselves to our surroundings, striving to fit in or stand out, to cut deep, to flatter, or appease. It's no wonder that on-the-nose dialogue can ring so false. Crafting nuanced conversations that take voice and circumstance into account can be tricky, but it's always well worth the effort in the end. Tip number five, relationships play a key role in conversation. Speaking of circumstance, every conversation your characters have should be shaped by the context in which it takes place, especially as concerns their relationships. How your lovers talk about the weather should differ from how the same conversation would play out between an estranged father and son or between co-workers or strangers on the street. Tip number six, make use of body language and expression. People say just as much with their expressions and body language as they do with their mouths. Posture, eye contact, mannerisms, and reactions should all play a prominent role in the conversations your characters hold. Tip number seven, don't be afraid to get messy. Realistic conversations rarely take place in perfect polite sentences. People are messy after all, and our dialogue is too. So don't be afraid to allow your characters to speak in fragments and unfinished sentences, to eschew grammar and use slang, or to curse up a storm. Tip number eight, balance the players. Crafting dialogue between four or more characters can be tricky. Fortunately, it's rare that so many voices share equal weight in conversation. When writing such scenes, resist the urge to ensure every character speaks just as much as the next. Instead, let power dynamics play out naturally. Tip number nine, work with the tension of the scene. In fiction, nearly all dialogue exists to create or resolve tension in some way. After all, it's tension that keeps readers turning pages, eager to discover what will happen next. To ensure your story's dialogue doesn't stall your story, pay special attention to the threads of tension in each scene. How can you manipulate tension through dialogue in a way that keeps readers engaged? Tip number 10, you don't need to write every detail. Dialogue doesn't need to play out word for word on the page. Often, it's easier to work mundane details such as greetings or words of acceptance into the narrative, or to simply allow readers to infer these details for themselves. Remember, every word you write has the power to bore readers or slow the pace of your story, so make sure you're choosing your character's words wisely. With all that said, you should have a stronger understanding of how to craft nuanced and engaging conversations. Now, let's turn our attention to the technicalities of well written dialogue. Tip number 11, ditch unnecessary dialogue tags. Dialogue tags exist to clarify who is saying what, with the most common tags being said, asked, and replied. Other common tags, such as shouted, whispered, and hissed, expound upon how a line of dialogue is said. Dialogue tags are doubtless and important aspect of fictional conversations, but too many tags can also slow the pace of your story, or even draw readers out of your story entirely, so use them with caution and care. Tip number 12, said isn't dead. The clarity that tags provide is often vital, but bear in mind that dialogue tags are also a sign of authorship, that is, a narrative element not written in the point of view character's voice. The occasional sign of authorship won't pull readers from your story if they're deeply engaged, but the more ubiquitous you can make your dialogue tags, the better. Readers will graze right over words like said and asked while still registering the identity of the speaker, ensuring your story keeps on affluent. Tip number 13, utilize action tags instead. Action tags are the small, attributive actions that precede or follow a line of dialogue, such as the following examples. Amanda fiddled with the hem of her shirt. I don't know if that's the best idea. Are you sure that's what you really want? Brad raised a brow. Making use of action tags is a great way to attribute dialogue while also keeping readers engaged and adding motion to the scene. Tip number 14, choose strong dialogue tags. If you're going to use a dialogue tag and the tone in which a line is spoken is important to impart, then choose your tags with care. Consider whispered instead of she asked quietly or hissed instead of he said in a nasty voice. Tip number 15, use realistic tags. Many writers mistakenly use attributive actions in place of attributive tags, a grammatical error that's sure to drive copy editors up a wall. Here are two examples of attributive actions used improperly. I can't believe it, Emma gasped. Or that's hilarious, Henry chuckled. If you check out today's transcript, you'll see that these attributive actions are used as dialogue tags rather than action tags. And unless you're superhuman, you probably can't gasp or chuckle words. Yet this is exactly what the examples I shared a moment ago imply. Instead, let's take a look at two ways to properly attribute to these lines of dialogue. I can't believe it, Emma said with a gasp. Or Emma gasped. I can't believe it. That's hilarious, Henry chuckled. That's hilarious, Henry said, chuckling. See the difference between the two? Again, you might want to check out today's episode transcript for this one. Your dialogue might not need to be entirely realistic, but your dialogue tags certainly should be. If you want to learn how to properly punctuate all forms of dialogue, then you can also check out the post from the editor's blog linked in today's episode transcript as well. Tip number 16, cut redundancies. Many inexperienced writers also make the mistake of working redundancies into their dialogue. But there's no need to write, uh, she groaned, or ha, she laughed, when just one or the other will do. Tip 17, avoid name drops. People rarely address the person they're speaking to by name, unless they're greeting one another or trying to get the other's attention. Yet many writers work their characters' names into dialogue left and right.  You started it, Michael. Maybe Annie, but you're killing me here. See how false that feels? If such frequent forms of address are common in your character's culture, or if they serve a distinct purpose in your story, then have at it. But otherwise, such heavy name dropping will only pull readers out of your story. Tip number 18, use dialogue to break up narrative. Narrative that spans page after page can become taxing to read, no matter how theoretically exciting it might be. Adding a line or two of dialogue can be a great way to give readers' eyes a break, especially if you allow your point of view character to engage with or react to the world around them. And finally, tip number 19, read dialogue aloud. Even after putting these last 18 tips into practice, it can be difficult to tell whether you've written effective dialogue. In my experience, the easiest way to determine whether your character's conversations ring true is to read your work aloud. Do your characters sound like themselves? Does their conversation follow a natural flow? If it doesn't, reading their words aloud is a sure way to reveal where you went wrong. Feeling overwhelmed by all the advice I've shared in today's episode? Don't feel you need to master dialogue overnight. Practice is key to improving skill, and perfecting any part of your manuscript requires a healthy dose of revision. Focus on implementing just one or two of these dialogue tips at a time, and you'll be writing rich and compelling conversations in no time. Thank you for listening to today's episode of The Podcast Writer. I hope you found it helpful to your writing journey. If so, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss a new episode, and to give the podcast a quick rating or review. Doing so goes a long way toward helping the podcast reach new writers, and lets me know that you're enjoying what I'm creating. You can also give me a shout out directly on Instagram at christen underscore keeper. For additional guidance as you work to craft sensational novels and build your best writing life, be sure to head on over to www.well-storied.com where I share blog posts, workbooks, e-courses, and other helpful resources for writers. Again, that's w-e-l-l-s-t-o-r-i-e-d.com. Thank you again for tuning into today's episode, my friend. Until next time, happy writing!


The Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Beirut Gambo, has commended the People's Republic of China for donating military hardware and patrol vessels to the Nigerian Armed Forces, which is set marks another milestone in the bilateral cooperation between Nigeria and China to ensure safe and secured maritime environment. Plus, TV, news, corresponding destiny, Momo tells us more. The atmosphere was indeed that of celebrations as the People's Republic of China showcased generosity to the Nigerian military by gifting them a 46-meter vessel NNS Sagbama as well as other military hardware. The Chief of Naval Staff pointed out that the Nigerian maritime domain will be delisted from its list of prone countries by the International Maritime Bureau. A 46-meter patrol vessel, Nigerian Navy Chief Sagbama was donated by the government of the good people of the Republic of China to support Nigerian Navy operations. That these vessels and others in the fleet have enhanced Nigerian Navy's maritime security operations efforts which significantly reduce piracy within Nigeria's maritime domain as well as the Gulf of Guinea and eventually culminating in delisting Nigeria from the list of piracy prone countries this year. The Chief of Army Staff sincerely tanked the government of the People's Republic of China for this great assistance to the Nigerian Army. The donation of the equipment will certainly go a long way in assisting the Nigerian Army in its efforts to combat security challenges in the country. Nigeria actually recognizes a one-China relationship. Therefore, this donation from the People's Republic of China actually will really consolidate our relationship and we'll only look forward to better relationships both in diplomatic circles as well as in military circles between the two countries. On his part, the Chinese Ambassador to Nigeria, Ko Chan-Chung, said the gesture is a long-standing relationship between the two countries as Nigeria has been a strong supporter of China since 1971. Really is a reflection of a political relationship between China and Nigeria. Everybody recognizes without political consonance we do not to deepen and broaden the military cooperation so I want to let you know military sector, security sector really is a very important indicator for the healthy and also very very we can use the words resounding relationship between Nigeria and China. The donated vessel is to further enhance the Nigeria Navy's presence at sea towards carbon insecurity within the nation's maritime domain and beyond. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


And I was very interested in astral projection and lucid dreaming. I had that one incident where I was lifting out of my body finally after starting to astral project and my cell phone rang, which was one of the cardinal sends of what you don't want to do when you're trying to astral project. I was shown that this isn't for me. I'm not supposed to be doing this lucid dreaming is a little bit different where you're actually in your dream and you're controlling your dream. This is a at night while you're dreaming you have total control over your dream. You can do anything you want, go anywhere you want. But the reason I don't do that either is I get a lot of my visions about what's going to happen in the future through my dreams as well as through the third eye and waking visions that I get as well. So I don't want to change that. And I felt that if I were able to lose a dream I might not be getting the same message. So that's why I don't do that.


When we built the learning platform, LearnGala.com, we did so as an open source, open access tool that could quickly enable people to make new kinds of content for the environmental and sustainability challenges we face in our time. Content that could be quickly bootstrapped into existing curricula where there aren't good enough learning tools like the ones we need to manage our systems differently and better for the future. Our theory of change was pretty simple. We felt that makers are very empowered and that any learner should not just be able to use content but also be empowered to try their hand at making content that reflects their community's concerns, their individual skills and perspectives, their historical knowledge and their sense of future tools that might be important to resolving current challenges. So that's the short answer to how we attract students to our PITUN work. We make it fun for them and empowering for them, not only to use content but to make it and to make it better in accordance with the ways that they learn best. There are other ways we've moved to attract students and one of them is to partner with existing problem-driven initiatives on our campus like the U of M internally funded Blue Skies Initiative. That initiative, pioneered by civil and environmental engineer Luke Baraskin, has created trust and collaboration between our campus and the Civic Water Utility in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a result, it's made it possible for students to do something else they really love to do which is to work directly with practitioners in the sector they're interested in and find out if that sector is one that's of longer-term career interest to them and where they might make meaningful contributions. Turns out, that's also very useful because in the water sector in Michigan, we have many highly-mediatized problems like the water crises many of you have heard about in Flint, Michigan, or Benton Harbor. These crises are unevenly distributed, unfairly affecting communities of color and low-income communities, tribal communities. However, not only do those actual pipeline problems of contamination happen but the professional pipelines for a better water sector that is more inclusive, more equitably managed and more sophisticated in its use of data analytics, those challenges are a learning pipeline problem. And so students who get involved with us can feel that they're contributing to both. They're making water better and they're making learning better so that the future of this sector can be commensurate with the importance of the challenge of providing clean water for all as a primary public health proposition and indeed one of the human rights that we must protect as we move into the future. The Midwest Big Data Hub has helped us do that on a wider scale with a regional footprint and that's what we're going to scale up and explore further in this PIT project. So becoming a model for community-engaged public interest technology work is not as easy as it might sound. So many of the models we've inherited are broken. They're arrogant. They are disseminationist. They assume a science deficit in ways that involve the laboratory or the university as the seat of valid knowledge that must be disseminated to communities. Working against that is only now becoming something to which we have multiple kinds of answers. In our case, the student attraction that I discussed in that previous video is coupled with a series of conversations with partners like my co-principal investigator, Kyle Powis-White, who himself has pioneered approaches to things like the NSF program, Tribal College and University Partnerships, research experience for undergraduates in ways that begin to build out learning communities, even on campuses that have historically been underrepresented in tech fields and underfunded and underprovided with materials for tech solutions. Doing this is no main feat, even in preparing the proposal. I learned the hard way that to do this well, you need to take more time in building projects. You need to consult thoroughly, listen carefully, be willing to build more slowly, be willing to rebuild if what you've started to construct doesn't bring true to the communities you seek to interpolate or whom you've identified as vulnerable or targets of the problems you're trying to address. It needs to be we who try to address them through listening, through co-creation, through formative, iterative assessment of the learning tools we create and a willingness to recreate them over time as users give us feedback and guidance about how they work and for whom in a sector as volatile as the water sector in Michigan right now. That kind of community engagement is something that is sometimes frustrating, sometimes complex, but almost always an investment in the long-term benefits to the many, many different communities who need to move forward together in dialogue with one another in order for something like water quality to improve across a matrix like a city, a state, a region or indeed even our country and the world. I have worked on water quality with colleagues from Jinghua University in Beijing, China. I know for a fact that these concerns about community-based water quality rights are not only those of our own country, but that the solutions that have to emerge need to be deeply grounded in close listening and careful work with different kinds of minds who have different historical relationships to the problem. That's what we're going to try to model here in our fellows program. We'll train fellows in those skills, in addition to coding our Python and so on. We hope very much that it can be a beacon and we will be recording those things as learning modules as we go. In terms of the skills that students will attain through engagement with our PITU and project, well, learning to work in genuine dialogue with vulnerable communities is non-negligible as a skill. Project management in general is an important skill for students to begin to master early. But when working on something as volatile as the water crisis in very vulnerable communities, an even different dimension of project management comes into play, thinking about the temporality of the project to ensure that different kinds of participants feel they've had time to digest, consider and be in dialogue with one about the project is sort of vulnerable community project engagement 101. It's not easy. And it also implies attention to translational elements in what registers in what forms should a knowledge sharing effort occur and how can feedback about that knowledge effort best be invited and really seriously considered as the project moves forward. That means project framing as well as project management needs to be highly dynamic and sensitive to the ways in which problems are being defined and by whom with what the deliverables created by whom and for whom. This is huge. It's fundamental. Of course, there's also the question of students working across different disciplinary communities. And that also is a kind of communication challenge. Each student's different mandate might mix differently. The humanities, for example, the history and culture of a site and the communities affected in a site, even within a water distribution network or within a utility itself that utilities history, but they might also draw from social sciences. They might draw from biosciences. They might draw from critical infrastructure studies. All of these different triangulations matter immensely to the ways in which we frame the problems, the inscrutable puzzles about why water quality seems so much better in some neighborhoods than others, even within a single system. And what might be the explanations for that microbiologically, demographically, infrastructurally. I think we have in some ways the most perfect game. It's like a candy land board. It's like a system that one can explore and learn with across different fields of knowledge. And finally, much has been made of agile development in the software world in recent years. Clearly, the curricular and learning design world is also making that move and students will learn, both as coders and designers of learning tools, about how to engage in backwards design and iterative evaluation. How to think about iterative development in terms of feedback cycles and to get comfortable with those feedback cycles as a product eventually emerges and gets feedback from different kinds of users developing as it goes. As far as advancing the field of public interest technology itself, our PIT, UN Project Data Learning for Better Drinking Water in small utilities really does begin at that point where, sort of like craft brewing, we are thinking about craft tech. What kinds of particular innovations in learning tools, the features they use, the interactive features they come up with, the ways they link to an existing management system for civic utility. That process we like to call craft tech because it's locally grounded in problem-driven needs in our community. But I think we can also help the PIT field think further about how to integrate that fundamental place-based impulse with slightly wider kinds of users and applications. We're working, for example, with Blue Ponduit, which began as a student learning opportunity in our university campus, but is now a startup which links data analytics excellence with really existing water systems to help improve their performance. Further, we have the Midwest Big Data Hub, a federally funded repository for big data excellence that partners with many different sectors across the entire upper Midwest. How do we plan to integrate the very local relationships that are at the start of this? The modules that have to do with day-in, day-out flushing of the Ann Arbor water system and learning how to dig deeper in terms of data analytics about those practices through the work of doctoral student Matthew Bedran in combination with our platform manager Ed Weissmann and the faculty advisors for both the Water Improvement Project Blue Sky, and the Learning Improvement Project Gala, how do we scale that at a more regional level or even beyond at a national level? I think those kinds of questions of the interrelation of scales, localities and relationships that go into innovation might be extremely useful for PIT to think about in the context of our project. And we very much hope to blaze trails for the solution to those challenges that not only remains accountable to and useful for a local system, but potentially also modularly applicable and inspiring for other systems beyond our own. One thing is for sure, data analytics skills are not going to go away. In the space that we're working in our project, Data Learning for Better Drinking Water in Small Utilities, it's clear that drinking water utilities are going to need to do more with data and continually adapt to changing conditions within their systems and within their staff and their client base. But as Jonathan Knee points out in his really excellent book, The Platform Delusion, recently published, we need to be careful not to fetishize or be a triumphalist about things like big data and AI. There's danger in that. Certainly they will be relevant, but so will be the questions of how communities are involved and own or decide how data are used. So this kind of engagement is really important to model and as Knee points out, far too few platforms currently being built or expanded are really taking as a task the mending of rifts that large platforms with their race to scale have created within our societies. That's a space that we believe that PIT support helps us move into. How do we be a different kind of platform? We believe that learning materials are going to need to continually adapt and that creating useful learning materials about environment and sustainability challenges is going to keep meaning new and better ways of connecting professionals, researchers, learners and community leaders. That facilitative and collaborative goal is not only based in low barrier to use, delightful to use software but it's based in social process and project management. So students in PIT careers are going to need not only core technology skills but also network building skills and a critical sense of when not to network but to work together with existing partners to ensure that trust and accountability isn't lost in the race to scale. That means I think that our small experiment with PIT is extremely valuable support can be a step not just in public interest technology but perhaps for technology itself further and further away from that sexy original moment of move fast and break things and instead toward a new moment of move slowly forward together and make things. Thanks for your attention and I look very much forward to learning from the rest of the network.


Hi, welcome to SuperUserTV at the OpenStack Summit in Boston. Can you please introduce yourself? Hi, it's my pleasure being here. My name is Alba Fishman. I'm the marketing chair of an OpenSwitch project under Linux Foundation and Breva. And also, I'm the switching marketing manager at Cabu. Awesome. So tell us a little bit about OpenSwitch and how it works with other technologies. Yeah, very good question. So OpenSwitch has started like two years ago. And actually, it was a response to market, to very observable trends in the market of disaggregation and switching to people are trying to decouple the software and the hardware. So the hardware can be a refreshment cycles. And hardware are driven by the speed and feeds needs. While the software cadence is driven by much faster pace of software innovation. And that's a huge market that almost reaches in 2017, almost a billion dollars of revenues. However, this market still is close for the networking elite for companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and these kind of companies. And the OpenSwitch tries to enable the path of adopting this technology among, you know, like you can say smaller or tier two types of users. They want to benefit from the same advantages of open networking. OK. And so here at the OpenStock Summit, we're doing open source days at the first time. And, you know, OpenSwitch has a day where you're programming content. What can attendees expect to learn by attending your sessions? Yeah, so we will introduce our project. We will talk about the fundamentals of our projects in both in terms of, I mean, the technical fundamentals of the project as well as about ecosystem. We'll talk about our roadmap. And hopefully, we'll get some feedbacks and we'll sense the market and the industry responds to our project. So it will allow us to calibrate our activities going further. OK, and in the next six to 12 months, what can we expect to see from OpenSwitch? Yeah, so hopefully our target is to see OpenSwitch actually being deployed in some places in network. It will be a huge achievement. And the other thing, so in addition to enhancing the functional side, we'll also incorporate integrated with other software technologies available to provide the entire software stock and specifically with OpenSwitch. We'll say OpenStack, sorry. Well, awesome. Well, thank you again for joining us here at SuperUserTV and have a great week at the Boston Summit. Thank you for having me.


The Heavy Industrial Manufacturing Training Program is a 16-week project-based labor market training program. It's funded by the Ministry of Social Development and Social Innovation. Participants receive training in life skills, essential skills, and job search tools and techniques. The University of the Fraser Valley has partnered with us, providing a month-long introduction to manufacturing course. After they're done there, they return to Muscle Crain's training division. We then provide participants with three weeks of vigorous certification training. After completing all of their certifications, they are then placed with a local manufacturing employer for a four-week work placement experience. One of the greatest issues that employers face is finding the right people, people with the attitude that really want to be engaged and work in industry. And so what Muscle Crain has done for us through their training programs is developing people who come from other environments, other backgrounds, and preparing them to work in industry. I love it. Absolutely love it. Love going back to school. I have learned so many more things in life. They had life skills, resume building, the sky's the limit. I really enjoy the program. It's the great group atmosphere. You know, we got our first aid ticket, fall protection, nine tickets all together. I think that would be great on my resume. When they come, they're ready to work and they're ready to move into the kind of system that we have here. We have a training development matrix and they come already with the attitude. So the two that we've hired recently are already moving up in wages and skills through the training matrix. So all in all, I see it a win-win for us and for Canada as well in the quality people we're getting and our desire to continue to grow people.


Once you have a PWA, how do you make it easy to start? Hi, I'm Sarah Clark, and I'm here to show you how to make your PWA have its own icon just like a native app. Since a PWA begins on the web, your customers could create a bookmark in the browser. But since a PWA is meant to be as convenient as a native app, it can have an icon on the home screen. In the past year, 80% of PWA users intentionally moved an app to their home screen. It's incredibly useful. If you remember the first talk, Sam mentioned fire, fast, integrated, reliable, and engaging apps. Adding an icon to the home screen falls into the OS integration and engaging categories. There are two common ways to install an icon depending on your platform, a manifest file or meta tags. We'll show you both ways beginning with the manifest file. The web app manifest is a simple JSON file that you link from each HTML page. It also lives in the root of your site. This lets you specify an icon for the home screen, a name for the application, and even customize the color of the browser Chrome. Here's a sample manifest file with some edits to make it fit on the screen. You should give the app full name and a short name to appear under the icon. Then you list a set of icons at different sizes for different screens. Note that the three dots isn't part of the syntax. It just shows where we edited out icon data to make this fit the screen. The full name and the icon will also be used for the splash screen. You should also set the background color for this screen. You should always define the starting URL for your app. You can also control whether you show the URL bar or launch in full screen mode, and you can choose the screen orientation. There's one last thing. You can change the color of the app in the task switcher. This usually matches your background color. Safari on iOS was the first browser to allow full screen web apps back in 2007. It predates the manifest, so you can add these two meta tags to every page to use the full screen and to make the status bar translucent. Then users can bookmark your app to get an icon. But be careful. When you go full screen, you lose access to Safari's back button, so you will need to provide navigation inside your app. As of mid-2018, Apple was developing manifest file support, so it won't be long until you can use one standard across all browsers. Let's ask your customer whether they want to install an icon. Browsers that use the blank engine, such as Chrome, have an installation prompt that you can trigger. Your app has to meet two requirements. It needs a manifest with at least a 192 by 192 icon, and it needs to work offline. Let's talk about how to trigger the prompt. Some older versions of Chrome use a heuristic. Modern versions require you to explicitly show the prompt. Here's a technique that works on all versions. First, you need to listen for the before-install-prompt event and save the event. Then you need to show something on the screen that the user can click to indicate they want to install to the home screen. Chrome needs to see a user gesture at this point. Finally, take the saved event and call prompt on it. This is easier to understand with some code. First, we listen for the before-install-prompt event and save it. Call prevent default to keep early versions of Chrome from showing the prompt automatically. By the way, if you're wondering about the let keyword, it's an alternative to var. You can use var here if you prefer. Add a button, link, or icon to begin the installation process. Don't show a full-page interstitial or other elements that may be annoying or distracting. In some cases, you may want to wait before showing the prompt to the user so you don't distract them from what they're doing. For example, if the user is in a checkout flow or creating their account, let them complete that before offering the prompt. When you get a click-to-start installation, call prompt on the saved event. This must happen inside the user event handler. It will show a modal dialogue asking the user to add your app to the home screen. Then wait for the promise in the user choice property. It will complete once the user accepts or cancels the dialogue. You should then clear the saved event. Notice that we are looking at the outcome to log a message. This is optional, and you might use it for debugging or to fire an analytics event. Even if you don't check this, Chrome will do the right thing. Note that you can only call prompt on the deferred event once. If the user dismissed it, you'll need to wait until the before install prompt event is fired on the next page load. Speaking of analytics, you can listen for the app-installed event to detect that your PWA has been added to the home screen. Once you add this code, let's test it with Lighthouse. The user can be prompted to install the web app, audit, verifies if you have implemented before install prompt correctly. You can also look at the app manifest in the Chrome Developer Tools. Clicking Add to Home Screen will trigger the before install prompt event so you can test your workflow. Note, if the PWA criteria aren't met, Chrome will throw an exception in the console instead of firing the event. There are two more things you may want to add. One is to change the CSS if launched full screen. The other is to detect a full screen launch in code. You can use a media query in CSS or call match media in JavaScript to see if the display mode is set to standalone. Or you can do this in your manifest file by adding a query parameter to your start URL. This makes it easy to use analytics to see how many people are installing your PWA. If you start running into problems, check out the next episode for some troubleshooting tips. Otherwise, look at the rest of the videos to start becoming a PWA expert. Thanks for watching.