statistics and excel normal distribution calories example part number one get ready taking a deep breath holding it in for 10 seconds looking forward to a smooth soothing excel first a word from our sponsor yeah actually we're sponsoring ourselves on this one because apparently the merchandisers they don't want to be seen with us but but that's okay whatever because our merchandise is is better than their stupid stuff anyways like our trust me I'm an accountant product line yeah it's paramount that you let people know that you're an accountant because apparently we're among the only ones equipped with the number crunching skills to answer society's current deep complex and nuanced questions if you would like a commercial free experience consider subscribing to our website at accounting instruction dot com or accounting instruction dot think of it dot com here we are in excel if you don't have access to this workbook that's okay because we'll basically build this from a blank worksheet but if you do have access there's three tabs down below example practice blank example in essence answer key practice tab having pre-formatted cells so you can get to the heart of the practice problem the blank tab blank worksheet with just our starting data in it so we can practice formatting the cells within excel as we work through the practice problem if you don't have any starting data to practice with you can try to go into resources such as cagle dot com or create your own practice data set by going to the data tab up top analysis group and the data analysis if you don't have an analysis group you can usually turn that on in the options under the file tab as we have seen in prior presentations let's go on down to the example tab to get an idea of what we will be doing we've got our data on the left we're going to have our calorie counts by date being able to then sort our calorie count once we put a table around it we're going to do some familiar stuff we've seen in prior examples now with our calorie data one of the differences however between this example and prior examples is that when we think about the calorie count we're looking at fairly low units of measurements so when we actually plot our graph we can do it calorie by calorie but when we want to compare this information to our actual count it is often useful then to kind of group some of this information together so we'll put it into buckets which will be one of the distinguishing factors of this problem to prior problems so let's go on over to the blank tab and take a look at it i'm going to delete this here and let's do our standard formatting now i'm going to format the entire worksheet which will mess up the dates here and uh then i'll fix the dates so i'm going to note that that's going to happen i'll select the triangle right click on the entire worksheet and then format the cells let's go to the currency and negative numbers bracketed red dropping it down with no dollar sign and we don't need the decimals either so let's remove the decimals okay so you can see the date field has now gotten messed up i'm not worried about that i'll fix that here before i do though home tab font group in bolden and then i'm going to select column a and change the date field so home tab number and then i'm going to go to the number drop down and just bring it back to that short date field and so there we have it i'm going to put a table in here now so it'll be more easy for us to sort the data so i'll click anywhere in this set of data home tab insert i'm going to put a table in it now i don't think there's any blank cells in our data so i think the table the dancing ants should be doing their dance around the whole worksheet which is down to 458 and there it is let's just double check that that is indeed the case if i scroll down boom table has got all of the data within it now we could sort the data data by date now of course or we can sort it by the calorie count and so we might go from low to high got those zero days in there we got from high to low those days where we uh had a lot of calories for whatever reason let's keep it there because we could see the numbers here that's where we have to work that's what we have to work on any case i'm going to make column c a little bit smaller and let's do some of our standard calculations we'll do the mean we'll do the standard deviation which i'm just going to put sd the median and let's try the mode and see if the mode works as well i'm in the mood for some mode let's go ahead and then do the mean which is going to be equal to the average tab we're going to select all of the data i'm just going to do that with the drop down because it's in a table format making it nice and easy the dancing ants doing their average dance not that it's average their dances are all above average in terms of how well the ants actually dance how they move their hips is just astounding if you were to zoom in on it but average calculation that's what like the rain like when the rain happens but this time the ants dance made the average calculation so then we go to the standard deviation the standard deviation double clicking on that and this is going to be for the population so i'm going to select the entire thing again and now they're doing their dance they look like the same dance with those dancing ants but this is the standard deviation dance which would look totally different if you zoomed in as you well know because otherwise how would excel know if they did the same dance how would excel know to do the average calculation versus the standard deviation let's do the mode the median the median is the one in the middle so we'll start typing that in i'll select the entire data again now they're doing their median dance hitting the one in the middle i think it's got a little rocky balboa theme song in it uh when they dance to that one because because of in honor of rocky's wanting to hit the one in the middle hit the one in the middle and this is the mode the mode let's do a single mode and select the entire thing and boom so if we look at our data we can say okay the mean is pretty close to the median which is an indication that we might have something that deals with a bell type curve in terms of our data and therefore we might want to plot an actual bell curve for more predictive power about it the mode is pretty close as well but remember the mode is main is saying that one number shows up multiple times and because calories are so small in units uh then then it you know it might not be the case that even though we have something that's kind of in the has a mean in the middle and has a bell shaped curve that the numbers are exactly showing multiple numbers of the same number right because because they're pretty small units of calories but in any case the mode's fairly close as well so we're thinking the standard deviation might work you would assume just based on the information we're looking at that a normal distribution might fit due to the fact that if we're counting calories usually the calorie count's going to have to be somewhat consistent and vary from day to day if someone was going to maintain some some average of of weight you would think there should be some relationship you would think so let's do our what we're going to do now is plot this we're going to say okay i'll plot the x and the p of x and say we're going to plot this out and so i'll select this and make it black and white hometown font group bucket drop down making it black making it white and then we will center it okay so so now the question is on on the calories notice it's we had from zero see this is where the issue comes in we had from zero going all the way up to four thousand calories so you can see that's if we do it calorie by calorie that's a lot of units now it's kind of nice to put all the calories in there all the singular units because then when we do our p of x calculations we'll we'll get the thing to add up to basically a hundred and we'll have a nice smooth graph but when we do comparisons to our actual data we might want have some other method of doing it so i'm going to so i'm going to start out saying i'm just going to do it calorie by calorie but the question is how far down do i need to go so let's say we're going to take the number of deviations number of standard deviations let's say we're going to go for below and for above that means we'll have a lower x and an upper x so the lower x is going to be equal to we're going to have the mean the middle point minus the standard deviation times four standard deviation times four less than the mean and note what happens we end up with a negative number now in practice you would think you can't get a negative number it would stop at zero but in theory the bell curve goes on forever so i'm going to just keep that for now you could change it to zero but i'm going to keep it for now because when i plot my curve if i if i have four standard deviations i can get basically all of the data and it should add up to like a hundred percent right and on the upper side i'm going to say this is going to be the mean plus the standard deviation times four so there's the upper side of things okay so then we're going to have uh uh let's do this let's do it then so i'm going to start then at a negative which again it's funny weird uh weird weird so so a negative 1069 and then it's going to go to negative 1068 and then so on and so forth let's see if the system if i select those two it can count that out so then it goes down to seven so i could just count this down to five thousand it might also be useful for me to do a sequence calculation which might be a little bit easier so i can look at the difference between these two how many are there we've got we've got uh six thousand five hundred and seventeen so let's try it this way instead of me copying it down which we could do i could say this equals sequence and then i'm going to say uh the rows that we want are going to be this many rows six five one seven plus one actually no not a plus one we'll keep it right there and then comma and then the start point is going to be this is going to be the start point and let's close it up and then boom and it didn't do it k pos oh i put the start point i should have put columns so i need two commas here and then the start point so now the start point because there's just one columns all right then boom and it counts it down so if i hit control shift down i should end at five four four eight so it's at five four four seven so let's add let's i should have done the plus one i i was right the first time let's do that uh plus one and then boom and then control shift down so now it goes down to five four four eight perfecto just like moondo would do it i have a friend named moondo he's a perfectionist so whenever i do something like really well i say perfecto just like moondo would do it perfecto moondo so then i'm going to say that uh we can do our norm dot dist calculation equals norm dot dist so the x is just going to be that x again it's negative looks funny but we're going to put that in place because because that'll plot the the bell curve out for standard deviations comma the mean is going to be this mean over here i'm going to select f4 to make an absolute dollar sign before the e and the one so when i copy it down it will copy down the standard deviation the 815 f4 to make it absolute dollar sign before the e and the two comma let's make it uh not cumulative which means false or zero is what we need to put in i'll put a zero because it's easier it's faster let's percentify it before copying it down home tab number group percentify so we can recognize adding some decimals nothing there we're going to copy it down by just double clicking on that fill handle and then if i say control shift down it goes all the way down to the bottom and there's there's some activity there we go in the middle now notice a lot of the numbers are quite small because we're going we're going calorie by calorie let's add a couple more decimals i'm going to select the entire h column home tab number adding a couple more what you went the wrong way k posso percent adding a few more decimals so you can see we have pretty small numbers for any one of these uh due to the fact that when we go call it one calorie at a time we're finally getting into the positives that that if you're looking at for that exact number you're going to get a pretty small number but the benefit of going one calorie at a time is that if i select all of this data if i go control shift down and then we sum it up this will be the total and i say alt equals to sum it up then it adds almost to a hundred percent right because we're at four standard deviations on the low and the high now that double check numbers nice because that's also one of the reasons why sometimes it might be useful to plot the negative numbers even though in practice you're not going to have in real life negative numbers on this scenario just because that gives you that kind of verification number and it'll plot the graph a nice bell curve tailing off to that side as well you could remove the negative numbers if you would like to as well so i'm going to make column f a little bit thinner so then if we were to plot this i'm going to put my cursor on p of x well let's plot let's plot the calories first i'm going to put my cursor on the calories control shift down let's make a graph of that i'm going to say control backspace to go back up insert and let's go to the charts let's go to a just a histogram let's go to a histogram and there's our data so that's another indication here this is giving us our buckets of calories zero to to 370 370 to 740 and so on it looks like we're kind of in the middle here this is our average count 1,850 to 2,220 and then we had a count of in that bucket 120 so you can see this looks somewhat symmetrical somewhat like looking like a bell curve which would justify us basically doing you know this bell curve type of analysis with this kind of data so we have that let's plot this one so i'm going to say control shift down on this one and i'm going to say shift up so i don't pick up the total control backspace to get back to the top before we insert the graph insert tab charts this time we want the bar chart selecting the bar chart and boom and because there's so much data it almost looks like an area graph right because we did it so we did it cell by cell it almost looks like we entered an area but if you click in here you can see it's actually it's got these bars in there but the lines are so small because it's calorie by calorie that it looks like we entered an area graph on it so there is that looks quite bell shaped so we're going to say okay that's the shape of that one and then we can say let's compare that to our sample and this is where we're going to kind of reveal one of the issues that we have with this particular system of going one calorie at a time at a time so if we were to compare this two hour sample there's a couple different ways we can do it we can we can then take our actual data here for the calories and and then we can put those into buckets and take a percentage of the total of all the counts that we had or i can try to say let's take our percentages here and and multiply it times the count and then compare that to our calorie count so in other words let's take a look let's take this data right here and multiply it times the count of the data over here so i'm going to say let's do a count of the data this equals count and then brackets i'm going to select all of the data and so and enter so there's 457 counts that we have over here so if i multiply the p of x p of x times the count times the sample count and let's make this black white and wrap it maybe i'll double i'll put a space here and then maybe center it then then that should give us then the probability of each of these numbers coming up if we had a count of 457 based on our actual bell curve not not the actual data so we're going to multiply these percentages times the sample so if that was the case what would we expect to happen well i'm going to take this number i'm going to select f4 on the keyboard to make it absolute because i'm going to copy it all the way down times the percent which is very small here and enter now if i if i select that i'm going to add some decimals to it so let's make it quite long you can see it's a very small fraction of a number now obviously when we have an actual sample of 457 there's no way that i'm i'm going to get a fraction of a count right it can only be one or above on how many times i have a count so that's one of the issues when we try to compare this so if i double click going down you can see our numbers are quite small and the problem is in in the actual counts right we would have actual whole numbers when we when we count them so that's why we might need to kind of group these together into basically buckets if we wanted to kind of do a comparison right so if i compare that to my actual data let's compare this to the actual data actual frequency frequent frequency not sure if i spelled that right i'll check it in a second home tab font group black white let's wrap it and let's uh center it and now we'll do a frequency count which is going to put each of these into the buckets uh a bucket count so in this case you would have everything up to and including uh 68 and over and above 69 so it's going to be equal to frequency tab this is an array formula we'll select the entire data on the left and then comma and we'll pick up the x's which is our bends control shift down shift up control backspace to get back to the top so we can see what is happening here i'm going to close it up and then enter so now if i say control shift down you can see it takes it all the way down to the bottom here i'm going to try to shore up this last bit so that it doesn't uh pick up so it doesn't spill all the way over so uh let's see if i can take this up one and then enter and so now it spills down boom control shift down and it's still going all the way down to here let's try it again we're going to double click on this go all the way down to the bottom and i'm going to pull this one up to right there and then enter control shift down okay so there we have it now if i if i sum this up i say alt equals now we've got the 457 so the count is there so the issue then though is the fact that i can't get a count of course let's add some decimals to these home tab number adding a bunch of decimals right it's not going to help because i'm not going to get a count that is going to be less than one right i can only get a i can only get a count that is is going to be one or above so even though i've got these fractions based on the bell curve you're only going to get actual numbers here and so here's you could see sparsely ones that are sparsely arrayed here when we're counting only calorie by calorie because there's so many options when you're counting one cell at a time i can also compare if i wanted to compare to the percentages i can take my actual count divided by the total so i could do this equals this divided by the total control shift down which is that 457 i just want the 457 and then f4 to make it absolute and then enter and then make that a percent home tab number percentify adding some decimals and double click that down so that's something we've done in prior presentations but again it's not going to it's not going to be comparable all the time because i i'm only going to have certain items that have a count and there's going to be all of these places where i don't have a count because we're going calorie by calorie so whichever way we do it we run into that problem so this is going to be a percent of total so let's make this home tab font group black white wrap it and center it so next time what we'll do is we'll say okay let's see if how we can kind of put this this information into buckets for possibly so i can compare it to the to the actual count we'll take a look at that next time


What about our Congress at the Nubia and who are you? I'm Maria Montfort, so I will show you now the N-Series. You have a Nubia phone right here with a Qualcomm full screen battery and large memory. So we cannot say much about this phone because it's not even in the market yet, but it will be in April. Two camera system, double micro-SIM. 18-mide display, a long big display. How about this one over there, the V? Yeah, this one is kind of the same model. Different series, also a long battery life full screen. So many functionalities also. Double micro-SIM and double camera too. So long battery life. So Nubia is doing the previous phone right? Yes, this was the previous phone. This one for example is the Zen 17 mini. All the features it has you have them here. What the special feature that all phones have is their camera. They are pioneers in photography. So here you can come here for example if you see this. We've got the clone camera experience. One characteristic that you should have is the camera family. You've got many different functions. The trajectory one, you can capture the train while moving. You've got the clone camera. So this clone camera if you want to give it a try, not just with my friend. Yeah, you can go? Alright, yeah. So, the picture of you. First, hold the umbrella. Can you do something different? On the bike? Let me help you, it's very heavy. Just hold it. I'm checking I'm going to have the bike. If you come here you can see that you've taken three pictures. So you're going to open it. Now you've got yourself flown. But sometimes you just have to erase the parts you don't want to keep. Okay, good idea. Yeah, and just brush the parts that you want to keep. And this, you're going to do this and hold the pictures. Get erased the parts you don't want to keep. Too many umbrellas. Yeah, too many umbrellas maybe. Is that the right way to hold an umbrella? I don't know. Awesome, can you send me this? I need this one. Yeah, of course. Just after. Let's walk around a little bit more. So maybe I can show you the new camera we have, the new phone. You have some systems coming up in the future where you're doing the first phone with a fan. This is actually not only a phone but a game phone. The fan inside to cool it off. Exactly, it's for games. And the main problem that these phones, game phones have, is that they heat what's playing. Especially when they have an Intel processor. Exactly. So you have a refrigerator here. So you can even cool off some other stuff and here you have... Yeah, so here I've got different designs. Kepler. Okay, let's walk over here a bit. Over here you have some... Are you doing smart locks? They do different functionality that Novia has. So you're doing smart locks? Exactly, yeah. We have this simple one that has on the finger. If it doesn't work, you also have a security code here. And in the figure option you have the keys under the lock. You also have this bigger one that it works the same. The finger with the security code. Even with chips that works for 5 years. What's the price for this? Yeah. These 200, more or less? 1,200. This 1,100 between 1,100 and 1,120. Cool. And you also have some lights. This is a smart lamp sensor and a gateway. You can control all about your home with it. Like the light, even the window, the door. This is the whole gateway lamp system. Even the air conditioner. The light socket. Yeah, it's connected to your mobile phone via an app. And you can use it here. And right here? Yeah, smart mirror for your app. You can connect it via Bluetooth to your smartphone. All right. You can see Google Maps and everything for kids. Cool. And that's it. Thanks. And what are you showing over here? Some more smart stuff. Over here we've got the meeting room. So this is a secret... some whole system. Jump over here. Noise counseling headphones. All these things. Right here. So, what is this about? Well, we have a lot of kind of headphones. But little batteries. We also have a 360-degree camera to your smartphone. You connect it. So it's a Type-C? Exactly. Type-C solution. Nice. How much is this one? Not too much. It's not a market. So I don't know the price yet. All right. Cool. Can we jump back to the phones over there? Thanks a lot. You have a flagship over there. What are the top phones over there? You can jump here. This is the high-end. The biggest, the most expensive Lubea phone, right? Yeah. Oh. It will be the other two that I showed you before. They're not in the market yet, but they will be the flagship. Right now available this one? Yes. Right now is this model. This has a full-screen bezel-less. Bezel-less, yes. Full-core Snapdragon. That means the screen is bigger. So it's basically full-screen. Bezel-less. Full-screen. Yes. Double micro-seam. Yes. And also double camera. Both front and back. Yeah.


What's up everyone it's your girl Kinsey here from Layton Sports Cards and I'm ripping a personal for Troy D. We've got a 2022 Leaf Procept Metal Football Hobby Box. All right best of luck Troy. Thanks for your patience and for waiting. Let's see what we can get you. And we got just one more box in queue and I'll probably call it unless any anymore come in. Oh wow. Printing plate right off here. All right up first we've got hey one of one printing plate of Sam Howe. Just a nice way to start that box. You know Troy. We've got a blue wave of Isaiah likely 16 out of 30. Joshua had a really good idea for April Fools. We have blue Jaden Rashada. Is it a Donny break? 22 of 35. No that was my idea.  And they said we should have we should print Rich. We have purple wide receiver of Tye Fryfogle 16 of 30. Or Lane Texas and he says oh Sam calling out sick. Kenzie can't come in. We can't get a hold of four as Donny's breaking today. That would be awesome. We've got a zebra. Troy Franklin. Five of five. Great box here. Printing plate and a zebra.  We've got a Garrett Wilson on the Silver Mojo. Nine of 25. Very nice box. These have been hot today. Justin had a good box of this earlier too. All right Troy that'll do it for your box. Thanks again for your patience. We're waiting and we'll get this right out to you.


Hey everyone welcome back to vlogmas day six. Today the main thing I'm working on is making cage liners and fleece beds for our Christmas cage themes. So I'm going to show you guys how I make my liners. Okay so let's talk about what fleece I have. First up I had ordered this moose print for the girls cage a couple years ago and I never really finished making liners with it so I went ahead and ordered more to make sure I had enough for liners. You can just see all the cute little moose on there and then I have this nice green dark green to go with it. That's kind of the color scheme for the girls cage. For the little babes cage so Johnny and June they don't really have any of their own fleece that I've made specifically for their cage so I got them this cute Christmas woodland print and then I have this red fleece to go with it. So that's going to be the color scheme for the little babes cage. Okay guys so let's chat about how you make liners. So obviously first off you need some fleece. So the fleece that I like to use is you can see it says anti-pill on here. I usually like to use anti-pill fleece or blizzard fleece. I get the majority of my fleece from Joanne because you can, can you guys see my dog walking around? He's very interested in helping. The main reason that I get anti-pill or blizzard fleece is really just because it lasts longer. It works really well to run through the wicking process which we will talk about and it just seems to work really well for getting pig cages. A lot of the anti-pill fleece I've been getting in recent years from Joanne has been really soft too and it makes really great liners. So I usually get anti-pill or blizzard fleece. So you need some fleece then what I use for my absorbent layer is u-haul pads. So if you're not sure how fleece bedding works basically you need one layer of fleece on the top and you have to put it through the wicking process which means you have it prepared for liquid to go through. I will insert a clip in this video of properly prepared fleece versus non wicking fleece and you can see the difference. So the way fleece works is once you get it wicking the liquid will just soak through the fleece layer and it needs an absorbent layer to go into so that it's soaked up and keeps your guinea pigs from sitting in wet spots. So what I use for my absorbent layer is these u-haul furniture pads. I just get these from the u-haul store. They work really well and they're really easy to sew with because they're not crazy thick. So this is what I'm going to be using. I have my top layer of fleece. The gu-haul will go in the middle and then I will use this as the bottom layer of fleece. So I'll be able to use either the red side or the Christmas woodland animal side on any of these pads. So let's go ahead and work on making some of these liners and I will take you guys along with me and show you the process. All right guys. So I showed you the fleece that I'm going to be using. Side note I'm wearing this hat because it's what I attached my GoPro to to get you guys that GoPro footage. But for today's video I'm going to take you guys start to finish through how to make cage liners. So I showed you the fleece. I showed you the u-haul and talked a little bit about how fleece works. So let's talk about exactly start to finish how to make liners so that I can show you guys how to do that. So I have my two layers of fleece. I do not pre-wash or pre-wick my fleece. I go through the entire process of making them first and then I get them to wick. I'm going to go ahead and tell you guys right now how to get your fleece to wick really quickly in case you want to wash all of your fleece first and then make your liners. You can do that if you want to. So to get your fleece to wick which means to get it prepared so that the liquid will just go right through the fleece. You pretty much just want to put it in the washing machine in hot water and run it through three or four times. Usually works well for me. I'm usually there at three washes but I usually do a fourth just to be sure. I will put a clip in if I haven't already in this video of prepared fleece versus not prepared fleece so that you can tell the difference. But pretty much what I do is I wash the liner three to four times and I test it to make sure that it's ready. So you just put a little bit of water on it and if it soaks in pretty quickly within like three to five seconds then it's ready to go. So I'm going to make liners first and then do that process. So I'll show you guys that process later on in this video. If I get time to do that today I don't know if I will have time to make all of these liners and all this fleece and go through the wicking process but it should be sometime this week during vlogmas. If you guys want to see that process as well I will come back and put it in the description box once I do that. So the first thing that we need to do to make these liners is to figure out what size we need. So these liners with this fleece are going to be for Johnny and June's cage which is a two by five C and C cage. For this cage we are actually going to be making two liners because I think it's a lot easier to clean and to do laundry when I have two smaller liners instead of one huge one. So I'm going to figure out what size two liners need to be to cover a two by five. So the first thing we need to figure out is the dimensions that we need. So my C and C grids are 14 inches square. So we're going to use that as our measurement. So 14 times two is 28 inches. So that is how long the two grid portion of the cage is. When you're making cage liners you don't want to make them the exact dimensions of your cage.  In my experience when you wash it on hot fleece does shrink a little bit and you just want to give yourself some extra space in case that happens. I also like to make my liners a little bit oversized so that they overlap the edges a little bit just so that I know the whole base of my cages is covered and it just makes it easier to clean cages. So if I need 28 inches to cover the floor of my cage that way I'm probably actually going to make these liners 30 inches. Yeah I think I'm going to do 30 inches so add two inches to that measurement. So my liner one dimension of my liners is going to be 30 inches wide. So next we need to figure out how many inches is the five grid portion. So if you do five times 14 that is 70 inches but since we're splitting this in half I'm going to divide that by two which gives us 35. Again I don't want it to be perfectly lined up against each other. These liners in the cage because I want them to overlap so that the whole base of the cage is covered. So I'm going to add I might just round it off and do 40. I'm going to do 40 inches by 30 inches for these liners and that should cover the entire base of my cage. Something else I didn't mention that I also that you also need to consider when you're making liners is the distance that you're sewing. So when I sew I use a standard quarter inch seam allowance and that is like I'll show you guys what that means if you're unfamiliar with sewing when we get into making these liners but you do need to leave space for the seam allowance as well.  So make sure you add to the exact size that you need so that you have the correct size liner. So I'm going to make my liners 30 inches by 40 inches that will cover the entire base of their cage and it will overlap in the middle so that the entire floor of the cage is covered with two liners. So now I'm going to go ahead and cut this out. I'll show you guys footage of how I do that and then get on to the next step of how to make these liners. Getting ready to cut this fleece so what I've done basically is I took the yardage and it's folded in half when you get it off the bolt and then I folded it in half again so that I have an easier piece of fabric to work with. I've got to fix this now that I messed it all up. Move that out of the way. So it's easier to cut when I have it this way you just have to be careful to make sure you're getting a nice clean cut. So what I'm going to do now is cut it down to 40 inches. All right so then we're going to figure out how to cut it at 40 when my mat is 36 inches. So let's measure the distance this way. It's pretty well lined up with that line at this point. So we have 10 extra inches which means we need to cut this at 30. So I'm going to cut it here at 30 inches. So that'll give me 30 plus this 10 which gives me 40 and I'm going to go ahead and cut it right at 40 because 40 inches is already way more than I need. So if it ends up not being perfectly 40 inches long I have plenty of extra room to work with. So I'm going to go ahead and cut this at 30 inches. All right we have a little bit left. Okay so we have a 40 inch long piece of fleece here now. So now we need to cut it so that we have 30 inches this way. So this way this way is 40 inches. We need this way to be 30 inches.  So that is this little edge that looks you know kind of funny. That's not really part of the fleece so I'm going to go ahead and cut that off. All right so that's off. There's my little bucket. Okay so now we need a 30 inch wide piece of fleece here.  Okay and then I'm going to cut it at 30 inches and I should know I'm not going to. Not going to be able to get two liners out of that. Well that's a bummer. I was hoping I could. That's all right we can use this piece to make a two by two. All right so I'm going to cut this piece at 30 inches here. 30 so I needed 28 right. I'm actually going to cut it at 31 just to be on the safe side. I like my liners to overlap quite a bit so I'm going to add an inch on there. Okay so here's our first piece for our liner. This is 31 inches by 40 inches so this should be perfect to cover half of the babes cage. So there is that piece. This piece I'm pretty sure is not going to be long enough. No it is not. So we're going to make a two by two out of this. That actually will work really well and I'll tell you what I'm thinking here. So we'll end up with two cage liners and then we'll end up with a 26 by 26 which is not quite a two by two and this will be good for under their hay area and then I'll have this smaller pad which will end up you know like this long so from here to here pretty much. This I can put underneath their Ikea bed or just under Hydeys or whatever where they go to the bathroom a lot so that should work out fine. So I'm going to go ahead and cut this here. I'm going to get this lined up better first. All right so that means we need another liner and we need red for this red for this and then red for the two liners so I'm going to show you guys how I do this in a way that saves me time but it's not very precise to be honest. So if you want them to be precise cuts you can do the exact same thing I just did match the exact measurements but what I do is lazy and this is why I don't sell liners. So with the basic process of how to make a liner with these small pads first so it's a little bit easier for you to see so what you want to do you can see I have my sorry if you can hear my furnace in the background so I have my u-haul piece I have my two fleece pieces so you want to put the u-haul piece down and then you put the fleece piece on top of it and make sure that you put the right side up so you can see that this side looks a little fuzzy and like distorted and this side doesn't so you want the nice looking side to be facing up so I'll line this piece of fleece up on here and smooth it all out and then you want to take the other piece of fleece and make sure that it's the the nice side down so you can see this side is a little less soft you probably can't see that but I can feel that this side is softer than this side so I want the soft side down because those are the pieces that are going to end up on the outside of this pad what am I saying um so you want that to come be on the outside okay so that's the trouble with cutting around these these aren't perfectly square so I have to get it as squared up as possible so make sure you get it nice and square and lined up okay so that is about as good as we are going to get with this one so I'm actually going to take some pins and pin this together and the reason that I pin this is so that all the layers stay held together nothing is shifting I don't like when I make liners and one piece of fleece shifts and then you get those like bubbles on the top of the fleece that's a problem I had when I first started making liners that I didn't like because fleece stretches so you want to make sure that you're not stretching it while you're sewing it or you could end up with one piece all wonky compared to the other pieces and that makes it hard to spot clean your cage and just doesn't look as nice so I'm going to pin all these layers together so they don't move around on me so that looks pretty good put one more here that looks pretty good pretty square you know pretty even all right so let's sew this together so here with the sewing machine I'm gonna put my pins back up okay you guys can see what I'm doing here under the sewing machine so I have my sewing machine all ready to go so what I'm gonna do is start about here and you'll see why so I'm gonna start a little ways down on this particular piece of fleece so you can see I have all of this up here and you'll see we're gonna leave a space down to this pin so that we can turn this inside out so let's go ahead and sew this together so I'm coming down to where this pin was and then I'm gonna back stitch a little bit and then I'm gonna cut my thread and take it out so you can see we sewed all the way around so what we're gonna do now is turn this inside out okay so what I usually do is I check it first to make sure that when I turn it it's going to be how I want it to be so start to turn it and it is so then what you do is I take my scissors take my scissors and you cut the corners off straight across like this you guys see that straight across just like that don't cut into your stitching okay cut across the corners and then I like to trim any like excess off like right here trim that off a little bit the rest of it's not too bad all right and then I like to make sure that I actually got all the fleece all the way around pretty sure I did okay so then you take it and make sure that you turn it based on like don't don't turn it from here with the u-haul pad turn it between the two pieces of fleece so what I usually do is put my hand in it and grab the bottom and then just pull pull pull pull push push push okay until it comes right side out put my hand in then I push all my corners out like so the corners pushed out and then I just make sure that it's all nice and turned all the way to the seam so I have the nice pad here all nice and flat I usually also take my scissors here and push my corners out all the way that one's pretty good that just make sure that your pad is like nice and square looking with nice corners don't push too hard don't rip your fabric don't rip through your seam just push just a little bit that you can get in there with the scissors where you can't get in there with your finger push the end of the seam out just like that all right so this guy is ready to be finished up so just flatten it out make sure it's nice and you know flat and square all right so it looks pretty good here so you can see obviously we have this hole so we're going to close this up first so how I do that is I take it and I roll it under like so what I actually like to do is I like to overlap my okay this can get a little tricky so I like to cut this down a little bit not the fleece just the u-haul okay so that it's not in that little seam and then I overlap the fleece and then roll it under okay so I did a pretty good job there I got that whole seam closed looks a little wonky but it's all right it is all right as long as it's all closed that's what I care about so I'm going to snip these off all right and it's time for the last step so what I do is I start in the corner here and you can kind of feel there's like an edge here from all the bulk of the seam so I just sew right along that down this whole entire thing so I'm going to do that now so I sewed around the whole edge there so then what I do last on these smaller pads is I just go from one corner to the other that just keeps the u-haul from shifting on the inside but that is this entire pad done ended up pretty good so then last step make sure you clip all of your threads my sewing machine cuts them down pretty well but make sure to cut your threads and then this one is ready to go on the washing machine so I'm going to set this one aside and work on some of the rest of these the cage set is done I do want to make a blanket for their Ikea bed but it's not really going to be a pad it's just going to be a little blanket so I'm not going to show you guys that I'm going to do that sometime so I made this snuggle sack basically I just kind of eyeballed it and ended up putting two pieces of fleece together and then I have boning in here so that it stays open and then we have our two by two 26 by 26 size pad we have the smaller pad to go under their Ikea bed and then there's two square pads and then there are two liners so that is an entire cage set for the little babies so that is pretty much the tutorial on how to make liners and small pads let me know if you guys have any questions down in the comments and I will try to answer them as much as I can all right guys so I'm going to go ahead and end the vlog here this video is already going to be pretty long with all the footage of teaching you guys how to do this again let me know if you have any questions down below I will link products and all that kind of stuff down in the description box as well thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you in tomorrow's vlog


In this lesson, we're going to talk about collective nouns, and you're going to learn how to correctly conjugate collective nouns so you have perfect English grammar. Of course, I'm Jennifer from jforrisenglish.com, and this channel is dedicated to helping you sound like a fluent, confident, natural English speaker. Now before we go any further, make sure you subscribe and hit that bell icon so you're notified every time I post a new lesson. Now let's dive in with this video. Let's talk about collective nouns, and specifically we'll talk about verb conjugation with collective nouns. So I'll give you an example. My family, mm, arriving tomorrow, do I need is or are, because in a family there's more than one person, right? So is a family singular or plural? What do you guys think? Put it in the comments. My family is, my family are. What do you think? Put it in the comments. Family is, family are. The correct answer is my family is, my family is arriving tomorrow. Now family is a collective noun. What that means is within this noun, there is more than one. Of course, like I said, a family, there's more than one person, right? But we treat that noun as one entity. Now you can think of it as we're not talking about the individual members within that family. We're talking about the family as a whole. So we're imagining that that family is one unit. So that's what you can remember with collective nouns. They're conjugated as singular because we refer to them as one unit. So of course you need to know subject verb agreement for the verb to be and you also need this for the present simple. For example, my family arrives tomorrow, not my family arrived tomorrow, no. My family arrives tomorrow. Because remember we need to add that S or ES to third person singular he, she, it, verbs. So let's think of some other collective nouns that are conjugated as third person singular. For example, company, same thing. Company many different people within that company, but we refer to it as one entity is third person singular. The company is profitable. Team is another one. Of course, there's more than one person on a team, but we conjugate it as one group, one whole. So team, group is a good one, community, class is another good one as well. Those are all conjugated as third person singular. Now how about this one, everyone. Is this conjugated as third person singular or plural? Would it be everyone eats third person singular conjugation or everyone eat? Everyone eats at noon. Everyone eat at noon. What do you guys think? Is everyone third person singular or plural? Let me know in the comments what you think. Everyone eats. Everyone eats at noon. So everyone is third person singular. It's a collective noun. There's more than one person, but we're referring to it as one entity, one unit. So this applies for everyone, everybody, anyone and anybody. Now some other common collective nouns that you'll probably use in your vocabulary would be government, audience, jury, tribe, couple. So two people, but we refer to them as one. The couple is really cute. Couple is a collective noun and army as well. The army is well prepared. So here's the list of the most common collecting nouns. I definitely recommend that you pause the video and you write these down or take a screenshot so you can add these to your vocabulary. And remember they need to be conjugated as third person singular. This is a really important grammar concept, so make sure you take the time. And for now to practice, I want you to choose three of these collective nouns and write three sentences in the comments below just to get really comfortable with them. If you found this video helpful, please hit the like button, share it with your friends, and of course subscribe. Now before you go, make sure you head on over to my website, jforistenglish.com, and download your free speaking guide. In this guide, I share six tips on how to speak English fluently and confidently. And until next time, happy studying. Alright, awesome job.  I love it, and I can't wait to read your examples in the comments below. I'll see you in my next video. Bye.


This video might be a little more informational than usual, but don't worry, drinks are coming. Another rum video. Why do I love rum so much? Maybe I missed my true calling. Actually, can you excuse me for one second? Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. One thing I find interesting about rum is how common it is for companies to put out rum they didn't actually make. For example, this little guy. If you examined the bottle, you'd know it's Jamaican, but beyond that, you'd have no idea where exactly it came from. Now, it's not the case with this bottle, but one explanation for this phenomenon is that distilleries will sell their product to middlemen who then sell it to independent bottleers who turn around and sell it to us. One important thing before I continue, I have no problem with this practice. In fact, I love that this model exists because it's given me some of the best rums in my collection, which brings me to today's video. Today I'm trying an unaged, a six-year-old, and a nine-year-old rum, all from different brands, but all three from the same distillery, Hampton, which has been making rums since 1753 and is much beloved among the rum woke. First up is rum fire. The story is that this is based on a sort of Jamaican moonshine that distillery workers at Hampton used to siphon off for themselves. It's bottled at 63% EVV, so no smoking. As you can see, I'm a big fan of this stuff. And I can smell it already. Open this one in a crowded room and everyone will know. Smell of alcohol is overwhelming. Also, freshly cut grass. Yeah. A violent explosion of flavor. A lot of times when I talk about rum, I say they taste like banana, pineapple, etc. Those notes are all here, but everything is young and underripe. Some of my vegetable notes too. Also, all Jamaican rum has a quality most commonly referred to as hogo or funk. It's not present in all Jamaican rums equally, but this has it in spades. This is maybe the most aggressive rum I've ever had, and no joke, I could probably drink it every day. Just don't get me started on the label. Next up is our friend from before. Yes, this is Hampton juice. Stolen overproof is the last of a rare batch of pot-still rum aged six years in expert in barrels. This one clocks in at 61.5% EVV. More refined, but still wild. Explosive fruit flavors, guava, pineapple. Plenty of funk, but overwrite tropical fruit dominates. Most rum is a word. Some rums are a sentence. This rum is a paragraph. I said I could probably drink the last one every day. I could definitely drink this one every day. Good thing I bought a case. Last up is Golden Devil single cask. Nine years old and because it came from only one barrel, this bottle is one of only 273. This one is 62.7% APV. If you've been paying attention, and it's okay if you haven't, you may have noticed that even though it's three years older than the last bottle, it's slightly stronger. This is a good time to point out that while these three rums came from the same distillery, they all had different paths, and in the glass tell very different stories. If you put rum fire in a barrel for six or nine years, you won't necessarily end up with these other two bottles. Intensely aromatic. A lot of people would say this smells like industrial cleaner. I kind of like it. There's also a distinct sour milk note. I'm not kidding. All these rums are hot, but man, this one thick and oily, burnt fruit, petrol. This one's intense, but I do like it. One thing rum nerds like to do is let rum sit for a minute or two to open up, so hang tight. Five minutes later. This is somehow more intense. It kind of tastes like a tire fire, but I do like it. I'm going to do something I don't usually do with rum, which is add a few drops of water. It's a lot more drinkable. I'm confident that if you gave this to a whiskey nut that it never had rum this intense, they'd like it. Now, I can't make three daqueries because I'm afraid I'll die, so I'm only going to make one, and I'm going to make it with a stolen overproof. Look at that color. Beautiful. It's been said plenty of times before, but a daquerie is one of the finest drinks a person can enjoy, provided they use good rum. Thankfully, we have tons of options, and if your definition of good rum differs from mine, that's okay too. And this stuff is still out there. There are only 5,000 cases, but I checked earlier this week, and my local grog shop still has some. Stolen opted to only package it in 375ml bottles, which in my opinion is a good thing. It means there's more to go around. Yeah, the Golden Devil is gone, but the rum fire and the stolen aren't, and if you can get your hands on some, I say do it. They're a couple of the most memorable rums I've ever had. If you liked it and liked it, consider subscribing if you haven't already, and if there's something you think I should try, let me know in the comments. Stay safe, follow the advice of professionals, and drink more rum.


Cool, so the title of this talk is The Truth About Mentoring Minorities, and hopefully you're in the correct room to hear the right talk.  First off, my name is Byron Woodfork. I am a software crafter for the company known as Aethlite. We are a consulting company with our main office based out of Chicago. However, I happen to be moving to our Los Angeles office as of next week. So if you're an LA resident, feel free to say hi as I could use all the new friends I could get. And there is my Twitter handle as well. It's just my first and last name. So to start off, I'm gonna talk to you all about how I became a software crafter. And to do that, I actually have to do a bit of a rewind back in time. And for those of you that were around computers in like the late 90s, early 2000s, you probably recognize this beast. This is a compact desktop Rosario and this was my first computer ever. Someone actually gave me this computer, or gave it to my mom, my mom gave it to us. And I just was so fascinated. I wanted to learn the ins and outs. I wanted to learn everything that was to learn about this computer and computers in general. So I deconstructed it, I reconstructed it. I spent like hours upon hours learning about the operating system and things of that nature. And fast forward a bit, I eventually found myself in college and I remember having to choose between majors and I was like, all right, like there's computer science and there's these other majors who knows what they are, don't really care, but I really wanna do computer science. However, I was under the notion that to like major in computer science, you had to be ridiculously smart and or ridiculously good at math. And I felt like I did not match the bill in terms of that. So I actually talked myself down for majoring in computer science and that's probably why college didn't exactly pan out for me. That accompanied with like lack of funds and just lack of passion to like pursue what I was doing. I think I was like majoring in biology or something like that. I don't really remember. And upon dropping out of college, I actually found myself working full-time at Best Buy. This isn't exactly what I dreamed in terms of breaking into the tech industry, but I found myself here anyway. And in working at Best Buy, I remember one day I was like listening to like some motivational speech or something like that. And as I was listening to it, I remember something clicked and I knew that, I realized that this was not how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. I realized that I was not chasing my dreams in the way that I thought that I would when I was younger. And with that in mind, I got it in my mind that I was gonna break into the tech industry and I was gonna find some way to do it. So I researched some careers and I landed upon software developer. And for those of you that are familiar with MySpace or did some work with MySpace like in the mid to late 2000s, or yeah, about mid 2000s, you may remember that you could build MySpace layouts using HTML and CSS. And I was actually really good at that back in the day. So I was like, hey, I used to be really good at building MySpace layouts, so becoming a software developer should be pretty easy. Not too far from that, right? And I eventually found out that wasn't exactly as easy as I would hope. But nevertheless, I continued my path forward and I started teaching myself how to code through various sites such as Code Academy, for instance, and various other tutorial sites out there. And in doing so, I eventually came to the conclusion that this still wasn't gonna be as easy as I was hoping for it to be. And upon coming to that realization, I actually started reaching out to some friends, like pretty much anyone that I could find that may know someone that's in the software industry. And I just kept asking questions and eventually I found someone. It was actually a friend of mine, a guy by the name of Dave Moore. And I remember talking to Dave and we were exchanging conversation and I kept asking him questions about software related matters and he kept responding. And I was like, as long as this guy keeps responding, I'm gonna keep asking questions. Like, and eventually Dave realized that I wasn't gonna go away. And I remember he invited me out to his company, company known as Aethlite out in Chicago and he said, we have public meetups on Friday so you should come out and we can talk more about software related matters. And I was like, heck yeah man, I'm coming out like ASAP. I called up Best Buy, I was like, yeah, I'm not gonna be able to come in and work on Friday, click. Didn't really give them explanation. I was like straight path forward to breaking into the software industry is at least that's how I saw it anyway. So after the meetup, while we were at the company known as Aethlite, Dave talked to me about what was called or what he referred to as an apprenticeship. And I was pretty unfamiliar with the term and he explained what it was and basically what the apprenticeship is is the company will bring in people like myself who had little to no experience or senior developers as well into the company and teach them how to either build software or how to be software craft people as we like to refer to them as software crafters and essentially like get them to this level of writing clean code. And when he told me this, I was like, okay, that's awesome. And he offered me the position to become a software apprentice under him. And that was like, and immediately when he said that, like of course, like I'm like, yes, like whatever will get me out of my job at Best Buy, like whatever will break me into the tech industry, I'm all for it. I didn't even think about asking questions about like being paid or anything like that. I was probably willing to pay him at that point. You know, so and luckily the apprenticeship actually involved as he informed me that the company would actually pay me to learn. And this seemed kind of sketchy.  All right, like whatever, like I'm down for it. Like it doesn't matter, like I was willing to pay you. I was willing to work for free if need be. So that's 10 times better, right? So that's pretty much how I became an apprentice and eventually I would graduate and become a software crafter for the company. So that in the nutshell is how I became a software crafter for the company known as Aethlite. And I remember somewhere around the time that I graduated my apprenticeship, I was engaged in a pretty interesting discussion with someone that I had just come to know recently. And the person asked me a question. We were at, like the conversation topic revolved around like racial relations in our country. And the person asked me a question. He said, why aren't more African American people more successful like yourself? Like you brought yourself up, you're from Chicago. You're from a not so great neighborhood. You lived below the poverty line when you were a kid. Like why is it that you were able to become a success within the software industry when so many other people haven't? And like this question really plagued me and it struck me and I had to explain to the person, I had a lot of things that a lot of people that I knew and grew up with simply didn't, right? Like I was one of the lucky ones in that regard. And after that conversation, I really wanted to pinpoint exactly what it was that I had and exactly where my life changed for the better and essentially made me who I am the day. So in coming to that conclusion, hopefully I could help other people like me essentially become successful in the software industry as well. Now, many people wonder why minorities aren't succeeding in their respective companies. Many people wonder what's stopping us from breaking the upper management barrier once we are in these software development companies. And once we're at these companies, what's preventing us from becoming software developers or becoming team leads or becoming executives within our respective companies? In lieu of all this, I asked myself the question, where is the gap for minorities in our industry and how can I help close it? And eventually it clicked and I realized exactly where things changed for me. I realized where my life changed and that brought me to the realization that the solution to breaking the barrier for minorities within the tech industry is providing a strong network of mentors to support them. And now you might be saying to yourself, well, my company hired minority employees and they still left or my company hired minority employees and they're unhappy or my company hired minority employees and they couldn't make it up the corporate ladder. And there's a reason for that. For years, we've been teaching everyone exactly the same. For years, we've been bringing in protégés and apprentices and teaching them exactly the same. For years, we've literally been duct typing our teachings to these protégés and the problem with that is you simply cannot duct type people. You can't duct type software developers. We can't expect everyone to respond to the same type of mentoring. So a contributing factor as to why you'll get people that are unhappy at their jobs and essentially get frustrated and leave is that you're teaching them in the exact same way and it's simply not effective for everyone. Our industry is changing and because of that, we need to change with it and the way that we change is that we change the way that we mentor our protégés and apprentices. Mentors must be willing to adjust their teaching styles to the, essentially adjust their teaching styles to the uniqueness that comes with mentoring someone who's a minority. And in doing so, we must also become aware of the challenges that minorities face as well as the challenges that we face when mentoring someone who is a minority. And to do that, we can take a step back and look at some of the data when it comes to minorities involved in the tech industry. And first off, let's take a look at some of the diversity numbers among tech employees, companies such as Intel, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. And if we look at the diversity numbers, we'll see that the largest bar, obviously, middle employees at these companies. And then we can look at next, the women at these companies as well. And as you can see, much noticeably lower. And next, the race and majority of the people that each one of these companies is, of course, an average white person. And if you break out your microscopes, you can see the really sad number of black people that are actually employed at these companies as well on the same goals for Hispanic and people that label themselves as others. So companies in our industry are struggling to retain minority employees. Like the CEO of Intel simply just has no idea, or he said he has no idea as to why they're losing African American employees at an alarming rate. And to look at things such as how often people quit, we have a graph that shows the predicted job quit rate for people across race. Now, if we look at the predicted quit rate for someone who is white, you'll see it's just below 4%. And if we look at the predicted quit rate for someone who is African American, you'll see it's noticeably larger, just below 5%. And the same goes for Hispanic Americans. Now, if we take a look at that, like this pretty much has everyone associated in terms of male and female. However, what happens if we have someone who is a dual minority, say someone who is an African American woman, for example, or someone who's a Hispanic American woman, for example. The predicted job quit rate, and compared to men for African American women, is actually 61% greater, and for Hispanic American women, 67% greater. Why is this? Well, one of the main reasons is, according to research, whites and minorities do not progress up the corporate ladder in the same way. Whites are more likely to be placed on a fast track to an executive position within their company than a person of color. Whereas people of color tend to plateau in middle management during their careers at the same companies as their white peers. And as a result, many people get frustrated and essentially leave their company. And unfortunately, this creates a domino effect. And the domino effect is in that you have these minority employees that plateau in their careers and eventually leave your company, and that leaves you with less and less minority employees for other entry-level employees to actually look up to. So it makes it more difficult for people to build relationships with people that look like them and or resemble them. And speaking from experience, it's honestly just comforting knowing that there's someone at the company that looks like me and actually did something in the company, made it up the corporate ladder. One of the questions that I asked myself for any company that I'm gonna apply for is how many people at this company look like me? How many people have built successful careers at this company look like me? And how many people have become executives at this company look like me? And it's far too often that that answer is no one. And this can be disheartening to a lot of people. However, there are companies that actually see minorities succeed and break that upper management barrier. So what sets them apart from the rest? How are some companies succeeding in retaining minority employees? And for the minority employees that are retained at these companies, what's keeping them motivated to essentially achieve something greater within the company? In asking myself these questions, I came across a bit of research and the research was conducted on the career progression of minority employees within corporate America. And the research came to several conclusions, but one of the most notable conclusions was that the minority employees who were the most successful, one thing that they had in common was a strong network of mentors to support them. Why it's so more likely to be placed on a fast track to executive positions, as I mentioned earlier, whereas minorities weren't necessarily fast track. However, even though they weren't fast track at these companies where minorities were successful, their mentors invested in them as if they would be fast track. So even though they plateaued for much longer than their peers who were white, they still invested in them. Their mentors continuously invested in them. And in turn, this helped prevent people from leaving the company and or decreasing their work performance. So this was my first mentor at Aethlite, guide by the name of Dave Moore. Dave mentored me individually for several months and he also brought in Malcolm to be my co-mentor. And around like four months or so into my apprenticeship, Dave introduced me to this guy, Paul Pagle. And I remember the conversation Dave and I had. Dave said, hey Byron, do you know what scope is in Ruby? And at the time I was still pretty green. Like I was still really new to programming aspects in Ruby in general. So I said, no, I don't know what scope is in Ruby. So he said, awesome, because I set up a one-on-one with you and the CEO of the company for him to explain to you what scope is in Ruby. And I was like, what? The CEO of the company, like CEO of the company is gonna teach me Ruby, like who am I? I'm nobody, right? Like that's what was going through my mind. And so I like, I found that really awesome. And Dave introduced me to several other people as well who would eventually become my co-mentors within the company of Aethlite. And if ever there were a question that Dave felt that he weren't as knowledgeable as someone else on the topic, he would actually put me in touch with several other people at the company that could explain it either different from him or much better than him or whatever the case may be. And if he ever felt that I was leaning on him too much for answers, he would continuously have me go out to people that I generally was uncomfortable going out to and not confident in actually asking questions. And he'd make me ask these people these questions. And in turn, this helped me build relationships within the company, helping build my network of mentors and contribute to my success in the company. And also, so to be completely successful as mentors, we must also become aware of the challenges that we face when mentoring someone who's a minority. And with that, we have challenges and opportunities. And according to research, minorities who plateaued in their careers received mentoring that was basically instructional. However, the most successful minorities who actually broke the career barrier, they received mentoring that was more than instructional. They received closer, fuller, developmental relationships with their mentors. So purely instructional mentoring wasn't sufficient enough for minorities. Protégés needed to feel connected to their mentors. Research shows that cross-race as well as cross-gender relationships can have difficulty forming. However, most mentorships must be cross-race or cross-gender. And as a result, you have the possibility of situations such as negative stereotypes, for example. Mentors must be willing to give their protégés the benefit of the doubt, investing in them because we expect them to succeed. A potential mentor who holds a negative stereotype, perhaps based on race, may withhold his support for his protégé until his protégé proves himself or herself worthy. Such subtle racism is that, may help explain why the minorities in the research that I mentioned earlier weren't fast-tracked in the same way that white people were in the companies that they worked for. Whites were placed on a fast-track based on their perceived potential, whereas minorities had to prove a solid and sustained record of performance over time. So in turn, minorities actually had to be over-prepared for the same positions that their white peers were actually being granted. When we, as minorities, feel like we aren't given the benefit of the doubt, we might become more reserved in our actions for fear that we might fail or be disciplined at something, or for something we do or say. And stereotypes have also proven to actually reduce performance within the workplace. And that actually brings me to an idea, and the idea is what's known as stereotype threat. Stereotype threat is when people feel themselves to be at risk of conforming to stereotypes about their social group, and to elaborate on this, there were these psychologists at Stanford, and they were actually conducting this case research study. And the case research study involved them grabbing both men and women, and they placed them into a room, and the men and women that they grabbed had equal levels of math skills. So upon placing them into the room, they actually gave everyone standardized math tests, and they had them take the tests, and they noticed something that actually repeated itself. They noticed that women actually underperformed on the standardized math tests, even though they were of equal skill level to all the men in the room as well. And the psychologists couldn't actually figure out why it took them a while before they actually had an idea, and the idea was, hey, maybe there's a stereotype threat that's happening that we aren't seeing, specifically the stereotype that women aren't as good as men in standardized math tests. So they actually recreated the same environment, the same experiment. They placed the men and the women in the room again, gave them the standardized math tests, except this time they did something different. This time before they took the tests in front of everyone in the room, they said, I know you may have heard that women aren't as good as men on standardized math tests. However, that's not true for this particular test. For this particular test, women actually performed just as well as the men. And in saying just those few words, the women actually brought their scores up and performed just as well as the men. So if you caught that, there was that stereotype threat that they just had looming in the back of their mind, something that you just don't necessarily think of, something that is unconscious, it's not something that you think of on a regular basis. And it can definitely, as proven in the case study, lower your performance on the job. And in talking about that, this leads me to something that is referred to as being a coach and a counselor for your protege. And to explain, a coach gives technical advice while a counselor talks about the emotional experience of something. And I'm gonna tell you all the story about essentially me working for Aethlite and my first days of coming into Aethlite. I remember every day I come into work, I came into work with just one goal. And that goal was to make sure that I didn't get fired. Like you laugh, but I'm so serious. Like every day I came into work with imposter syndrome, like surely everyone else here is better at software development than I am. Like I'm sitting next to people that came out of deaf boot camp and paid like 10, 20 grand to come out of deaf boot camp and I just came off of Code Academy trying to teach myself how to write NIF statement, right? Like I'm sitting next to people that went to college and got computer science degrees, people that are already five or 10 years into their software development careers and their apprentices as well. Like I was feeling inadequate. And eventually like all of this anxiety built up and I informed my mentor and he told me something that actually shocked me. Like he told me that he also felt the same way I did when he was an apprentice. And this was like super shocking to me in the fact that I knew how much experience he had coming in the eighth light. He had several years of experience, really smart guy. And I was like, all right, like if he felt the same way I did, maybe I'm just like going crazy. Maybe I actually have this. And he told me that I did. He told me and informed me that I was good enough to be at the company, good enough to work here and that I was progressing in my career essentially being an apprentice and becoming a software developer. So to be effective mentors for minorities, we must both play the role of coaching counselor, not only teaching the technical things, but also being someone that can listen, someone that can actually connect to our protégés on that emotional level as well. Because it's too often that minorities feel like outcasts. It's too often that they feel like they don't have anyone to relate to. And while there might not be someone at your company that looks like your minority protégé, that doesn't mean you can't be there for them emotionally. And something else that comes to mind when it comes to matching up people with mentors is the idea of identification and role modeling. And what I mean by that is you essentially want to have someone that a protégé can identify with for them to be taught by. Now, Dave and I, we had similar feelings of emotion going through our apprenticeship. While we're on completely different technical levels, we actually experienced similar struggles in going through our apprenticeship and that allowed us to essentially connect and identify with each other.  So he was already my role model. He was doing these awesome things, giving talks and whatnot and teaching people. And I was like, that is the life that I want to have. So he was already my role model. So in identification and role modeling, it also means that a mentor sees someone that reminds himself or herself of themselves in previous times or as an apprentice sees someone that reminds him or herself of themselves in the future. And I mentioned before, many relationships must be cross race or cross gender or many mentorships, I should say. And because of this, this brings about the idea and opportunity for something that's referred to as protective hesitation. And protective hesitation is when you review your relationship with someone as more fragile than others in fear that you might offend that person from something you do or say. And to elaborate on this, there's a case study whereas there was a white mentor who had a minority protege and he felt as though his minority protege style was too abrasive, like he was too rude and generally not a great person to work with. However, he never told his protege this for fear that he might sound prejudice, specifically that he'd harbor the stereotype that all black men are rude or disrespectful. And the mentor eventually found out that he was right when his protege became an issue with other people at the company. And by that time, it was too late. His protege had been deemed a problem. So in terms of discussing race and in terms of just racial relations period, people believe that they aren't supposed to discuss race and if we have to discuss it, then it must be a problem. However, that's not the case. Relationships where mentor and protege can actually actively discuss race can lead to greater opportunities for their protege. And some people will argue that discussing race might make people feel othered and that doesn't have to be the case. When we're open to discussing race, we're helping inspire our minority apprentices to take hold of something that makes them unique as individuals. I had a conversation with one of my mentors and I remember him saying that, he said, Byron, like I don't know if you're aware but there aren't many people in the software industry that look like you. And I was like, yeah, I kind of knew that. I thought he was joking but he was actually serious. He was making a point. He said, there aren't many people in the software industry that look like you and if you wanted to take it upon yourself to essentially become someone that other people look up to and essentially teaching people software development, that could be really huge for yourself as well as several other people that are looking to break into the software industry. Like you could be their inspiration, that person that they connect to on that level. So discussing race actually is one of the main reasons that I'm actually up here because my mentors inspired me to actually give this talk. So all in all, we've discussed things such as the career progression of both whites and minorities. We've discussed that whites are more likely to be placed on a fast track within corporate America than that of a minority. We've also discussed the diversity numbers among several tech employees and discussed essentially people having issues retaining employees at their companies. And to back that up, we've also discussed ways that we can help change those things. We've discussed that we can build strong network, strong menswear networks for our apprentices. We've discussed that we can become coaches and counselors for our apprentices as well. We've also discussed the possibility of negative stereotypes in the workplace, as well as the stereotype threat. We've also discussed the ability to identify and become role models for our apprentices. And we've discussed the idea of protective hesitation. And the goal of this talk was to essentially answer this question. Where is the gap for minorities and how can I help close it? And I think successfully like answer that question at least on one aspect. Building a strong network of mentors for our apprentices. So that concludes the talk. To wrap this up, I'd actually like to discuss this last one thing with you all. At Eighth Light, we've always had an apprenticeship model. And it wasn't until recent time that we actually had this crazy idea of not only just bringing apprentices into the company for us to teach, but to actually bring apprenticeship programs to other companies. So essentially, if you were a company that had like a group of developers who were either junior or senior level and wanted to either learn about some new technology or they wanted to learn how to become leaders within the technology space, we're actually working on this new project where we'll actually teach a group of developers from your company how to do that. And right now, the project is called Develop. It's a working title. We really don't have a specific title yet. I wanted to go with Bartik after I believe Susan Bartik who was awesome. But apart from that, if you have any questions in regards to this or anything else for that matter, feel free to see me and that is it. And I am willing to take questions as well. Yeah, so like, I think one of the things about my mentorship that really helped me out in that regard, or I'm sorry, let me repeat the question. You said, what are some things that you can do to help you and your apprentice identify with each other and discuss and essentially become more open, correct? Right, so one of the things that really helped me in that regard was that my mentor and I would actually like just talk after work, right? Like we just talk about whatever and like while we were friends before I got to A-Flight, once he became my mentor, it was kind of intimidating, like it was weird. Like I feel like I couldn't open up to him anymore once he became my mentor, but eventually we got to that point. And it was honestly just a matter of like Kim showing me that he was a real person. Him opening up to me about ways that he felt, things that he felt. And that allowed me to feel like I could trust him enough to actually open up to him. So essentially like, I feel like the more that you pour into someone, the better your relationship can be and that'll allow people to feel like they can trust you and open up to you as well. Right, so like you would essentially like to reach out to the minority developers that you have on your team at your company, correct? Yeah, so with that, like there can be like several ways to do that and essentially making sure that you can retain your minority employees. And you said there's like five of them. Okay, and they're all of equal levels within the company? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so in that regard, like it can be pretty difficult when someone's starting out because like there's no one for them to look up to in terms of people that look like them. So one thing that I always suggest in that aspect is to actually find people outside of your company, not necessarily to even hire, but people to maybe come in and like give a talk, people for them to network with, right? So that they can like build those mentor relationships. And in terms of like you, like making them feel welcome, just like talk to them about like thing, like ask them what are their concerns with the company, right? Like ask them where do they wanna be and if they open up to you in that regard, then you can say, all right, like let's start making some plans to like get you to where you wanna be because it's really often that people just won't ask those questions and or they'll ask the questions and the people will tell them and they're like, okay, well, all right, don't really have too much to tell you, but like you'll get that, you'll get somewhere eventually, like pretty much just like working with them, right? And like making them feel like they're a part of the team and a part of the company and someone that matters. All right, so to repeat the question, she said that she has a woman of color within her group of women software developers. Yeah, and you don't wanna like make her responsible for educating you on like challenges that she faces in the industry. Yeah, so like to start with that, that's like making sure that your team, actually one believes in the idea of becoming educated on like challenges that she'll face on a regular basis, right? It starts with you all.  Like that makes us like feel like we're not alone in like this struggle to like break into the tech industry and actually succeed, right? So as long as you all were to attack it in that aspect and actually be proactive and not reactive and not like put the burden completely on her to inform you all of like ways that she might feel or things that she or challenges that she might face. All right, so. So yeah, so the question revolved around if you're looking for or if you're either not employed or you don't have a strong network or mentor network at your current workplace, what can you do to make it so that you do, right? Yeah, so in that aspect, like one thing that I always tell people to keep in mind, even if you have employees at your company that have strong networks of mentors like try to encourage them to or like you essentially put it on yourself as a mentor or as an apprentice to like reach out to other people outside of the company that you either work for or if you're actually unemployed, then I'd honestly just started reaching out to just like people that I admire, right? Like I've reached out to several people that like were just role models to me in the software industry and actually gotten replies back. People that would like happily discuss like progressing up the software development ladder and breaking into the tech industry and stuff like that. So as long as like you can like muster up the courage to actually talk to these people, a lot of them will actually reply. A lot of them are really helpful and willing to teach local user groups. Yeah, that's a huge thing too.  And like you can meet a lot of really cool people there. A lot of people that actually got employed at AtheLite met someone at Meetups. So right, so to repeat the question, she said that she has a coworker who is being racist towards another minority coworker within the workplace and she wasn't exactly sure how to handle the issue. So before going to HR, and I'm gonna tread lightly on answering this question because it's a very sensitive topic. So before going to HR, I'd honestly talk to whoever was the first hire up in like in charge of the team and actually let them know that it's making you feel uncomfortable. Like put it on you, don't say, oh, it's making this person feel uncomfortable because maybe it's not, maybe it's making you feel uncomfortable. And if that is the case, then it's their job to actually see to it that something is done about it. And in that regard, when that person, whoever the hire up is, decides to go to HR for example, they'll say like, hey, you actually have the problem with this person and what they were saying. And that way you just completely take the burden off of the person that you're seeing being abused. So, sweet, thank you. I've never gotten that. Thank you all for the very thought-provoking questions, those were all.