I'm tending to teach to this side, so I'm really aware that there's a whole group out there that, I guess it's because it's like that it is. So I must be more aware of that. I'm going to begin by getting some information over to you about the to diverse opinions concerning technology. ac rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio, dyna dyna'n gwneud i'r wych, ac rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n leithio'n gwneud i'nw'r bod i'n gweithio'n gweithio. Ond Neil Postman yw'r gweithio'n 60-lu sy'n tecno'n lleol iawn yn y cyllid o'r ymlawf, ac wrth i ddaethau, yn dweud i'r newid yr holl hwnnw a'u ffordd o'r lleolio traddithio'n gyffredigol. Mae'r cwntrall y rhaid yn ddweud i'r bywyd yma. Felly, ydych chi'n fwyaf amddai, yn y dyn ni, yn ystafell hwnnw, o'r teulu cyffinio a'r byw yn gweithio'n sgrifennu am y cyfnodol. A rydw i'n hynny ymweld yr ysgol yn y cyfnodol yn ei gweithio cyfnodol. Ond Llyriad, yn y ddwy'n gweithio, sy'n sefydlu sy'n golygu cyfnodol o'r newid yn ysgrifennu'n ddwyledd ac yn ymdweithio'n cyffinodol o'r newid o'r newid o'r creu'n gweithio'n ddwyledd o'r gweithio'n cyffinodol a gyda'r studiadau gwahanol i siŵr wrth iddo, dwi'n gwneud hyn, di'n rŵr? Having looked at that, if there's anything you would like to check up on, we have the references at the end and you can have a look at that at the luck of postman and Laurieard, but we'll go quickly on I think. We just didn't want to talk much about theory, so that was more or less it Now we will tell you who we are, how our co-operation has now begun, and then we will concentrate on fiddell conferencing and other activities that are connected to the programmes and courses we are involved in. I will quickly go to presenting my institution at Masaryck University, the second largest university in the Czech Republic. gyda ceisio roedd 50,000 o'r siwr, ac ydy'r Llangwt ddiddordeb yn ymdillag ymddillog. Oherwydd y gallwn ychydig wedi bod 9,000 o'r siwr. Wrth gwrs, oherwydd 100 o'r ddechrau. Felly, we teach English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Latin and Czech for Foreigners. And we're involved in activities of course of teaching in research. We specialize in these innovations, well use of ICT testing and European language portfolio. And then, we take part in a lot of projects. Some of them we're going to talk about. Aberystwyth, o Aber. I downloaded this. Aberystwyth University is located by the sea in one in three residents stay from the university. They come, they like it, they stay. The area has beautiful coastlines, beaches and mountains as well as a lively social scene. Within 130 years experience under internationally renowned research facilities, Aberystwyth is a great choice if you are serious about study and you don't mind living two and a half hours from civilisation. Our language centre is very small, even smaller since we now no longer do in sessionals but we concentrate on pre-university courses. The students in our classes are divided by language level and by special subject level depending on their intention to go to graduate or undergraduate courses. That's us. Okay and if you want to know how we got together, well it was through the RASMUS programme, European programme. First our students started to go to Aberystwyth and Aberystwyth students to Brno. The next year teaching mobility started and because we watched what the other teachers were doing, we were helping with feedback and also, well of course, did a lot of teaching and we realised that the team teaching could be a very nice idea. So the next step was to try to team teach in some new environment and that was video conferencing. That's why actually we started to work together. One of the first projects that we worked on was the Invite project. It was our first combined research project with funding coming from the EU. It was driven by business needs and of relevance for us is that the funding enabled us to begin our video conference and to move it forward in terms of the equipment that we needed and also the collaboration that we needed to get together for. This is a conference and through these and such other conferences we could present our collaborative findings and work as a team. This unified our teaching and learning and gave us an opportunity to host the Douglas conference in this year. Compact is a new project with EU funding, but specifically for the Czech Republic. Are we out of this this time? Yes. We'll just pay you. It's a huge over a hundred plus people involved in course development and other things and the leaders are from Masarick language department. So you're it. Are you? Yes. Okay. But why I'm interested is allows us through the funding to collaborate further and to keep on our small university, great huge university collaborative liaising. Okay. So that was let's say the introduction about we are how we started to work together, how it is possible that we could work together and that we hopefully will continue in this. And now we're getting to the second part for the most important one. And it is to look at video conference and as such, we will try to have a look at it from a lot of different perspectives. So we call it video conferencing. You will see that we will talk a lot of different activities around. But well, video conferencing would be the central focal point. If we should think about the aim of our courses, it is to develop language and communication skills in an intercultural setting in real situations. You will see through the seminar that we really tend to push everything towards reality so that we do not have any like active situations, but a real situation for them. And also the intercultural aspect is very, very important, especially for our university because we are in Central Europe, located, well, we are an interior country. So it means that if we get foreigners, they are mostly from surrounding countries or from the East, so we do not get that variety of cultures in classes is the situation that I burst with. Yes, so both our needs are satisfied really. In terms of style, we wanted our classes to become one class. We didn't want one over there, one over there, you taught, you taught, we wanted it to be one class. A virtual face-to-face. So we were looking at dispensing with that screen or being able to go beyond the screen and interact two dimensionally. The structure? Yes, just before I go to the structure, a very important thing here is that most of the tasks are student driven. Of course, we start with certain input at the beginning and encouragement, but more and more throughout the course, it is students who are actually dictating what is going to happen. And now I'm moving to the structure. We do a really wide range of activities and the structure can be from very traditional lectures to experimental asymmetric sessions. What we mean by asymmetric? Almost everything, because, for example, in Aberystwyth, the students there, they have 20 hours per week of English. Hours have two hours per week. They have, I mean of English, they have, let's say, a very different level of English than ours. Ours are already with certain academic expertise in Aberystwyth without pre-university students usually. Then, for example, the multicultural setting is completely different in Aberystwyth. Everybody is in English, well speaking environment, in very intercultural setting in Brno. It is completely different situation. So this asymmetry is so different. Also the institutions are very different. And we would just like to show you that despite all those differences, it is not that complicated, not that difficult to create a course that works and that can be fruitful for both ends. And then within that structure we divide our activities into two bigger branches. One of them is synchronous activities and we will talk about video conferencing, Skyping and face-to-face sessions. And the others are asynchronous activities and we will mention emailing, blogging, forums and Moodle. At this point it is very important to say that maybe you have noticed some of you who came before we started that there was a video conferencing session playing going on. So we record all the video conferencing sessions and students can access it online. So you can see this is last year thing like this is every other week. They had it in the first term and then in the second term every week. So whenever they, for example, miss a class, they do not understand something in the class or they need to come back to some discussion or something, they can always go back and they can see what was going on. And that's both ends. The students in Messerick, students in Aber can all access the online. Yep. OK. And now we will show you a few examples. When I said that the diversity of courses is really huge, then we'll show you a few things that are in our courses or that can appear in our courses. The first one that I'm going to show is a traditional lecture. If you think about traditional lecturing via video conferencing, there are basically two types. The first one is that there is one teacher at one end lecturing or giving a seminar to students at the other end. Or there can be a teacher at one end with their students at that end plus the students in the other end. OK. What we are going to show here is work with text. It's about argument effect here. The teacher chose the possibility that he was showing computer. Well, the presentation mode, what was the text was in the computer. So you will hear only his voice. And here you can see that this is the group of students listening to him. Now, we want to say that the quality, what you can see here, is much, much lower than in reality. I'm sure that those of you who are involved in video conferencing, you know that it's like almost face-to-face thing if you have these big images of your colleagues at the other end. And one important aspect is it's turning a private endeavour, writing, and the students usually have one teacher as their audience, as their reader, into a public domain. So everybody is looking at that. Everybody is having a say on what is happening. Now, all of this at this stage is what I would know for all given information. Information that you already know. And as we start the next paragraph, this approach to writing below, this is referenced to the given information. Now, where are you going to playing argument structures and drafting them, and anything that needs... Okay, I don't think we need to go on. Simply this is the very traditional, very basic use. But then we do a lot of other activities, and students, typically in our courses, they are taught how to give presentations, for example. So at the end of certain courses, they give their presentations, and they can choose what they would like to talk about and how they're going to talk about it. So what you will see is that a student who is... It was Jason. Yep, Jason from Hong Kong, who is giving his presentation, has chosen a different style that he was, of course, he wanted to show his PowerPoint presentation, but he also wanted to use his body language. So he just did it in this way. All his pictures were pretty big, so we could see everything. Of course, if you have different systems, you can have, like in one window, the person talking in another window, you can have a presentation going on, and in the third window, you can have, let's say, the audience, but it depends on the systems you are working with. Our system has... Both our systems have document cameras. You can put anything onto it. You can put anything onto it, press a button, and it goes directly to the other venue. So that you can have students reading off the same page. The computer, with one press of a button, it can go to the other venue and you see the computer. Jason didn't want just the computer, because usually you can't see his face. So he said, I'm going to do this. So he orchestrated this, I think. Yep. A cute girl showing her fists to you with words, say, M-D-M-A. It looks like a kids' TV program. Rotsi. And Lesiana would. This one, another Hawaiian girl. Looks quite sad, but I don't know why. Say, no drugs. If you think you can drop the drugs, go. I don't think so. OK. So you can see that you can be giving, again, traditional, let's say, PowerPoint presentations to others. Very important is to say that usually once they get used to video conferencing students, we try to build teams of both ends. That it is not that students at one end would be giving a presentation to students at the other end, but that the team that is going to give the presentation is composed of students of both ends together. So they have to cooperate together to prepare it, to distribute that, let's say, functions, the timing and everything. And then they go like one end, then the other end, one end, then the other end. Well, they simply have to organise it. Lots of social networking going on there with the various other forums. We'll show that later. Yes, we'll show that later. Now, a very important thing, as we said, that later on we are mostly student driven, the students can tell us, the teachers, whether they need our help or they don't. So when they are preparing their activities, it doesn't have to be just presentation, they can prepare anything they like, they just tell us, well, the topic will be like this, and could you do this for us or that for us, or they can just tell us, well, just wait and see. So you will just see here two examples. One is when students of Masarig University prepared an activity for students in Aberystwyth, and you will just see how they start this in the very beginning. Is everybody there? Yes, there are people here. Okay, try. Oh, it's missing. The student called Rock is missing. Well, that doesn't matter. And reading the questions for you, and showing them to you, so you can read them yourself as well. Okay, and then after that, you will have, like, a minute to discuss them, or think about them, and then we will start discussing them altogether. Okay, so you can see that this is not us teachers, well, presenting the things, but the students. You can see also that it's very important to say that students are very flexible. Whenever something doesn't work the way they've prepared, there is no problem for them to say, well, it doesn't matter, we'll do it differently. Well, we've prepared something, but let's do it differently. So, that's one of the aspects that's very good for us to know, or that we have the feeling that then we can be quite, well, we have to be flexible, but, I mean, we can be relaxed that we know that when something doesn't work that the students will say, okay, what shall I do now? I will do nothing. No, they will never do that. They will always try. I think an anecdote here is that you were very, or you said to me that, I think it was last year, that it's the only class that you teach where the students call you liable. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, it does lower any of the formality and the students become, we become part of the learning process, really. It's very important to say that in the Czech Republic, we are, I think, similar to other Central European countries, the teachers are called very formal way like Mr Teacher, or, in my case, it would be at university Dr Shtipanak. But, and they would never dare to call me liable in my, well, in Czech environment, but once we switch into English, because it's so real, and there is Janis, there is Joe, there is, well, there was Joe, there is John or somebody else, it is quite natural that they simply take the cultural aspect of it, and they call me liable. And then, after the session, when they switch into Czech, they go into Dr Shtipanak again, because it's a Czech environment. So, that's one thing that is very important about the culture, how it influences the reality of the situation, the culture, because when I teach the classes that are formal, well, the regular face-to-face sessions, they would never think of calling me liable, because it's the Czech setting, Czech group in Czech class, nothing changes, but in video conferencing, the culture changes. OK. Another example here, it's an example of the feeling of telepresence. We just said at the beginning that we wanted students to see, or to feel that this is one space, one class, but we never realised how easy again it is for them to feel this, because they were preparing their activities, and one of the activity was this group was presenting drama therapy, and I didn't know what they had prepared. So, at one point, they just said this, and we were, like, both teachers, were completely surprised that it is so easy, and you will see what I'm talking about. He was a little shocked here, he doesn't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on. We'll sort of make space here. Is it just for us or for them as well? No, we just want to make an imaging circle, so our group will make a half-of-circle, and your group will make a second half-of-circle. Okay, so it was as easy as that. I mean, you are, well, here, they are there, and if I, as a teacher, was thinking, well, how to make it real, how to make a circle or something, I would be thinking how to prepare them for it. No, just let's make a circle. We'll be half, and you will be another half, and it's as easy as that. And they were doing activities that one person was going after another, and it was really smooth that the last one in Bruno simply finished her activity, and the first one in Aberystwyth started was like in real circle. So it's great that we can actually rely on students that they can come up with any activity, and that's why we say that we feel that almost everything is possible through video conferencing. The only problem is we have to then, as teachers assess, whether it is effective for our course or for language learning or other activities, because many of those things are fun, great fun, and they say it's great, it's cool, it's great fun, but then we have to think, okay, it's good that it is fun, but do you learn, or how much do you learn in that process? Okay, then I'll just get very fast into the Skype talking. All of us know what Skype is. We use it for teacher-teacher communication when emailing is not enough, and we need to discuss something. Students use it again in the normal way. After the sessions, if they need to talk about something, they simply go to Skype or any other desktop video conferencing, and they discuss the things. It's different to video conferencing. Skype, you can see a picture and it goes over to your computer. It's ideal for one talking to one, but one talking to many or many talking to many, it's not an ideal use of technology, and we're aware of that. So if you're thinking, hey, wow, I could do this with my Skype, it could, but it wouldn't be as interactive, it wouldn't be as robust as it would be if you were video conferencing. First the quality is much lower, then you can hardly produce the sense of that one space there because the technical, let's say, solution is somehow different. This is just an example how we use it, simply if we need any experts or specialists coming to our classes, and they do not have video conferencing facility, we just use it through Skype that they are on Skype, and you can see that, well, this is the small group here of our students. It will never be as smooth as in video conferencing, but where you can see the faces in the group, in the class. Okay, I think it's done. There's no point in that, the key areas, I'm all a little confused about the open spaces of the... Okay, I just will. All of us know Skype things. Yes, definitely. Let's do you get the idea that I know all about this, and I know how to put in plugs and do all this, and that, oh gosh, how do you start that? Don't think that I'm a techie, or that even, Libor is a techie. Studied history. We're not, we really are not, we're trying to understand how best people learn and what best fits that learning environment. And when mistakes happen, when we crash things and we can't get online, we've rolled with the blows so that we're no longer, well, I don't think, are we scared? Well, no. No, not always. Maybe not always. So we have classes between the video conferences, so we have a class to prepare for the video conference, and then we have our video conference. Mainly, I think we developed because the level of student understanding is quite less, is a lot less, actually, than in the Masarick University. And when we're giving our in-class, initially the students online were very reticent. They were, oh wow, and wouldn't speak, and oh look what I look like. And so it took away from that one class. So we bought this neat piece of kit. Has everyone seen a flip? This is so easy to use. That's it on. You flip at the side there. That tells you you're ready. This then tells you it's filming. And you can say, hello everybody, how are you? And the students can then interact with that. They can start and say what they think. And then that comes off and it's simple. Play it back. And if you want to play it back, using the computer or using large screen, it's this, jam it in there, the students see themselves. So they get that, they get feedback and they can go into tutorials and they can see all this happening. Sorry, Libor. Okay, so we're not showing the videos. So maybe we'll get some videos of the students because with them, because it is such a non-invasive instrument that students easily forget about its presence. And then when they see themselves, they can analyse what's going on a bit more easily than if they see themselves in huge screens and they're just really thinking about the camera, which is there. And you can see the students are not really aware that they're on screen anymore. Okay, so this would be the synchronous activities we are using in our courses. Now let's move to the asynchronous activities. And the first is emailing. Of course, we don't have to talk about the fact that we all are using email. This is just two things that we want to say. As teachers, you have to be ready for an enormous frequency of emailing within that team teaching, especially in times at the beginning of the course when you have to discuss what actually is going to happen and then usually before the class and after the class. You can say I just want to show you the world, this is two days in November, the fourth and the fifth, okay? And there are 11 messages from Janice, probably 11 from me too, to Janice. So it's just that day when we have a video conference or the day before or the day after when we need to organise everything. So as teachers, if you are going to use it, be ready for this excessive emailing sometimes. It is our lifeline. It's when we email each other sometimes in a panic. What happened today? Where were your students? And we could get online. Oh yes, someone stole one of the computers so they locked us out and we couldn't get in. That's why you couldn't get hold of us today. So all these kind of things are emailed and we keep them and we use them as our research to take it on, to say what should we do in the case of. So emails are very, very important part of our course. And we can also, for example, check, what were we doing last year this time? Are we at the similar stage or are we doing completely different things? So this is about teachers, about students. We can't say what's going on whether they email or not. If they email, it's good but we do not know anything about it. And because we would like to know what they do, sometimes we also need to evaluate their writing skills. So we needed a different space or different environment and we started to experiment with blogs. So as you can see, the blogs we were using in 2006 and 2007, it has certain advantages and certain disadvantages. Yes, one of the advantages was that the students were reacting and interacting with each other. It was, they set up their own blog and they started to use it formally and informally for things that we had asked them to do and also to hush around, I guess. And it was the informal formal that really was problematic for us, I think. Yes, yes. The problem was that, for example, we set a task or something and or they were to write something which is meant to be formal and then immediately they, for example, switched into where is it, yes, pictures of Thai food and you were as a teacher, you were simply looking for the things which were like the task that the students were supposed to do but of course you didn't mind these activities but we wanted a more organised space. We needed to assess. We needed to use that as an assessment tool and it wasn't really happening. Yes, that was one thing. Another thing is that blogging is not meant a tool for group communication at one time. So, for example, after a session, when students got all of them and logged in, well, the blog didn't accept it so it's collapsed and all the students were writing, well, it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And we just logged in a few hours later and said, no, it works, everything is okay. It's only when, I don't know, 20 or 15 people or 30 getting in there. And it was a public domain meaning that anyone could react to it. So it was really hard work getting through to find out what we needed to assess the students. So that's why we started to use forums which was an improvement in that way that saw in that respect that we definitely knew what was for us and what was not for us. It felt like a blackboard. Yeah, well, I don't know maybe. Definitely at this point, it was, for example, when a summary writing was assigned, I knew when I entered this thread I could see that students were writing their paragraphs summaries of the discussion. I knew that I didn't have to get into that thread because, well, party, they are organizing a party, it's great, but I don't have to be involved. Also, but what we found was very good that, as we said at the beginning, in video conferencing, we do not deal only with video conferencing but our aim was to develop all the communication skills. And we realized that other students are using all those communication tools. They may not be effective in using them. And we could see that, for example, this is a group comparing fairytales in different cultures and we could see what different students did. We asked them or we told them that if they want us before their presentation to know, well, if they want us to know something, they can post all those materials there and we will read it before the session and they can rely on the fact that we know about it. So some of the students, for example, sent just a, well, just a Georgian tale so that we would read that and that would be enough. But others, for example, would produce this. Okay. So then when we analyzed it, so, well, do you think that students would simply sit before your presentation go through all of those links to watch all of those fairytales that are accessible online? Was that a realistic situation? Then, of course, after the analysis, she realized that, yes, that is why nobody actually got to those links because, yeah, that's what students do. And we could also see a very good example here, for example, Masahiro and his Japanese fairytales. There is a very short introduction of the characteristics, very short fairytale and two links. Simply very realistic, yes, students read it, students knew everything what they needed to know. So it was also very good for the analysis that the students could look at, okay, this works. Everybody was reading this, but nobody was going into those hundreds and hundreds of links. Okay. So that was very good. Also, we use it, and I'm not going to get in there now. With forums, you can use it in more advanced tasks like peer reviews, for example, that they have that we use it with both graduates when they read their texts or abstracts and then the others peer review and comment on that. So the forums prove to be very good, but there is one big but on forums, you need administrator because it is not just you as a teacher who could be administrating the thing. Well, you could, but it's completely different kind of work. So the first thing was about, well, our administrator was funded from the project. The Masaric University forum is funded by the Masaric University, so it's no problem, but we need it again something more complex. And that's why we tried, and it was last year, we tried virtual learning environment model. I don't know if... Five minutes, thank you. That some of you may know what it's enabled, let's say, oh, sorry, was a wide range of activities. Could you just say a few things I would get in there? Yeah, the Moodle also needed an administrator, but it was more organised, it was more teacher friendly, so that we could get in and we could have a look at what the students were doing. They could interact with it, they could add things that or they could be, they could go to some of the assignments, they could go to getting to know your place, they could go to some of the lectures that we had, we'd get Hofcedr and culture and stereotypes and they could go in there and interact with those, so it was really good. Unfortunately, Aberystwyth had a bit of a meltdown with its computers and they're putting an enormous firewall, so at the moment we have to send everything to Libor and he has to put it on, which is a bit unfortunate, but I still prefer it, I still prefer it to any of the other social networking things that we've had. So, for example, what we do more than in the forums, we can say that it is wiki activities or web quests and other things, but those of you who know these virtual learning environments know that, well, there are a lot of more activities we can use. Okay. So, you can see from all the things that we do that the video conference is not a standalone, it's not something that is video conferencing, it's all intertwined and fluid with all the other social networking tools. It just can't be on its own without your email, it can't be without a forum so the students can be in touch after, so all that goes together to make some hole out of the experience of sharing and having a virtual classroom. And if you ask what students think about it, most of them or most of the feedback is really positive. Usually at the beginning, all of them are very conscious about their looks mostly. Then sometimes you can see that they're complaining about the shortage of time. They have, for their speaking, talking sometimes. Usually later on they just think, okay, teachers, just leave. We can do it ourselves and we can just enjoy it and we don't need you at all. But mostly what is positive that it is a lot of things about those cultural differences. They share ideas, then compare cultures and it is very much important really for Masaruch University. But also sometimes they say, yes, it's very good that we talk and write in our, let's say informal environment but it is, well... At a high level of English, yes. And recently it's been, for the first time last year when they were saying, well, it will actually be very good for our CVs that we have the skill that we can feed our conference. Cos we didn't say that they actually go and they run the video conference. They're training and then they invite people to produce the video conference and to participate. So they do get practical info. So this is more or less it. We wanted to share the wide range of activities we've been working on. And if you are interested you can of course ask many questions we can go into. We can go into detail in any aspect of this. Just one last comment is about future ideas. Yes, we are in contact through diverse and through the various tech educational conferences we're in touch with more people and we're going to try and move out of just the two of us. I think you've already done that. You're in Quebec already aren't you? And so these, we're going into other places to get other places online. So that's something that we're doing and particularly through diverse. For the video conference setup in Japan, Korea and China where a lot of our students come from we'd love to video conference especially for students coming in. What do they need to know? What's the need? How can we ease them in? But the time difference is becoming a huge problem. But we've tried with time difference like workable time difference is nine hours is the maximum we tried because it's like a big, well morning nine-ish in that's one zone and let's say seven in the afternoon well in the evening in the other zone for example in our country seven o'clock in the evening is still okay for having a class so that the nine hours difference is not a terrible problem. Well we hope our passion has transferred into you and that it was transparent that we're very excited about this and that you will also catch the bug and want to do it. Any thing else? Very much.


Welcome, Gisie Roberts. She's a graduate student with the University of Missouri. She's going to talk to you about a survey of relationships among rare breeds of swine. And I'll let you introduce yourself, at least briefly. Well, good morning. My name is Gisie Roberts. I am a graduate student here at the University of Missouri. Today, I'll be presenting part of my research, which was funded through a graduate student grant from SAIR. And we'll be looking at relationships among rare breeds of swine and also the importance of those relationships. So I'll start off with a little bit on breed diversity. Currently, there are over 70 different breeds of pigs around the world. However, in the US, with the advancement of vertical integration within the industry, the actual number of breeds that currently used on large scale production is very low. There's about seven that are very popular. And that's driven by consumer demand for a lean, uniform product. And so the Yorkshire or the Large White, Landrace, Chester White, Durrock, Berkshire, Hampshire, and Spot are the seven breeds currently used by most large scale operations. So the American Livestock Breed Conservancy recognizes that breed diversity is an important aspect of livestock production. And so they were founded to protect rare breeds of livestock and poultry. So they are working to protect approximately 180 different livestock and poultry breeds. So the main reason we're interested in breed diversity is to preserve genetic diversity. So industry breeds, since they're raised for a similar purpose, they share similar genetic makeup. They're bred to thrive in a specific environment, which is mainly a confined feeding operation. The less popular breeds and also the older heritage type breeds and some rare breeds that we're going to talk about are generally more genetically diverse. And therefore, they're able to tolerate varied living conditions, harsh environments. They are more disease-resistant and more self-sufficient, requiring less management in general. Also, many of these less popular breeds and older breeds have many unique traits that are not found in industry breeds. And so the ALBC lists seven critical swine breeds. They're defined as critical as having fewer than 200 registered each year in the US. And so from this list, we selected three that we felt we had the best ability to gain access to for DNA samples. So we selected the guinea hog, the Asaba Island, and the red wattle. And today, we'll actually be focusing on the research involving the guinea hog. So guinea hogs are characterized as small, hardy pigs. They're mature sizes around 100 pounds. They are excellent foragers. And they're also characterized by a high-fat content, which is one of the reasons maybe they're less popular because the industry looks for a lean pig today. They are good for subsistence farming due to their small size and their ability to thrive in harsh environments or where there's very rough forage. The Asaba Island hog comes from an isolated feral herd on Asaba Island. They are also a small, hardy pig, mature size about 100 pounds.  And it is this reason that they're actually a good model for non-insolent, dependent diabetes in humans. Red wattle are actually very large pigs, 600 to 800 pounds. I believe I saw some out there. They're also very hardy. And they're characterized by a rapid growth rate in comparison to other rare breeds or heritage-type breeds. They have a lean, tender, flavorful meat and a mild temperament. So some challenges of conserving these breeds are that they aren't as popular and this is due to consumer demand for a lean, uniform product. And many of these breeds are characterized by a small carcass, high-fat content and a relatively slow growth rate. They also, the breed population is fairly small for most of these. So it's difficult for farmers to find the animals to purchase if they're wanting to raise them. Also, there aren't as many small pig farmers due to the more intensive management that pigs require as compared to, say, a small beef cattle farm. Also, the small herd size, so many of these farmers that are raising them have very small herds as compared to large confined feeding operations. So there can also be a lack of pedigree information on these pigs. Many of these are very old heritage-type breeds. When they were initially founded, there maybe wasn't a formal breed organization so we don't have a lot of that paperwork to trace their history back. And due to this lack of pedigree information, we get reduced genetic diversity because we're breeding very small populations. We get a lot of inbreeding. And so not knowing the relationships of the animals makes planning matings very difficult and ultimately reducing breed viability over time. So inbreeding is just defined as a high level of homozygosity, so there's more of the same kinds of alleles in the population. So this allows undesirable or lethal alleles to be expressed within a population and they can also become more concentrated within the population. And having more of similar alleles reduces genetic diversity and then ultimately in the long term reduces breed viability. So the objective of this research project is to determine relationships among rare breeds of pigs when the pedigree data is incomplete or unknown. To give farmers a better plan for mating in order to reduce inbreeding. And then ultimately we'd like to compare the rare breeds to each other and to industry breeds in order to see which are the more genetically diverse, which are more similar to industry breeds and how they all relate to each other. So the method of analysis consists of collecting DNA samples in the form of hair samples from each of the three breeds we've selected. We really only need 10 to 11 animals per breed to get a basic idea of the breed relations to each other. And then obviously if we wanted to look into more of how individuals are related to each other, well we'd need DNA samples from each of those individuals. And then the samples are then genotyped at gene seek and then when we get that data back we can then determine the relationships from the genotypes. So which is a quick little genetics review. So DNA is composed of four nucleotides, represented as A, T, G and C. And the sequence of these nucleotides and the DNA is important because the sequence is what codes for different genes. So in pigs we have 38 pairs of chromosomes. So there are two forms of the gene, one form of, so each chromosome has one form of the gene on it. And so those two forms could be the same or they could be different. So let's say we have a form A, which is allele A and a form B, allele B. And so then the animal's genotype is determined by which alleles it carries. So in this diagram we have, so each of these represents a chromosome. And so on this chromosome we have an allele for purple flowers and on this chromosome an allele for white flowers. And then we also get into dominance and recessive. So if purple flowers was dominant, then the flower would be purple. So in this case we have a heterozygous individual, right? Because it has one copy of each allele. Homozygous would mean that it has two forms of the same allele. So we would get A, A, or this would be purple, purple or white, white, or B, B. So therefore there are three possible genotypes. So how this relates to what we're doing is we're looking at single nucleotide polymorphisms. So the nucleotides again are the base pairs in the DNA. And so a SNP is what it's called is when a change occurs in a single nucleotide in the DNA. And so this then creates two different forms of an allele. So we'd have an A allele or a B allele. And in this picture you can see we have the sequence of DNA and then here we have a change. So this would be the SNP giving us one form of the allele that will have a T and the other form would have a C. So we would expect that related individuals would have a similar genetic makeup, meaning they would have more SNPs, more alleles in common. So we use the swine 60K SNP chip, which means that we're genotyping over 60,000 sites across three billion base pairs in the DNA. And so the genotypes come to us in a spreadsheet and they're coded as A for homozygous, H for heterozygous, and B for the other homozygous form. And so then with this in matrix form, we can, the SNP data can be used to measure levels of hetero or homozygosity in the animals. So this is an example of just a short, very small piece of a larger spreadsheet, right? So across the top, these are all different SNPs. And so this would extend for 60 plus thousand, right? It's a giant spreadsheet. And in this case we just have, these are all the animals though that we looked at. These are all guinea hogs. And so you can see in like that first column, they all have the same allele at that location. They're all homozygous for the B form of that gene. And then in the next column, we see that well all of them are alike, except for Samson, he's heterozygous. So you can see that just, I mean just looking at this, that he's less related to the rest of them than they are to each other. And then here we have Houdini, who's the odd one out with a heterozygous and the rest being homozygous. And then we have Houdini and Samson. In this case, both have a heterozygous genotype, whereas the rest are all homozygous. So this is what I'm looking at across all 60,000 SNPs, right? So through calculations, I don't go through each one individually like that would take forever. But we get a count of similar homozygous alleles, right? Because that's what we're interested in. We wanna know what the homozygosity is because that indicates a reduction in genetic diversity and indicates an increase in levels of inbreeding. So we're assuming that a higher number of similar alleles between two individuals would indicate a closer relationship. And so through some calculations, we can ultimately express this as a proportion or a percentage of shared alleles based on the total, out of the total number of SNPs. So we can see highlighted in yellow. So this is the diagonal of the matrix. And those numbers indicate the proportion of homozygosity within an individual animal. So like the first wort, Sidesau, he, or she maybe, has 74% homozygosity in the SNPs that we're looked at. So 74% of the alleles are homozygous. And then you can see that for Samson, he has a much lower level of homozygosity with only about half of his alleles being homozygous. So then if we look at some of these other numbers, so these all indicate, all of these numbers on the off diagonal indicate the percentage of similar alleles, homozygous alleles between individuals, right? So for the big old stiff bore and wort, Sidesau, they share 62% of their alleles are similar. Whereas if we look at Samson and wort, Sidesau, only just under 30%, just a pretty big difference. So based off this, our initial step was to just put them into families, kind of not very precise as far as the relationships between individuals, but just to get an idea of how these order out into some families. So we based this off of ones that had higher numbers of shared alleles. So again, this didn't give us precise levels of relatedness, but I could tell you that family two is much more closely related to each other than they are to the individuals in family four. So from this, just from those animals, we came up with five different families. But then the producer that we were working with, we wanted to be able to tell him, like, you know, Samson and family one actually is related to members of family four. Because from this, you might think that we have five completely unrelated families, and that's not necessarily the case. So in order to kind of calibrate our system and calculate more precise relationships, we took a sampling of pigs with known relationships. So I had full pedigrees on these pigs and they were actually industry breeds. And so we calculated both the relationships of the pigs based off of the pedigree and then also had them genotyped and calculated the relationships based off of what I showed you with the genotype, with the SNP data. And so from that, we were able to kind of create a formula and plug in the number of shared alleles from the guinea hogs into this formula and come up with more precise relationships. So in this case, now when we see a decimal place of like 0.5 or around 0.5, that indicates that the animals have a relationship, yes. Oh, thank you. Similar to a sibling or a parent offspring relationship. So here we can kind of see that we have fairly high levels of, you know, there are a lot of numbers over 0.5. So we have a lot, there's some levels of inbreeding, right, if we have animals that have a greater relationship than full siblings or parent offspring. But then we also see, we have some that aren't unrelated. Samson is unrelated to see more. So with some research, I was actually able to find a partial pedigree for these guinea hogs. So here's what I constructed from what I found and a little example, family tree. And just from this, you can already see there's some inbreeding present as DNC George and DNC Chunky are half siblings. So this is kind of an example of the calculations of the relationships based just off the pedigree using all the animals. And I've highlighted the animals that we actually have the SNP data for. So here in this table, we just did like the pedigree, the calculated relationship of the pedigree versus what we came up with with our SNP calculation. And in many cases, the actual relationship from the SNP is higher than what we expected based on the pedigree. And this is due to incomplete pedigrees, right? And our SNP information is very helpful for producers because based off a pedigree, we might think that Settie Lilly and the big boar are not very related at all. But then we look at our SNP relationship and it's 0.83. So you would, without expecting to, you would get a very high level of inbreeding within the offspring of that paring. So our future work will be to determine the relationships in the Asaba Island and the red waddle pigs and then how those relate to the guinea hogs and each other, comparing SNPs across breeds. And we'd also like to compare these to industry breeds to get a more complete picture of the origin of these breeds and see how maybe these heritage breeds way back have actually influenced industry breeds today. And then we'd like to provide this information to producers so that they can reduce possible matings that would increase inbreeding within the breed and others that are interested in the conservation of these breeds. So I'd like to thank Sarah for providing the funding for this research and the working with ALBC, Jeanette Merringer and Allison Martin and then my professor, Dr. Bill Lamberson, the producers who provided samples, Cheryl Fanning, Kevin Fahl and Robert Long and then some graduate students. And I'll take any questions. Yeah, Chester White, no, they're actually, yes, he's asking if the Tamworth, the Horford and the Chester White how they rank or considered rare breeds. Chester White is not, it's a very popular breed used extensively in the industry. Horford and Tamforth, I believe are considered rare. I don't know as far as like the level of rare, but yes, they're considered rare. Yes. How many years till the research is available or? Well, we've already had this information out to the producer that provided the samples. So he's been able to, yes, yeah, yes. Yes, we're actually, we're gonna work with extension and have the information available to anybody that wants it. I mean, if you wanted this, you could have it, but all we really have that's really ready is just these few animals from the guinea hogs. But yeah, if you wanted the information on the guinea hogs, you could, it would depend on money for it, or if you had money available to pay for the genotyping, then, I don't know, a few months you could have the information.


What's the word y'all? Every single Playoffs series has played at least one game and I'm here to talk all things Playoffs ladies and gentlemen. My original schedule was to drop a Playoff Prediction video the day before the actual Playoffs, but these came up. So I couldn't record that video, but now I can. So I do still have my original predictions. None of that have really changed, but I will be talking about some of the things I saw in the Game Ones around here, but I will be honest with you. Some of these games I got close to like no eye time with in the live setting. I did watch some condensed versions, watched some highlights and stuff, but this weekend was a very eventful one for me. Became a father, still very weird to say it out.  You got this tiny human you gotta care for. Basketball was one of the last things on my priority list, but I did get around to watching at least a little bit. Like I said, my overall predictions for series were not swayed based on the one single game, but I just wanna talk some hoops with y'all, baby. Get back in the swing of things. All right, so I'm actually gonna start off with today's games because those are the ones that is on my mind, like Chris Paul just took over fourth quarter and I'm super excited about that. Sons and fives is my prediction for that. It's not a lot to really say about this series other than the Sons are just a more complete better basketball team. And you saw a lot of that in the first half of this where Pelicans put up 32 points in the first half. The defense was locked in. And the third quarter, the Pales made that run though, it turned into like from a 20 point game to a single digit game. You got some CJ, you got some Brandon Ingram. And then Chris Paul was like, oh, I'm gonna do my thing and take over this game. I love the players. We talked about them extensively after they're playing games. I love a lot of the players and the Pelicans, but I don't believe that they have enough firepower to make this a super interesting series. But I do give them one game mostly because they do have a bunch of bucket hitters. I can see Brandon Ingram having a 35 piece and then CJ McCullum also having 30. And then Jonas Vallon soon as also has a really big game and boom, they just stole the game. But overall, the likelihood of this series going any other direction other than the Sons is like 2% it feels like. Let's get the bullsmen out of the way. People are like, oh, this got the feel of a good old fashioned 90s. No, it didn't. Just because the score is low don't mean it feel like the 90s. In the 90s, they steal his shots. No, nobody could do anything today other than Jonas. Jonas looked like a guy that was an NBA player going into the YMCA. And now if you look at the stat line, he finished running 27, but I promise he was the most dominant 27 we've seen in a very long time. Ah, I wanted this one so very bad. You know what I'm saying? I got my C rare shirt on. I put my daughter in a shirt that say, watching the bulls with daddy or something like that. It was fire.  Let's go Chicago. Even though I believe that majority of people on panels are like bucks and four, bucks and four, bucks and four, which I completely understand. The bulls haven't beat the bucks in the last 13 times when Jonas is playing, which is a crazy statistic in itself. And then on the broadcast, they said something like the bulls are one in 18 in the last 19 games against the bucks. I'm like, bro, we get it. You feel me? People understand the bulls can't beat the bucks. We get it. You don't have to keep rubbing it in. So my initial prediction was like, can I get the bulls to win one game? This was the game, y'all. This was the game they should have won. The bucks struggle in game ones. It's just a fact. They even talked about it on the broadcast. The only reason they won last year's game one is because Christmas doesn't hit a buzz be there. They struggle in game ones. And both of these teams, a lot of the teams you've saw select some somewhat bad basketball because a lot of these teams haven't played in a week because we had to wait for the play in, then wait for travel. We got to do all of this stuff. And you can tell the bulls, big three, got awful. 24%, 33%, 32%. That's bad. But if you look on the other side, the bucks, big two, or the other two other than Yanis, 30%, 37%. This was the game. If there was going to be a game for the bulls to win, this was the one. I don't see a scenario where Chris Middleton, Andrew Halle continue to shoot 30% from the field. But you can also say on the flip side, you don't see a scenario where DeMar DeRosa shoots 24%. Or you see a situation where the starting center is shooting 33% for the bulls. I can see that happening again. I can't because I've seen it happen a couple of times. I've just seen something similar. And exactly in this first playoff game, there was a lot of nerves for this bulls team. And they have this reputation against good teams. Obviously, everybody knows statistics because StatMuse tweets it every damn day when the bulls lose a game. They struggle against good teams. Like, really, really struggle. Historically bad against good teams. And in those games, they always struggle out the gate. And they did that. I think it started off 9-0 run. I'm tweeting live, tweeting games again. It's so much fun because I believe that majority of people understand when I'm joking and when I'm not. And I say majority of people because it can't be everybody. This just felt like the one that they could win. But they started off very, very slow. The nerves are probably at an all-time high. You got to think about it. Some of these players have never played playoff basketball at all. And Zach Lavigne just broke a record of, or I guess not the record. He was the longest active NBA player to not appear in the playoffs. It's over. I hope that next game, we get more Iowa DeSumo because he played a big part in this season. And I know for the second half of the season, he wasn't as good as the first half. Regardless, he provides some defense. And I think that the defense for the bulls was pretty solid today. Again, a lot of people were just missing shots, too. But I thought the defense was better than what I think a lot of people expected it to be. I would love Patrick Williams to not pass up wide open three-pointers anymore and just let it fly homie. Nobody else on the team was in the shot.  We shot 19% from three. 19%, 32% from the field as a team. But my miss you thing was bucks and five. But since the bulls didn't win this one, where it felt like the bucks were bad, I don't know, bro, I'm going to keep my original thing. But I would not be surprised if it was a real life bucks and five. I'm probably the best, not probably. The best game of the day was bucks, I'm sorry, Boston versus the Brooklyn Nets. Wow, wow, wow. I think I've mentioned this a few times on the channel and on the podcast. This has been my most anticipated series because we got two teams that I honestly believe have enough talent to make the big run and we're getting it in the first round. A two seven nonetheless, in the first round. And like I said, I'm somewhat of a net skeptic. I do believe that they have the talent to do it, but would they be able to do it? I always bit iffy about that. And this game they ended up losing on dramatic fashion. What a possession for the Boston South. Shout out to E-Made for not calling time out. I love when coaches understand that their players run off these things and like, they had been running with the Brooklyn Nets all day long. He's like, let them run this break, let them run this break. And listen, Draymond Green made this tweet during the game or after the game. And me and the homies literally said the exact same thing it was watching. Hold on, let me find this tweet. So his tweet says, and there's the difference in the Celtics team. Last year, Marcus Smart would have taken that shot.  Beautiful. Looking like a true point guard again. That's what made him special. And me and the homies, of course, we'd be live watching a lot of these games. We all say as something along the lines of, I cannot believe Marcus Smart did not take that shot. Not just because it's Marcus Smart, but considering, you know how much awareness you have to have to see two people sprinting at you. And you obviously know that the time is going down to see two people sprinting at you and to make the extra pass.  And again, it is Marcus Smart too. I mean, he was having a very good game for him not to let it fly. It's just beautiful basketball. Tatum said afterwards, hey, that was just a layer for me. I didn't really have to do much. This was a dog fight. This was a great game and I cannot wait to get six more of these because my prediction has been Boston and seven. And I know a lot of people pick Brooklyn, I'm not mad at you. Brooklyn had to tell me. We saw today, carry Irvin, basically be a perfect basketball player on the offense side of the ball. Defense is always gonna be if you would carry, but I can't even be mad at him.  But I will be mad if you take the possessions off if it is the last two possessors of the game because Jaylen Brown got a very easy bucket late in this one. And that last possession, I know they were throwing doubles at everybody, because they were trying to either get the ball out of the hands, make them force a turnover, make them think that the time is running out enough that they got to jack up a shot. But the defense for the Brooklyn that's down to stretch was not as good as you want it to be, obviously was rounded a lot of yapping and these interviews before this series started, then do a damn thing. He actually in his 36 minutes, he felt somewhat of a liability, which is crazy because for the last three months, he has been very, very good for them. And listen, I saw some people had a nerve. Oh my God, I'm not, I would never say something like, I felt like I sounded like Stephen A. Smith and I would never want to do that. People who have the nerve to say, ah, I don't know if Ben should come back. Hello? I love Bruce Brown, bro. I like, I've been on the Bruce Brown bandwagon since Detroit. I understand how good he can be. But in a game like this, this is where you need Ben Simmons. The defense was skeptic, the defense was bad. The defense was bad and the rebounding was worse. Brucey, love him. He's a plus rebounder, a six for guard, power forward center, but Ben would help on that glass and they let Al Horford do his thing on that glass. Then you, Tyce, was not bad on the glass. I cannot believe there are people that I really believe in that Ben Simmons would not be upgrade over the four minutes you got of Kessler, I was no disrespect to the Rook. But like taking a couple minutes away from Brucey, taking some minutes away from drumming or even clacks who had a good game, but he just can't hit free throws. It's crazy for me to think that that won't be the case. And I also would love to see some Lamarcus algeous minutes in game two. I'm not saying he got to play 40, but I would love to see what he may decide to do with Lamarcus in the game. He's slower, he's worse on defense than a lot of the players on the team, but his little mid range jump sides, offensive firepower could help a little bit. Open the game up a little bit more for Kyrie. If there is any silver lining for the Brooklyn United they lost in a buzzer beater in the game where Kevin Arrant might have had his worst playoff basketball game of all time. One of his worst games of all time. So there is some bright spots like, hey, we were in this game where we really only had Kyrie Irvin going against the entire city of Boston, literally the whole city of Boston. I'm still rockin' my initial pick, which was Boston in seven. Did I tell you that I'm just a dude with a microphone so you might disagree with everything I say, but that's completely okay, cool. The last game for today was his Heat vs. Hawks game where I probably got five minutes of watch time on. And it was mostly because we were getting discharged from the hospital, you don't care about the type of stuff. So I didn't get to watch this game. But when I saw this box score and saw that Trey Young was one for 12 with six turnovers and that Bogey, Bo Young, no Bo, Bogdan Bogdanovich was over eight, I almost lost my mind. You cannot tell me these two dudes shot one of 20 from the field. You can't tell, you could not have convinced me that was even possible. And I know that Heat defense is one of the best in the league and I commend them for that. But I would even, I didn't even think it was gonna be eight points for Trey Young is wild. Him score under 10 points in a playoff game is wild. And I did watch the first two minutes of it maybe. And him and Jimmy Butler got into each other's face. And people on Twitter was like, oh, I love villain Trey Young. And look, I do too, but the villain got packed up today. If he a villain, the movie ended with him getting arrested, it's over with. You know what I'm saying? He's in Gotham Asylum right now. Kevin Knox, give Kevin Knox real minutes. Shout out to the Miami Heat, man. Debo going out there and hitting eight threes is crazy. I doubt Debo's gonna do that again. He is a very good player, obviously, one of the greatest shooters in the league, even though this was somewhat of a down year for him. I don't expect him to hit eight more next game, but who really knows? Maybe Debo's has found that spot. I don't expect Trey Young and Bogey to shoot one for 20. And I think that the travel thing was big for them too. I think they got into Miami at 3.30 a.m. the day before and a lot of stuff. And I don't know, I still, my initial pick was Miami in six because I still do believe that Atlanta has enough to maybe still a game or two, but not having a Clint Capella is real rough. But I still believe they can win a game or two, but regardless, Miami's probably gonna win that series. All right, let's get to yesterday's Slater Games. Ooh, yesterday's Slater Games was kind of solid, bro. And I'm going in the reverse order, too. The Warriors win 123 to 107. And then you know who we gotta talk about. You know, the splash nephew, the boy that took Steph Curry, started spotting his plan. Steph Curry had to come off the bench in like a decade. And they were cool with him not even having a good game because Jordan Poole is that guy. And Clay Thompson hitting some of his first shots of the game after missing playoff basketball since 2019, bro. It was so wild. There's so many stories here. And my initial thing here says, Warriors in six, I did believe that Yoakich can wield them to a couple victories. And even during my green set after the game that he wouldn't put past that Yoakich might have a 40 point triple double next game because he's angry at the performance from his team. But I like the way Steve Kerr and Dremont Green decided to do this thing, bro. I love the way they did it because listen, there's not a lot of people in the league that can stop a guy like Yoakich, right? Dremont could slow bro down. And he did. They packed up this paint and they realized that the supporting Cavs was Montaimors. Will Barnes had a really good game for his tennis. Defense was good. He hit his shots. But Montaimors, Will Barnes, Aaron Gordon and Jeff Green. Okay, we're gonna let y'all try to beat us. And if y'all do, perfect. That's okay. But the likelihood of that happening is very low. So we're gonna pack this paint. Yoakich has not hit a three pointer in like a month, it feels like. I mean, he's a good three point shooter. But in the last month, I think he's shooting 15% from three. He can't hit those. So they packed the paint and was like, Yoakich, if you're gonna beat us, you gotta get super physical. And Dremont Green is all about his physicality. And they had a good defensive game plan and then they had Jordan Poole turning into the player that he is. They actually had the top three candidates for most improved player come out today. So surprised that Jordan Poole didn't make top three. I understand even my own personal battle they had like seven different players on this. I understand why, you know, some people can't make the cut. But performances like this is why I'm just like enamored by the amount of effort and work that goes and that went into Jordan Poole. Whether it be him by himself or the Warriors organization as a whole, he has blossom, bro. He was in the G. He was in the G last year. Think about that. He was in the G league last year and he's starting in a playoff game and dropping 30 confident 32 meme in the whole way. You know what I'm saying? He's going to be a lot of people's favorite player based off that alone. Whenever the cameras on him, he got a face. He's making a face. You know what I'm saying? And you, you got to love that. So I'm still going with the Warriors Grinch game. Oh man, let's talk about this four or five matchup out East and this is 76 versus Raptors. This one right here was a tough one to make a prediction about. Mostly because I thought that the, that the Toronto Raptors matched up very well against the 76ers. You know what I'm saying? Everybody in the team is like six, eight massive wingspans. They get in the passing lanes. I think Gary Trent and Fred Van Vleet, both were top five in deflections. They got Scotty B. They got Pascal and they got, even though they don't have a single person that can stop Joel and B, they have so many different looks that they could throw at them. But even with that being said, they still, the 76 still have Joel and B. And though James Harden might not have the step that he had two years ago, three years ago, he still can play at a high level when he did that. So I saw a lot of people making the, I don't even want to call it a hipster pick because it's more than that. Because the Raptors are actually a really good team. There's a reason it's a four or five matchup. So it's not a hipster pick if you thought, or you think that the Raptors will win this series. But I still went with the team that I thought had the better top-end talent. And that would be the 76. But I did go all the way to seven with it. I don't know if it will be seven because now Gary Trent is questionable or doubtful. Scotty Barnes tweaked that ankle and oh my God, I hate it to see that, bro. Because I did believe this was going to be a series that's going to be pretty solid, but it didn't end up being. I actually, let me look at my notes because I actually watched this game in its entirety. One of the big things, this is in my notes. Look at me, Kenny. And this is not anything new. If you listen to any podcast, it probably says something similar. In order for the Raptors to win this series, they have to destroy the 76er when Joellen B was on the bench. And they didn't do that. Actually, when Joellen B was on the bench, the Raptors lost the game by four total points and that cannot be the case. Any team that's going to beat the 76ers in a series has to win the Joellen B list minutes because that's when they're at the most dominant. Obviously, he's an MVP caliber player. That's when they're at the most dominant and they don't have the extreme amount of depth of some of the other teams that they will be facing. So when Joellen B hits that bench, we got to play our best basketball because that is the only way. I believe that the series against Toronto where Kawhi Leonard hit the shot, Joellen B had, he was positive in his minutes. Whenever Joellen B was on the floor, they were good. They won the matchups. It was the minutes when he wasn't on the floor. And I think that might be the case in the Atlanta series too. Regardless, the way you beat the 76ers is dogging them when Joellen B was not on the court and they didn't do that in game number one. We got to give a lot of love to Taris Maxi, bro. You got, and we gonna talk about this game next. We got Anthony Edwards, Jordan Poo, Taris Maxi. Just so many young players just like, and I don't know how many of these dudes are gonna blossom into superstars. It's kind of irrelevant, but so many people that are just so very, very talented at the game of basketball. And I'm missing some names too. I'm sure there's some people that were tonight that's not on the back of my mind that are young that killed it today.  You know that there's talent in this league. Taris Maxi was electric in this one, bro. Doesn't matter what it was. And one of the main reasons why I had him is one of my top seven most approved player candidates is that he turned into one of the best three-point shooters in the entire NBA out of nowhere. If you look at his pre-draft report, it was like, ah, he's cool, but can he hit threes? And now he took him a season to figure out, yeah, he can't, whether he catch a shoot on the move it didn't matter. And I just like that any time the ball is rebounded by his team, he is shot out of a cannon. He is down the court. He is running. He is running. And that type of energy is electric. And I think that when people are predicting the series, and again, we're only saw game number one, so anything can happen. I believe that people were over-complicating the Matisse Thaibu thing. Matisse Thaibu obviously is a great defender and he can help your team out when he's on the floor. But he played 18 minutes and he ain't really do much today or yesterday. So him not being able to travel to Toronto for those two games might hurt, but it might not. It legit might not. We talked about the playoffs here where the best of the best are probably gonna get 40 minutes, especially if it's a closed game. They might get 44, 45 minutes, depending on which game it is. So could it hurt? Hell yeah, but it ain't hurting game number one. We even got some B-Ball Paul minutes. I'd love to see that, even though in those 10 minutes he had four fouls. I still gonna stick with my original pick, which is 76ers in seven. Man, it's unfortunate that we get to this point and in game one, Thaddeus Young gets injured, like I said, Gary Trent and Scotty Barnes all get injured. It's super, super unfortunate because we won't get the full experience of what this series could have been, you know what I'm saying, because of that. But I hope that maybe these are one-game injuries. If that, only time will tell. Timberwolves with the upset. Oh boy. Did the higher seed win every single game other than this one this week? The higher seed won every single game. NBA Playoffs is mid. We get one upset out of eight games? That's crazy, bro. Okay, Minnesota Timberwolves came out to play in the grind house. They was the one doing the grinding balls. They looked very, very good. Another, I don't, again, I don't like giving excuses for teams that lose, but like the Memphis Grizzlies are similar to some of the other teams when I say that they haven't played basketball and 10 days, like a week's time, plus a little bit, you feel me? You could definitely see that. My original thing in my notes said Grizzlies in six, and I'm gonna stick by that, even though they lost game one. This is a perfect storm for a guy like Anthony Edwards, who has been incredible in his first playoff game. And I'm counting the play in as a post, in his first postseason, he has looked incredible, which is great. Carthony Towns with a big comeback after, of course, we know the type of stinker that he put up in the play-in game. He showed the world, listen, that ain't the real version of me. This is really me. And having a guy like Malik Bees come off the bench and hit his shots, and having Jada McDaniels hit his shots just increases the amount of value to a guy like Anthony Edwards, who could just legitimately take over games. You feel me? Who, was it Patrick Beverly? Somebody in his team told Anthony Edwards that his ceiling, somebody said that his ceiling is Michael Jordan. And because of that, everybody got all these photo shops of Anthony Edwards as Michael Jordan. And you know what? I don't hate it. Why can't he be Jordan? With a little bit, I can't even say with a little bit more swag, because though Jordan wasn't like a flashy talkative dude in the media, there's a lot of swag behind Michael Jordan, bro. I'm keeping it a bug. The Grizzlies had a guy, Steven Adams, who had been a very impactful player for them this season, basically be non-existent. He was non-existent in this matchup. And actually the only reason he played 24 minutes is because Jared Jackson Jr. was in foul trouble. You know what I'm saying? Coach Taylor Jenkins found out very early, oh, this might not be a good matchup for Steven Adams. So let's yank him and let Jiren run the full five and then he got into some foul trouble. He ended up with seven blocks of school. We got yam don't a couple of times, but I don't believe that the performance that we got from Desmond, the performance we got from D'Anthony, the performance we got from Jiren as far as shooting the ball is going to happen more than maybe one more time in a series. But I got to show a lot of love to Minnesota, bro. I didn't even realize I followed so many Minnesota Timberwolves fans on my Twitter. You see that I follow a lot of the ones that I do follows just retweeting everything because I saw nothing but Minnesota Timberwolves' memes and gifts on the timeline. And I didn't hate it. I got a lot of love for the city. Never been there before, but when you think about a franchise, it's been through turmoil, that's been through six flips, firing the G here right before the season started, trading away players for less than the value that they probably worth. And for them to be in the spot, in the playoffs and winning a game where they were the underdog is a dub. But you know what? It's not completely crazy because legit, I did see some people, and I'm talking about the higher regards, some ESPN writers or whether it's Bleach Report, picked the Minnesota Timberwolves to win this series, which would be super intriguing. And which will be a failed season for the Gris? You understand why? I ain't gotta tell you why a first round elimination for the number two seed will be a failed season, right? Cool. Even though you did have progression of jaw like that, but like you were a playoff team last year and if you losing the first round, you ain't really... Anyway, I think those are all my predictions. I think those are all my predictions. I'm excited to like actually be able to sit down and watch tomorrow's Slater Games like front to back. Sleep schedule is so wild. I know it's been two days since baby Aves was born, but like sleep schedule is so crazy that maybe I'm not watching these games front to back because I might be in this chair. Those and all, bro, that's how I'd be. But I appreciate all the support. Let me know in the comment section. Was your initial prediction on the series changed after watching game number one? Let me know, I'll see y'all soon. All right y'all, so it's the next day and I realized that I did not talk about Dallas versus Utah, which is funny because if you ask some Utah fans, or you ask some Mavericks fans, they're gonna say, Kenny, don't like talking about us. And the fact that I completely forgot to talk about their series and trying to deep dive into the playoffs is ironic because I don't have any ill will against any organization. Game number one was a very fun. It was another one of those games where nobody gave a shot and not having Luca just completely ruined the fun for me originally. I was like, man, okay, let's say Luca loses one game. He doesn't play one game. I still feel confident saying Dallas in six. And I feel like a lot of people have turned an eye on Utah because they just, I think a lot of people are just ready for them to make those changes, whether it is Rudy, whether it is Donovan or Mike Connolly. We've seen this version of the Utah Jazz for like four years now. I think a lot of people just wanted to end in the first round so we can have a shake-up in the league. That's not the way I'm thinking when I'm predicting the series though. I would love to see a little shake-up. And even if they keep in Donovan or we go bare, I would love to see them have shape-up, whether it be the rest of the starters, the bench regardless. But when Luca went down with that injury, I was thinking to myself, okay, it's a calf strain and those can take like three weeks. And that's coming from some of the doctors I follow on Twitter, the sports doctors I follow on Twitter, three weeks. So that means that he might be back for game two. So when I made my prediction of Dallas in six, it was mostly because I thought that Luca might be back for game two. And well, they said that he's questionable slash doubtful and that completely changes some things. Can I see a world where, you know, the Mavericks have Luca come back in game three and they use the last six games to win four? Sure. But the Utah Jazz are still a very good basketball team. You know, this is not a series that's like a 1-8 matchup where even being down in two games is not that much of a deal. It actually is a deal because the Utah Jazz, as much as weird they are, they're still a solid team. They're still a good team. They got Don Vimiccio a playoff performer. Game one by Donovic came out to play. I will say though, they watched condensed version of this game and Rudy Gobiar has to be better offensively, something that we've said for a half of a decade at this point. The defense for Rudy was great this one. I can say that with confidence. Of course, I'm not expecting him to stay in front of Spencer Demwitty full-time or even Jalen Brunson full-time. But as far as being the epicenter of this defense and holding it down low, he did that. And they actually destroyed the rebound battle in this one, which is a big part of this win. They still need him to be better on offense because I saw a trending on Twitter, a clip where he had Jalen Brunson on his back and nobody gave him the ball. And that's partially his fault because they don't trust him with that ball when he has a 5-11 dude on him. He's gotta be better. Anyway, I haven't changed my prediction for any series going into this. So I'm gonna keep my initial prediction, but it don't feel good after game one and knowing that Luca probably won't play game two and even is still questionable for game three.  It's just unfortunate timing for one of the best in the league. All NBA first team player, Luca Dodgers, to go down and maybe another first round exit, which would be bad.


Clocking in with 3.3 million Instagram followers, today's babe of the day is Lena Perez. She goes under the handle, Lena Rita. Something tells me this video is going to get demonetized because she's a whole lotta woman. Her description reads, I basically live in a bikini. My name is Michael McCrudden and we're going to take a look at Lena Rita's Instagram profile, find out who she's following, google over some pictures, basically do the creepy most people do at home, but I'm doing it in front of the world. Here we go. I'm Lena. I feel like my inspiration is kind of what Stephanie said, be whoever you want, kind of find like my Instagram to be like an alter ego, I don't even really feel like it's myself, which I mean I kind of do, but not like the extreme, you know, so it's just like fun to be able to like play around with like that. Oh yeah, by the way, this is called Babe of the Day and if you have any babes that you follow on Instagram that you think I should take a gander of, we'll be sure to let us know in the comments down below. Alright, here we go. Okay, so picture one, she says this bikini is too small. I don't know, that's how she likes it. I think it looks great. Let's move on. She's also got this photo here. Okay, so that reminds me of a Canadian tuxedo, but much smaller, much skimpier. My God, she would get eaten alive if she stepped into Canada. She'd also freeze to death. Let's move on. So we have this photo here of her enjoying breakfast. She writes, who wants to join me for breakfast? I promise to be less messy. Of course, the milk is absolutely everywhere. We all know what she's doing here. I've never seen Cheerios. Oh my God, look at her Cheerios bowl. You know, she eats absolutely no carbs, so she had to go and buy that one sample. I'm gonna buy the whole box. Can't have that around. It's just for a photo to make the milk beat off my boobs. I know what she's up to. Let's take a look at a video. She posted to her Instagram account. Here we have her in a white t-shirt. She's kind of dressed up or dressed down. She says, I know I'm supposed to be in lingerie or red, but there's a red chair here in this picture, so I feel it's appropriate. Happy Valentine's Day, my loves. And I think she tagged some babes. It's just funny that like for these kind of girls, Valentine's Day is the day they take off. You know what I mean? Weird. Every million Instagram followers that's pretty shocking, she's only following 318 people. I looked through the list and there wasn't one verified account. You would think that there would be a long list of celebrities sliding into her DMs, but this girl is keeping her game on lockdown. So let's find out a little bit more about Lena Perez. In her bio posted to a website, model Lena Perez, it reads, I was born on November 4th, 1992 in Miami, Florida and I've lived there my entire life. I love to eat pizza. It's definitely my favorite food. Okay, there's no way on earth. Pizza's my favorite food. And you can tell. Anyway, if she wants to have a slice, sign me up. It continues, I love hip hop music and Biggie Smalls is my all time favorite, especially Warning, which to me is the best song ever. Besides the pizza, Warning is also my favorite Biggie Smalls song. This girl's got good taste. Ever since I was 14 years old, I had always wanted to become a model. When I was 18 years old, I was asked by a friend of mine to help her with photography project and I discovered how much fun it was to create images. I decided that I would contact photographers and expand my portfolio and pursue a career as a model. Okay, for a lot of people, that's like a fish out of water, it's a hard thing to accomplish. But for her, after just a few months, she began getting more and more work. And that's probably because, well, take it away, Jim Carrey, that's because you have big jugs.   So she decided to quit her job and dedicate her life to being a full time model and she's so happy she made that decision. She ends it with, aren't you as well? Woo! Of course I am.  So I thought I did. You know what I mean? Lena Perez has also found some global exposure being featured in The Daily Star and the headline read, well, this woman bears it all. What kind of news outlet is that? I guess it's their version of Babe of the Dead. Anyways guys, my name is Michael McCrudden and, well, we're doing a few Babe of the Days here to see how it goes. I quite enjoy these videos because I have a bit of fun and I also get to hear back from the girls once in a while. Perks. Hey, let us know who you want us to do in a future video on Babe of the Day and we're also planning on doing a spin-off version, Hunk of the Dead. It'll be hosted by my friend Rebecca Felgate. She's pretty angry that I do this so it's her way of getting me back. So cool. Can't wait to show you that. And watch it. It'll be fun. Okay, bye.


This is a special day in your university. Democracy is under attack, and the voice is being attacked. Then the only real way to combat that is through action. India Coalition is coalescing around the idea, the core ideological idea of the Congress Party. Partnering with the United States, partnering with Europe to build an alternative official production within a democratic environment. This is a special day in your university. Mr. Gandhi, this is a special day for us. Well, thank you for having me here. We look at India and we see actually that the economy is growing, a country which creates technology that innovates. What is it that needs to be done? When we say, when we use words like democracy, what we are actually talking about is the voice of the people. Listening effectively to that voice, allowing that voice expression is central to any system. And we've experienced that pretty much everything that we've achieved, the better of it is this idea that we protect the voice of the people. Our leader, Mahatma Gandhi, said it best when he said that the most important voice is the one that's lost in the line, the most difficult voice to protect. And in a nation that is doing that, will succeed. Where exactly do you see yourself placing the role of India in a first stage of India? I've read the Gita number of book publishers. I've read many Hindu books. There's nothing Hindu about what we do here. There's absolutely nothing. The large mass, the real power of India is in the lower caste, the other backward caste, these communities. And they are not given any space in the governance of India. They're not given any space in corporate India. They're not given any space anywhere. And that to me is a crime. It's very important that we build a bridge between India and your countries. And I would like to invite as many of you as possible to come to India, take a look at what is going on and seize a lot of the opportunities that a democratic, productive India can bring to do. Thank you. I'd like to have you like to some dinner or something. You can have me if I want to come and come. Oh, we're serious. Really awesome. Let's plan something. India Coalition is coalescing around the idea, the core ideological idea of the Congress Party. We are in agreement with us. And really the fight is about whether the nature of India is going to remain the same or it's going to change. A constitution was adopted by India. And that constitution in its very design was an attack on the social hierarchy of India. And that constitution is what the RSS and the BJP are trying to destroy. And that constitution is what the Congress Party and the India Coalition is trying to protect. A prime minister of India whose politics is about dividing India. I mean, you can see the difference between a Manmohan Singh G-prime ministership and an Narendra Modi prime ministership from day one. Because what the prime minister says and the way he frames things has a huge effect. Currently, a lot of our problems are coming because our economic policy is only helping a very limited set of people. I always used to wonder why Mahatma Gandhi used to do these walks or why he would end up in Jambaran for two months, three months. And it's because there was complete media domination against him. The only way he would transmit his voice was by action. And without action, his voice wouldn't happen. So that's why the Yatra was imaginary. Today, manufacturing and production is taking place in China. China has uncompeted everyone when it comes to manufacturing. Can we show the Chinese that we can produce this form? We can compete with them. But we can do it in a democratic environment where we give our people more freedom and economic power. When you're not allowed to express your voice, when you're not allowed to say what you feel, where large numbers of people are not given that opportunity, is a weakening democracy. And that's what we have in India. Large parts of our population are not allowed to speak. They are threatened. Political leadership is brushed. I've got 24 pieces on me. I've been interrogated for 55 hours. I've been given a jail sentence, two-year jail sentence. And we've realized that when democracy is under attack and voice is being attacked, then the only real way to combat that is through action, through walking, through physically going and meeting people. I enjoy that. It's difficult. I get hurt every now and then, but I brush myself, get up and go back home. So that's the habit. I don't like unfairness. I don't like it when people bully other people, when people frighten other people. And I tend to like to stand up.


Now it's good for us to get some examples done, here we have a matrix A being a 3 by 3 matrix so we at least can have 3 eigenvalues, some of them which might be repeat, some of them which might be complex numbers, let's have a look, let's first of all, there's so many ways you can go about this but let's call our matrix C to something new I'm doing minus lambda I and that is going to be this 3 minus lambda, we have negative 1 negative 1, we have 1 1 minus lambda and negative 1 and we have 1 minus 1 and 1 minus lambda, that's our new matrix C, now we want the determinant of matrix C to equal 0, so the determinant of matrix C, well good thing to do these kind of examples because there's so many things you can review, how do you get the determinant of a 3 by 3 matrix, let's decide on a row or column to go along, it looks to me like column 1 would be the easiest because we have a positive 1 and positive 1 there, just remember that this turns out to be positive, negative positive, co-matrix there and so what are we going to have, we're going to have 3 minus lambda and then we're going to have these two multiplied, minus those two multiplied, so it looks like 1 minus lambda squared minus negative, minus negative 1, negative 1 is plus 1 so that is there and this becomes a negative, now I take out this row and this column, so I'm left with this, it's a negative 1 multiplied by the 1 minus lambda and from that, remember this row, this column is gone, so again minus negative 1 equals positive 1, so minus 1 there, this is now positive, so that remains and this row goes, this column goes, so it's those two, minus those two, that looks like a 1, that's a negative 1, but it's minus negative 1 so that becomes plus, this one, 1 minus, 1 minus lambda and that has got to equal 0, that's got to equal 0 and you can well imagine how easy it is to make a mistake somewhere along the line, if I haven't already done so, we'll see, so this remains 3 minus lambda, this is going to become 1 minus 2 lambda plus lambda squared minus 1 and what do we have here, a negative, so here we're going to have lambda minus 1 minus 1 and here we're going to have plus 2 minus lambda equals to 0, so those two will cancel out, so I have 3 minus lambda, now you can do these many fewer steps that I've just done here, lambda squared minus 2 lambda and then we're going to have negative 2 so that becomes a positive 2 minus lambda, another positive 2 minus lambda, that's got to equal 0, let's do this quickly, so that's going to be a 3 lambda squared, it's going to be a negative 6 lambda, that is going to be a positive lambda, where am I going? See, I told you, negative lambda cubed, positive 2 lambda and here we're going to have a positive 4 and a minus 2 lambda equals to 0 and that leaves us with a negative lambda cubed, so that one goes and left with a positive 3 and let's see, it looks like I lost the lambda some way, this is going to do the step, I'll tell you, so easy, and this is typical of me anyway, 3 lambda squared minus 6 lambda, we've got this negative lambda cubed, negative positive 2 lambda squared, there was my mistake, so there's positive 2 plus 2 is 4, negative 2 lambda equals to 0, so I have negative lambda cubed still for that one and 3 plus 2 is 5 plus 5 lambda squared, negative 6, and then there's that negative 6 lambda, this is 3, negative 6 lambda so that makes it negative 8 lambda, for those two and I'm left with a, for those two and I'm left with a positive 4 equals to 0, so in the end I can multiply 3 up by negative so I'm left with that minus that plus that minus that and we've got to factor that out, so let's do it, this is leave, this is leave ourselves, this is leave ourselves that so we've got to factor that out and let's try lambda minus 1, let's start there, and we're going to write that as lambda 3 minus 5 lambda squared plus 8 lambda minus 4, let's try that one out, lambda squared, it gives me lambda 3 minus lambda squared, that gives me a negative 4 lambda squared plus 8 lambda, that is minus 4 lambda there, which gives me negative 4 lambda squared plus, is that right? Have I got the right one? I'm going to pause the video to skin this board because I'm going to make sure that this is not incorrect, okay apologies for that, I couldn't find any mistake anyway, so let's carry on, there's 4, so that leaves me 0, that leaves me 4 lambda, I bring down a negative 4 which just looks like a positive 4 there, that looks good, 4 lambda minus 4 which is nothing left, so I can factor that out as well, so it seems I'm going to have a lambda minus 1 and a lambda, if I factor that out, that's lambda minus 2 squared and that equals 0, so I can see I have repeated eigenvalues there, repeated eigenvalues, so my choice of lambda minus 1 is the first one worked out quite well, okay so I have lambda sub 1, let's do a bit more, I have lambda sub 1 equals 1 and I have lambda sub 2 equals lambda sub 3 equals 2, let's start with that because I now have to find out whether I have just a single eigenvector or whether I have multiple eigenvectors, so let's do that here, so if lambda equals 2, so a minus, so a minus this lambda 2 or lambda 3 I, that is going to equal 3 minus 2 is 1, I'm going to have negative 1, negative 1, I'm going to have 1 and then 1 minus 2 is negative 1, negative 1, I'm going to have 1, negative 1, 1 minus 2 is negative 1, so that and I've got to multiply that, so k1, k2 and k3, then you can see that's all going to be the same, whether it's k sub 1 equals k sub 2 plus k sub 3 if I do that multiplication, so it's always going to be like that, okay and I can see two fundamental ways to write this, if I let this equal to 1 and this equal to 0, I'm going to get a k sub 1 which is going to equal 1, 1, 0 but I can also let this be 0 and this be 1, so I'm immediately going to have two distinct eigenvectors and so that's going to be 1, 0 or 1, so at least those two, so it's not repeat eigenvectors, so those two would be distinct, so let's just do the lambda equal to 1, oh that's horrible, so the a minus lambda i is now going to be 3 minus 1 which is 2, negative 1, negative 1, 1, 1 minus 1 is 0, negative 1 and 1 and negative 1 and 1 minus 1 is another 0, I'm going to multiply this by k1, k sub 2, k sub 3, now in actual fact you've got to call this case a 4, 5, 6, doesn't matter, we all know we're going to end up, so 2 times k sub 1, 2 times k sub 1 is going to equal minus 1, minus 1, minus 1, 3 minus 1, 2, 2 times k sub 1 is going to equal k sub 2 plus k sub 3 and oh I'm going to have k sub 1 minus k sub 3, k sub 1 equals k sub 3 and I'm also going to have k sub 1 equals minus k sub 2, bring it to the other side equals k sub 2, so k sub 1 equals k sub 2 equals k sub 3, they're all the same and there's only one way where that is going to work, so that's going to be 1, 1, 1, so that's my last eigenvector, I cannot write my single solution, remember it's going to be c sub 1, k sub 1 for me was 1, 1, 0, e to the power that was 2t plus c sub 2, 1, 0, 1, e to the power 2t, they were the same plus c sub 3, you have 1, 1, 1, e to the power t with lambda, the last lambda being 1, so nice kind of exercise is these because you have to go through so many things, bring back old basic mathematics, you have long division of polynomials to factor out your third-order polynomial there, we have repeat eigenvalues, fortunately that gave us two distinct eigenvectors, so we didn't have to go into our complex equation to get our set of solutions, which means in the end we have quite a simple answer.