I'm your host Christine Linders, physical therapist and board certified orthopedic clinical specialist. This show is designed to bring you not only the most effective physical therapy tips but also holistic information to help you achieve total body wellness. Today I'm going to drop the mic on back pain. I, your virtual physical therapist, will be giving you the evidence-based solution you've been looking for to end back pain for good. Let's go straight to video number one.   It's been around since the beginning of time, just waiting for you to call on it to help support your back. But no one told you it was there. If you have back pain, you need your TA to form the anatomical girdle with your deep back muscles to support your spine. You see, the TA contracts just after your brain has the initial thought for motion.   Try it. Pull your belly button in towards your spine.   So there you have it, the secret to ending low back pain. I've been using this technique since 2002 or three, and each time, even now, today that my patients learn it, they always come back saying, that really works, or that made all the difference.  No one told him how to engage his anatomical girdle.  It's your deepest abdominal muscle, and it runs sideways across your body like this. So it also gives you a narrower waistline or a flatter stomach, as I usually say, because it works. It holds your contents in.  And that's what keeps those vertebrae safe and prevents them from shifting or being vulnerable while you go about your day.  To learn to engage your trans versus abdominis correctly and engage your anatomical girdle, I'm going to show you how to do it in standing first. So you're going to stand up, and I'll visualize that for you.   You don't want to pull it in from here, too, because then you stop your diaphragm from breathing. You can hear how it changes the sound of my voice when I do that. You just want to pull it in from here. Your trans versus abdominis. And if you see it from the front, the fibers run this way.  Belly button in, belly button in. So practice that in standing first.  Enjoy. So that's a nice simple way to learn it while you're sitting or standing is using your hands. And you don't want to stop your diaphragm from moving because your diaphragm needs to be free to breathe for you. And also you heard by the sound of my voice that when I pull my diaphragm in, it's also hard for me to talk. But you may feel a little strained on talking, because when you pull your belly button in to activate your trans or abdominis, it does tug on your diaphragm because the trans or abdominis intersects into the side fibers of the diaphragm like that. It's a basket weave attachment into the diaphragm. And that's why the transverse abdominis and the diaphragm also help so much for pastoral support. So if you were to come into the clinic, I would teach you lying down. I would go through my assessment. You'd be on your back with your knees bent and your feet flat on the table.  So let's look at video three. To find the position of your neutral spine, you want to lay on a firm surface. So if you can't get to the floor, you can use your bed. But I'm going to explain to you why it's better to do it on a firm surface if you can get down to one. So I'm going to show you on the ground here. So I'll move my arm so you can see. So you want to have the point of contact with your tailbone and your rib cage here, but not in your lower back right here.  And you can see as I roll my pelvis like that. And you don't want to arch your back up all the way like that. You want to find a position that's in the middle where you're resting on your tailbone.  So you want to pull it in from your belly button and blow like this. Here, pull it in. You can see it narrow in my waist right here.  What you don't want to do is you don't want to pull it in like this and stop your diaphragm from moving either. You want to pull in your belly button so that you can still breathe here and use your diaphragm while you keep this in. So learn to pull your belly button in and then breathe.  Because what that does is it uses the big six-pack muscle, your rectus abdominis. That's not what you want to do. That's more for just range of motion if you need to get your back moving.  Excellent. So watch that again and again because that will help you to find your neutral spine. And I have a question right away. So will sucking it in make my stomach flatter? Yes, it actually will.   And at the time I said I don't think so sorry but it's definitely going to help you with your incontinence problems working your pelvic floor and your transverse abdominis to try to keep the pressure right in your core as you try to go to the bathroom. So she came back a couple weeks later.  And she showed me her waistline and she said, honey, look, it gave me a flatter stomach. And so I was new to working on the transverse abdominis back then and two years later, I think I went to a women's health section of the American Physical Therapy Association and sat in on a brief breakout session where they were talking about postpartum women and how so many want to do much crunches to get rid of that pooch or that belly that they have post baby and how activating the transverse abdominis, which I already knew because my patient showed me, would give them a flatter stomach whereas exercising the rectus abdominis by doing crunches would give you more of that bulging belly.  And the reason why, as I explained before, is because the fibers run horizontally. And so when they contract, they support your abdominal contents as well. And after a pregnancy, all of that is stretched out and you need to activate those fibers to support your abdominal contents. So the second part of the question is, can I exercise if I have lower back pain? The answer is yes. And it depends on what type of exercise you want to do. If you have low back pain, doing a lot of bending or hip workouts as I've learned they're called over the pandemic, high intensity training, something else is the T, very high intensity running, jumping down into pushups, jumping back up into burpees, doing all these bending quick bending exercises. That's probably not something for you to do if you have low back pain. But going for a walk is a great thing for you to do. If you have low back pain, as long as it doesn't hurt when you walk, I've suffered from low back pain for a long time. I've had a couple severe back injuries. One of them working with a patient where I was left with numbness down my leg. And so walking is okay for me, but it has to be very short. Riding a bike is great for me. That is the best thing for my back when I'm having tension or episode from work, because I've had to twist to work on a patient's shoulder. Riding a bike for 20 minutes, a stationary bike opens up my back and I'm fine. But that doesn't work for everyone. But what you want to avoid is high impact activities.  So I hope that answered your question. Thank you so much. So I want to talk a little bit about what contributes to low back pain outside of bending and twisting and giving yourself a back injury. So the strength in your hips is critical to having a healthy low back. Having proper alignment when you walk is critical to having a low back. And what I mean by that is if you stand on one leg, which I'll show you in a minute, you want to have your pelvis level when you're on one leg and not leaning with your trunk off to one side. And also what I've seen in two people lately is they're walking with one foot turned out. I had two people on Friday and two people, one person yesterday who has that problem and is suffering some low back pain as a result.   And so your hip either drops or your trunk bends to the right and that compresses on the nerves. That is the most common reason that I see for people that complain of sciatica. So let's learn a little bit more about that in video number four. Now let's talk about sciatica. There are many reasons for this pain in the butt for lack of a better word.  And my patient who I just explained to you was having some sciatica. He's a golfer. He's a left-handed golfer. He was in for his shoulder. So I said, well, let me just look at you really quickly and see what's going on. So I had him stand up on his right leg and he was fine and I had him do a squat and he was fine. I had him stuffed on his left leg and he was doing this. So I had him try it again and he was doing this and then I watched him walk and he was doing this on his left side.  So in the next video I'm going to show you what I gave him in two minutes that got rid of his problem. So that's a great way to identify if you're one of those people that has that hip drop. So I want to go straight to video number five to show you what I gave him to help us back. So here was the quick and dirty few things that you can do to end your sciatica pain all on your own. So first we did the knee to opposite chest stretch to stretch out the glute that was going into spasm. You want to hug your knee, line it up with your opposite shoulder and pull the other foot so it falls on the opposite side of your leg and stretch. You want to do both sides and breathe for about 20 seconds. Also I taught him how to do the second in and march to engage his anatomical girdle. So I taught him how to find his neutral spine, pull his belly button in without flattening his back and then march keeping his pelvis level.  I put a bander on his ankles, got his legs straight on the table, told him to pull his toes up, buns tight, slide his legs apart. We did 10 times sliding apart, then we did 10 times on his left side and 10 times on his right side and then we retested and what we saw was he was able to stand on his left leg without hinging over his spine. So that's fantastic. So I want to take a little bit of a break and ask you all how you're sitting right now watching this. Whether you're watching it live or you're going to be watching it later on tonight or tomorrow, I want to see how you're sitting.  I want you to pay attention to that because sitting is so important to the health of our low back and that's because the low back has a backwards curve and when you slouch, you round it and you completely reverse the curve which can lead to all kinds of back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, hip pain. I can go on as you age and go about your day. So some of those problems that I've seen in people are stenosis or spinal arthritis and usually I tend to see them later on in life in their 50s on and some in their 40s now I'm saying who have desk jobs which is tough because we're still young in our 40s. So you have to pay attention to how you sit. So let's look at video number six to talk a little bit about spinal arthritis and stenosis and what to do if you have it. If you have arthritis in your spine, it's important to get your spine moving gently. Motion is lotion remember. So one great thing to do to start is to lie on your back and just rotate your knees side to side a little bit. You don't have to go all the way, you want to avoid pain. Drop your knees side to side.  So that's just a few things there's many that I go through with my patients when they come in with stenosis or spine arthritis because every body's body is different and I have to go through a assessment and find out what's tight what's weak what's short what's long to help them with their individual activities that they do throughout the day whether they're very active or they're more sedentary. So I have another question this is perfect are there sleep positions to help lower back pain? Yes there are if you are a back sleeper and any other kind of sleeper it is optimal to sleep on your back with a pillow underneath your knees and that is not realistic for everyone and I know that.  It is better if you try to change your sleep position but I know that that's impossible for certain people so do your best. So also side sleeping is a huge issue many people sleep on their side.


Yeah, my name is Thomas Kohlwisch. I'm vice president of Kotima Coding Machinery. Kotima Coding Machinery is working in deep tech, so we build equipment for printing, coding and laminating. So these machines we see on the background here, is that your machines? Yeah, we work in different areas, so most of our pilot lines are being used for lab-to-fab development. We're working specifically with startups with technology clusters like here, the LTFN in Tessanoliki, on products like organic photovoltaics, on nanoprinted surfaces, but we're also working on new technologies like green hydrogen and battery technologies. So what are these machines we see behind you, the clicking code? Yeah, the clicking code is a patented Kotima system. This clicking code system can be adjusted in size. We can add additional features at a later stage of the operation. So the customer can start with a standard configuration and then we can add additional features at a later stage. So that's our most versatile flexible patented lab system we offer to our customers. And the roll-to-roll nano-imprint? Yeah, the roll-to-roll nano-imprint is the system to do roll-to-roll nano-structured surfaces, for example for optical light guides, for surface modification. And this system is used by the display industry, by label industry for specific features. And here we have dedicated systems. We're also now installed at the LTFN in Tessanoliki. Nice. So you enable all kinds of future technologies that are going to be exciting like flexible solar, flexible outlets. Yeah, exactly. And this we do already, if you speak about flexible solar, this we would do already since 2003, working on first OPV devices. We did the first printing unit for OLEDs in 2008 at a university in Finland. So we are always very early at the technology stages people are working on. So what's the way to get this to mass production so the whole world gets impacted by this technology? The way to mass production is our approach not only to build equipment. We have Europe's biggest R&D center with 12 pilot lines. We're doing a lot of pre-engineering for our customers. We have a whole service range for R&D development. So the combination of equipment, R&D services and also our global network is the key. Nice. What kind of discussions do you have here at the Nanotech Synology Conference? We have discussions here since 2008 already on new technologies specifically on the topic of OPV, specifically on the topic of green hydrogen, fuel cells and batteries. And we're focusing here also on networking with our RTO partners, finding new project proposals for Horizon Europe. That's a big effort here in these next days. Do people have new ideas what they want to do with your technology all the time? Yeah, I think that's the key of the company. We are always walking around, we are speaking to people, specifically here from the R&D institutes to find new ideas where you can use rotor roll printing, coating and laminating technologies. What do you think about, let's say, I want to have solar on my roof. Is it going to happen? Can I just get this kind of solar soon? It's happening. We work together very closely here with the university, with Staggers, with Theters. We work with OET, which is using our equipment here at LTFN. And we are already shipping solar cells to customers globally, specifically on the OPV topic. And here OET has new technologies in the surface modifications of these solar cells. So they are not only on the roof, they are also in agriculture being used in a lot of different applications. Is it crucial to have efficiency that's at the level that makes sense per dollar for people to just say I want billion units, you know? I think the more important thing is efficiency over the whole day, where OPV has advantages against silicon technologies. The other advantage is it's lightweight. You can design every form you need. And it's a printed material, so you also can do printed structures which fit into architectural designs, for example.  Yeah, for sure. That's one approach. The approaches also have smaller lightweight devices for energy harvesting, for example powering the Internet of Things, powering standard devices. So you're not using electricity, you're directly using solar energy to power your devices in your house, or in your car, in other places. What's the other big use cases you see? Solar, OLED? The biggest use case at the moment in Europe is green hydrogen. With all the surroundings, political surroundings we have, there was already a big initiative on green hydrogen from the European Commission. And now with the topic of getting faster out of fossil fuels, especially gas supply from Russia, which is not taking place anymore, green hydrogen will be the big hype topic here until 2030 or 2050 for sure. How do you enable the green hydrogen with your technology? We do catalyst coatings on the membrane for palm electrolyzers. So we are at the moment at the forefront on these production lines, road to road, which are being already installed at the moment in Europe, but also in North America. Can you talk a little bit more about these catalyst membranes and all this? Yeah, our company is working in fuel cells and electrolyzers since 20 years. We are able to cast the membranes so we can produce membranes which are being used for electrolyzer technologies and fuel cells. And of course on these membranes you have to bring the catalyst from both sides. And that's also a coating application and this we do since 20 years. And we are now going into, let's say, two meters of working with in the operation, faster speed, industrialization of processes, including quality control, using AI to get very good results. So you could, in theory, road to road print the solar panel, the audit lighting, the fuel cell hydrogen system, the whole thing can be printed? Yeah, that's basically the idea and that's the thing we are doing. And of course if you use solar energy, you have to store solar energy. And the best way to do it is to use electrolyzers to make hydrogen. So the whole green tech future is printed? It's printed or coated. That's basically the idea. And it's on flexible materials and it has to be scaled up, specifically in green hydrogen as soon as possible. Otherwise we are not reaching the net zero targets that the European Commission wants to have in 2050. How is the efficiency for something that you do compared to something that's mass manufactured in China that's like molded kind of things and stuff? In electrolyzer technologies, we still have a big advantage against the Chinese producers because we are already at a wider working with, higher speed, higher quality. If you look into solar applications, it's compatible because I think a lot of production technologies will come back from China to Europe. So we are speaking about a local European production to be independent from any supply problems or other problems here in Europe. Yeah, independence is a good thing to have sometimes. It's unpredictable political environment in the world. So you want to have stuff happen in Europe? Yeah. And this is the place to be right now in Europe, the nanotechnology conference as the most exciting thing right now. Yeah, because you have here the university, you have solar, you have wind energy and you have already activities from the LTFN and OED on electrolyzers and fuel cell technologies. In Denmark they're talking about doing huge islands for wind power and they want to also put them in the hydrogen and ship it over and stuff like that. And I just spoke with these guys over there in Saudi Arabia, they also want to do solar and hydrogen and ship it. Yeah, if you see a hydrogen, every country who is using electrolyzer technologies is using renewables to make green hydrogen will be totally independent from fossil fuel. So there will be also independent from other areas where fossil fuels is being produced. On the other hand, countries like Australia, like Saudi Arabia, like Denmark either have a lot of solar energy or wind power and then can produce hydrogen and export it to countries which don't have so much solar power, for example. That's also a big opportunity in Africa. If you see the connection between Africa and the European Union already being discussed, there will be big solar farms in Morocco, in Tunisia and then shipping the hydrogen to Europe. So it will be complete new value chains globally in this type of operation. So everybody is talking about it. Is Germany and the EU, are they all putting the money forward actually requiring this to be done? Yeah, there's the Green Deal from the European Commission. There's additional funding for hydrogen production and also developing hydrogen technologies in Europe. There is an estimated 3 trillion market globally on green hydrogen to replace grey hydrogen, to replace fossil fuels to 2050. And there are already 39 different programs globally on hydrogen economy from countries like Japan, United States, Europe. So it's an accelerating growth of the technology. Nice. Is there something you forgot to mention? No, I think we covered the hot topics. Are you going to have presentations here? Yeah, I will have a presentation on Thursday on the production technologies for fuel cells and green hydrogen. And my colleague will speak about sustainable packaging, also in a talk on Thursday. Cool. Thanks a lot. Okay, thank you. Thanks.


You to learn to trade guys, which is a good thing You know Dr. Lawyers take four or five twelve years to finally learn their craft and start making money You know and you can't just put in a couple months of hard work to learn this You want to get rich overnight? You want to graduate overnight? So these these are things you have to consider guys anything That's worth it.  All right guys. Let's start um One thing I want to talk about first. We start is the meetup is coming guys the meetup It's going to be the weekend of the August 19th Okay, do not miss this one.  You should take off from work. Do what you need to do to come to our meetup Completely free.   I don't know what else to tell you guys You know, this is completely free took us a lot of money to set this up. You do not have to be a member This is our fourth year anniversary.   If you want to hang out bars all day, that's cool, too You can hang out with me. I'm there all night But you know what man that at least you do it with quality people that want to get ahead in life There are doctors lawyers engineers. You name it nurses professors You'd be very surprised. There's FBI agents security Policemen every sort of life wants to learn to trade stocks. This is your event you go to my investing club Dot-com meetup sign up all the information. We even have cheap hotel rooms for you Okay, all the freaking information here. Here is the agenda This is August 19th guys. Do not meet that do not miss this event Okay, you will be great for the rest of your freaking life. Well For the year anyway, that's our next meetup, which is this year, but this is a big one guys Okay, this is the big one of the year Okay, every time we go we have a huge was a Philadelphia. We did we're the only ones that do meetups around the world Thank goodness that COVID opened up that so now we can actually start doing more meetups guys You do not have to be a member. Okay Me quality freaking people meet myself meet Alex meet all the moderators. Let me take a look at the stock Let me see if I have these open by the way Okay, cool See I am still training. I'm not here pumping and dumping Stocks, you know, I love doing this guys. I love doing this. I've been doing this for a long It's the same repetitive thing over and over once you learn the fundamentals You apply it with the problem with training is this guys you there's so much to learn You don't know where to begin. So that's why you to cut the learning curve You need to join it like MIC right something like that.  I'm just trying to help you guys I see so many people freaking losing man, and I'm just sitting here bored on my mind I mean, I traded let me see I traded how many stocks today here guys So here here's all the stocks I traded All for green Let's go over some of these just so the question is this guy. So you'd be trading meme stocks Sorry, my internet died or something. Okay, cool Sorry guys. So the question is will Should you trade the meme stocks dancers? Yes, or no? Yes, it depends. You know why it depends Are you long or are you a short? Let's bring up one of these stocks BBBY and AMC okay, so here's BBBY Here's AMC If you are a long Day ones are your best bet for these movers, okay? That's why I said depends everybody just wants to get in get in get in but the problem is this Okay, you have to have an edge. You have to know what your edges usually These plays have what's I call the three-day rule the first day is the pump day the first day I call it it's like the the early birds that know what what they're doing gets in so there's a So AMC started moving on Friday because of earnings all that stuff And so over the weekend what happens is the grandma see this the friends their brothers their cousins They're freaking you know their buddies you know see this and so it gaps up because there was like oh shit And AMC is going back to the moon, you know BBBY is going back to the moon And so what happens is this is why you get this gap up over the weekend weekend gappers are very strong for hype They spent all weekend humping pumping the meme stock up And that's why you get the gap and so you have and so it squeezes it squeezes And so it hits the three-day rule what I talked about three-day rules all the time This is what I talked about this for the 15 freakin years.  You have already bought down here This is be chasing this will be the this would be like your grandma buying because she heard it from A friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend, right guys But you heard it that you heard it either here or Here and then if you're dumb you hold it you hold it all the way back now you lose So the three-day rule is very simple the pup day the gap day You use this day to scale out as you know like as Most of your position and then dump the rest on day three and all day threes when shorts come in That's why I said it depends or you trade this. So this is a very difficult stock. I've actually surprised it went all the way down You know, I thought we'd linger around here. So in terms of percentage gain I skip these meme stocks what I favor for instead of the meme stocks is small caps You know, everybody has a niche guys and so my niche is to trade what I like to trade So you have stocks like ZKIN Which I have a nice average up in the 160s. I Kept adding adding 160s and now is the stocks at 120s So that's a 40 cents 40 by that that is 40 divided by 16 what that's a 25% gain on one position guys So, you know, it depends. I'm like should I focus? On You know meme stocks and I'll tell you the reason the guys so this is the thing Okay, you have to you have to ask yourself what what are you trying to accomplish if you have a million dollar account It's gonna be difficult to put a million dollars into a small cap.  I used to trade with four million dollar count Right, but you know now I'm trading small caps. I don't need that And so I'm it does not take much of a position to make decent money with small caps guys And so 25% across 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 stocks. I traded I traded all for for gains Okay, let's go through all the stocks. I traded all these stocks. I traded for gains today I didn't lose on a single position guys. I lost once. Let me see.   I got in some positions.  It's fucking. Oh, I had some open orders during the Instagram This one always gets me.  Boom. I went back to the hive day Boom covered all the way down. Let's bank again. So now I did not do maintenance and it got me. I didn't get me yet.  What's this? So I This thing is blocked 5 4 this my my shit's off. Let's see 5 4 6 That's cool. Hopefully you'll go down to 1 3 5 and okay Let me just put in some open orders guys. Um I didn't do I didn't know how to open orders. That's funny That's fine. So that's a p that's a pdn It's wiped up. So small this is the problem with small cats guys. You have to wait for the outer lines So I I do this thing is so freaking broken. I started doing the IG live here I didn't know started moving up and so I started moving. I don't know. There's news or what but it's crazy It's okay. It went on news freaking crazy, dude Okay, um That's fine. So then you have b nso Look at this dog guys from six dollars and 60 cents All the way down.  I traded guys. Well, she has an open order that fell too So look it went up from all the way to 16 bucks Covered all the way down to 14 bucks.    Yeah, there we go I'm gonna show you what I did guys. Hold on. Let me uh a pdn I already took some off here So these are all profit up here. I covered the ones I broke even over here Let me try that again So you see what I did guys? Look at that. Okay So I top ticked it actually You know why top ticket same freaking line from the previous video? So that we this is the magic guys All right, so I just leave it over there. So that's that's what I did guys Yeah, real time trader So I got the top Because of this previous top and this top was based upon the previous top So you have a triple top over here in the final 80 line And so if I was trading out actively so I did cover Half of the position here. So I took off the early ones So I'm writing the two positions up here guys And it goes back down here.  You got You saw this a pop in real life in real time. So that's pretty cool a pdn I've been you know two great trades in the morning guys. Look at this man All the way he cover all the way down top tick this all the way down Now it's kind of writing this. I'm hoping it It kind of crashes back fades down here. I'll cover down here I'll be set so I covered half of the thing down here So I'm already good man average is like up here somewhere because I took two off here. You see this That's pretty much scaling guys. And so that let me see what else is there So that's that stock and then we have hscs, which is a cool one. Let me take let me show you hscs I covered early So I'm all the way up here at the $3 20 line Covered all the way down to 290, which is a great percentage guys. Of course it goes down No more, but it is My internet keeps going out Fat phat at top ticks here. I'll show you how I did this So the stock is fat Look at this, man. If you're early on fat, you're dead. This thing started at $7. It's now $9 Do not have FOMO. What I do is actually waited.  That's all this play. It's simple The key is look at this do not have FOMO wait for the top to be set Signaled by a candle big candle down Okay, so that's fat. What else did that trade RETO? This one was RTEO Look at that waited not for so the first One they went up No, I'm not gonna top I'm not gonna try to top tick it because they could go to 10 bucks Who knows so I waited for it to come down and go back up And I actually actually top ticked it around 130 line Covered boom and it went down covered all the way down to one dollar. This is a 30 cent plus move Add them all up seven of these stocks guys. You don't need to make much money man Imagine you make this a few hundred bucks each one It adds up. So let's see what else is there top T1. This is the weird one.  I top tick top The reason I top ticked this my IG keeps going in and out Is it okay? Let me know if it's okay for you guys It keeps stalling it keeps Going in and out my hg. I got a new phone and my phone's off the jacked up But anyways, I top tick top using the line from this morning pre-market Covered I this some weird fast finger.    What can you do right? What can you do? And then the last one z-kin Oh, yeah, I think I told you about this already So these all add up guys. I made all money on all these stocks Is the same process. So you asked me Should I be trading the meme stocks if I trade the meme stocks a couple things will happen guys So this is part of the trading that you need to it's called stock selection So depending on your objective your your account size, whatever it may be your niche, right? My niche has been to trade these freaking five of these stocks They all add up make money on each one because they're you know, I'm not trading the hottest stock of the day The hardest ones are the meme stocks Hardest ones of the day Hedge ones are running them wall street guys are running them the eight guys diamond hands. You know, it's so difficult, right?      I said what's called fantasy orders But for meme stocks I have to focus on them.  They'll hunt your stops and all that stuff So, you know, so in terms of should I be trading meme stocks?    Oh, I feel some shit Let me answer 1588 The uh 16 What I got I got a good feel. I want to show you afterwards What I got let me show you what I did So I'm using fantasy words for these. What is the fantasy order? Fantasy order is just a way of putting a little order out there and hoping it hits You know, it doesn't hit doesn't hit but you have to know Strategically where to place them. This is why we teach you guys. Okay. Let's take a look at this So then that stock I fucked up on I shorted the top at $21 Then it covered out of 19 bucks Then the ball falls down to 13 bucks. So now it bounces back up.  Sorry guys top ticked it 920 Now it's down here.  I'm telling you this is the event And I have to show you I trained a seven one two three four five six seven eight nine tickers I trained in nine symbols all four games. I showed you all that so actually it works guys No, I didn't get back to what I'm doing any more questions. If not, I will get back to training We have all these questions are on the trading fish. I have a free We have a free video on our youtube channel. Look for the trading fish academy Okay, trading fish academy all your questions will be answered there focus and all that and we also have a Webinar free webinar my investment club comm slash webinar Okay, webinar slash webinar and also within a youtube channel So click like do us a favor help help me click like if you like these videos and help us out guys Okay, I gotta get back to trading. We'll see you very soon in the meet up and once again You can always hit us up on our dms. All right. Our dms are open for instagram. Thanks guys


Welcome to Style Documentation for the Resource Limited. My name is Betsy Hebel and today we are going to be talking about ways to get style guides done in the real world as opposed to the happy fairy world where you actually have three months to take to stop the world and do this. And so whenever you're getting things done under resource constraints, be it making a style guide or anything else, you need to follow some basic steps. First off, you need to have a thing that you're aiming for. If you don't have a vision where you want to go, you're going to track back and forth and you're going to kind of fiddle along. Second, you need to figure out baby steps that will get you there. And then you need to scale these baby steps a bit further down. You're always going to really overestimate how much you can get done in any given baby step at first. And so be realistic. Take a few times to go, no, really, I'm going to have 20 minutes a day to devote to this. What can I do in 20 minutes? You're also going to have changing circumstances to adapt to. If you're taking 20 minutes a day to do this, then you're going to be coding and your teammates are going to be coding for a lot more than 20 minutes of those days. You need to hit for a moving target. So nothing is going to really be quite what you expect at the end. The vision that you have at first is great. It keeps you motivated and it keeps you focused. But resign yourself to the fact that that's not what you're going to get. What you're going to get is something that's actually kind of cooler. Then you go do the thing. So this is the vision. What we have here is the 18F style guide. 18F is a division of the US government. I like this as an example style guide because 18F is a collection of small teams that consults for other government agencies. I could use other examples like Google's material design here. But since material design is built for Google scale companies and since most of us do not work at Google scale companies, something like this that's a little tinier is a bit not only more realistic, but also more adapted to our specific needs, not Google's needs. We talk a lot about getting everyone on the same page where our business logic is concerned. We talk about developing a shared ubiquitous language that we can share with stakeholders. But the thing is we need a separate shared ubiquitous language for our user interface logic. When we are doing web development, we distribute this user interface logic through the HTML and CSS and JavaScript and keeping this organized is not actually an easy task because it's so distributed. This coherent model that we're going to build is what lets us do that and not go insane. Goodness, that's ablest language. I'm sorry, guys. And the thing is you already have an accidental style guide. Your accidental style guide is your code base. All of your forms look basically like each other, I think, probably. And this is achieved via liberal use of copy and paste. This is great if you've got a small team or a small UI or anything like that. But as you scale up, it gets a little trickier to deal with. You start onboarding newer developers and they don't know what to copy and paste from. They don't know what the right parts of the accidental style guide are. Rails gives you a lot of really useful structures for organizing your business logic. Not as many as some people would like, but enough. If you open up a new Rails app, you know where the controllers are going to be and you know roughly what they're going to do. The same is not really true if you code. Every shop has its own funky little way of doing it. And that's not transparent. Also, realistically, stakeholders who are not you, especially designers, are going to have a lot more opinions about the results of the view code than they are about the results of business logic. They can see it. It's easy to talk about and easy to think about. So there is an example app. I'm going to be turning into it a few different times in this talk. When I talk about a coherent model of the user interface, I want to again stress this is about looking at repeated user interface concepts. These are not in the context of the user interface domain cat photo modules. Their cards are showcases. The reason I'm making this distinction is because a designer might want to reuse the same concept to display dog photos. Or they might want to reuse, or you're probably going to also be displaying cat photos in another way and if you're making a cat photo sharing website. Style guides should also go a little deeper than your branding guidelines. A lot of people go, okay, we use Helvetica and stop there. But a style guide can give you a lot more. You can talk about the look and feel of individual widgets. This tends to be as much or more about the affordances of specific components as it is about their aesthetics. You can talk about how they're arranged. Are the labels next to the form fields or on top of them? Where do error messages go? We can also talk about what UI problems are given which is useful for solving. You can say use carousels if you need to display several bits of cards, but otherwise just use a grid. Or you can say only display notifications if they're relevant to the user's current goal. And this is going to look basically like the bootstrap documentation when you're done. So you might be thinking, this is overkill, we just use bootstrap. Just is a really funny word in software development. It is usually a marker for someone trying to push their assumptions on you without realizing it.  If you think your shop just uses bootstrap, I'd like to ask yourself the following questions. Are you using all of bootstrap or just a subset? Are you only ever using bootstrap or do you have custom UI elements that aren't part of it? Do you have undocumented bits and pieces of code or rules around how you're using the bootstrap elements? And again, most importantly, you often copy and paste markup around to preserve these undocumented rules. That's the most useful real-world heuristic I can give you. And so if any of these statements are true about your site, your style guide is not the same as the bootstrap documentation. I'd like to encourage you to document the ways in which it's different and you don't necessarily need to be super fancy about this. It can be annotations with links that say more docs at this link. This link happens to be the bootstrap docs. But still, documenting these deviations is very important. There are a few other barriers to style guide adoption that aren't just, oh, why do we need this? They are, it's a lot of work. They are, it's a lot of work and my boss will not let me do this because it's a lot of work. There's also a few fuzzier ones. If you build your style guide very inflexibly, it's not going to accommodate a real-world user interface very well. Similarly, you might have a designer who believes in a lot of exceptions to the rules rather than just a few. And finally, if you make a style guide once and then assume it's set in stone, it's going to be just another set of dead documentation. It's going to slowly drift away from reality. We live in the real world. Our software is held together by Love and Duck Tape. And I say we for a reason. Like probably most of you, I'm a veteran of the, we can always make it better tomorrow, School of Agile. And because of that, I can tell you that actually you can do this incrementally. You can get this bright, shiny dream world in the real world. The first thing we need to do is let go of the idea that a style guide is ever going to be done. It's in 15 years since the Agile manifesto. We have all embraced a notion that our software is iteratively built and never quite finished. It follows that our documentation, like the code at mirrors, needs to be responsive to changing needs, needs to be malleable. I've worked with a style guide before that was this pretty thing that the designers went off in a room and built over the course of a few months. It was great for about five months after they finished. But then the lead designer left and we replaced them. And our new designer went into another room for another two months or so, and built us a new style guide and it was beautiful too. But we are suddenly faced with this dilemma. Do we stop the world and migrate to this? Do we leave our user interface inconsistent state? What do we do? And none of these options were great for our users and a lot of them involved us taking time to not ship code. So when we view these things as perfect versus worthless, when we hold up this perfect ideal in our head and expect that it's actually even all that useful in the real world, we suddenly stop doing iterative processes because we think there's no point. The history of industry has proven time and time again that iterative processes work much better than stop the world processes or heaven for fend, never doing anything at all. Who here has written brownfield test suites before? So taken a uncovered or under covered code base and written some tests around it. That's a lot to your hands than I expected.  You tend to pick one UI path and write an integration test for it. Or you pick one method in one class and you start writing unit tests for all the cases and it's really, really terrible. You do it for features you're working on anyway at the time, but it's still really, really terrible. You're trying to maintain some kind of velocity in your feature. And you don't have any kind of proper test harness. You're needing to build that simultaneously. And so you kind of fake it and go, good enough, maybe, and move on. But the next test after that, still not fun or anything, but it sucks a lot less. You already have a minimum viable test harness in place and so you can just write your test. Or you can maybe even flesh out your test harness a little and make it a little more full featured. And eventually it gets easier and easier and easier and then it gets easy. And that is the greatest feeling. And I'd like you to think about Brownfield Style Guide documentation in the exact same way, because it is the same thing. The great news about looking at Brownfield Style Guide documentation, like Brownfield testing, as an iterative process, is that lets us sidestep many of the real world concerns I outline for you about style guides. It also forces us to figure out a set of baby steps that lets us maintain velocity while we build out our style guide. It forces us to make things a little bit better with every little baby step so that we can prove to our teammates and our bosses that this actually is worth doing. And it forces us right away to grapple with the dead documentation problem. If someone didn't stop the Royal Doc project and released on April 27th, 2014, I know coming into the project that it was relevant then.  So if I'm coming to that project circa May 2016, I can know that probably many of the database tables are about the same. They might have a few more columns, but the general structure's still there. But I can throw out anything the documentation says about the controllers as completely irrelevant. However, if I have bits and bobs of documentation that don't have dates on them, I don't really have any way of knowing how useful any given piece of it is. So the second it starts to drift away from reality and I notice it's inaccurate. I can't make the same value preserving code entropy type guesswork because I don't know when it was accurate. And so I just kind of need to dismiss the entire thing. So again, we need to solve the documentation problem really very much first. But it also lets us sidestep the flexibility problem. When we document what we've already got and leave the rest of it for late and leave any kind of organization for later, we know our style guide covers real world use cases, yay. So I'm going to teach you a three step process for getting a style guide up in currently. We're going to use three steps over and over and over again in which we identify UI component, codify it, and then document it. Step one, identifying is super easy. We just look at our app. When you look at these screens side by side, they've both got pictures of cart or they've both got cards on them and they've also got tab sets. So if we attack tab sets first, when we get to the step, reformalize these components and code. When we do this, we try to refactor what you've already got to me and more internally consistent. This sets us up to document it later. And it also helps us sell this process to the rest of our team. We can't always say this new process changes in documentation is going to be magic and solve all our problems because we don't have, our teammates cannot be expected at that point to have context for why this is magic and why this will solve their problems. But it is very easy to say, hey, I improved these five lines of code and get people to say, yay. So this is going to be something we use to help build trust as well as set ourselves up for success with documentation. So as a heads up, we are hitting the code on slides part of this talk. It's the last day. It is after lunch. I'm really sorry. Please just focus on the broad outlines. Most of the slides have helpful bright red circles on them to point you to the interesting parts. At the end of the talk, I'm going to be giving you a link to a blog post and it's going to have all the code samples in it. So you can look up every bit of code on these slides later if you want reference. Please, again, think of this as a general overview. It happens to include code. And of course, this slide has no helpful red lines on it. But also, I'm mostly just throwing this up to show you unrefactored code that's kind of repetitive. And I'm going to skimp past it and overlay these two things. And gosh, unrefactored code is really repetitive sometimes. This is an overlay of those two things. Note that you can't really tell because it just looks like text. And because this is a Rails project, we're going to use a helper to refactor this. Note that I'm putting the output at HTML in a comment directly above method name. This makes reading the method quickly much easier. It gives you a literal representation, which can be a lot easier to read than content tag. It's a lot easier for your designer to read than content tag because your designer knows HTML if you're lucky, but is not going to learning Ruby, probably. And also helps you search for code more easily in large projects, which is a lifesaver. And so we move our tab code to use that helper. It's nice and pretty, yay. Look how nice, look how short. This is what your code base actually looks like, right? That's okay. Five years ago, front end Betsy was a bit of a snob and probably would have not said this is okay, but I was wrong then. Market frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation, which are what's going to usually give you these huge sets of classes, are really useful rapid prototyping tools. And in the real world, it's fine that you don't always have a chance to go back and make your prototype nice. Also, five years old front end snob Betsy when she said, ew, a presentational markup was actually missing the thing that's really wrong with this. When you look at these two examples, the semantic versus presentational nerd fight obscures the actual difference between them. The first one at the top is us using the markup to list out a collection of attributes that the tabs have. The second is us condensing that set of the attributes into a useful abstraction that builds out the shared ubiquitous language of the user interface. And so how do we get from one to do quickly? We cheat. And this cheat, incidentally, is great even if you're not necessarily as comfortable as CSS. If you're using Rails, you probably already have SCSS installed. And that's a markup preprocessor that gives us a few different options like Mixins, placeholders, and classic stems that we can use to include existing CSS classes into new ones, much like Ruby modules. So all we really need to do here, at least on the first pass, is make a parent class that encapsulates the concept and then just sling all the CSS more detail classes into it using class extension. This is not the world's prettiest SCSS, but again, it's better than what we had before. And in a lot of ways, that's all that counts. Generally, this particular approach is pretty safe. The fact that we're making a new parent class helps us limit the area of effective refactors. But sometimes, an abstraction requires a few nested tags, and you can't collapse them quite this easily. And you maybe can't fix them how you have. Or maybe you do try this approach and something weird happens with the cascade because CSS is a very global oriented language. And then you go, no, and back up a bit. In that case, the next most heavyweight mitigation technique I have for you is building a nested helper. This is starting to get into the end of code that's clever for clever's sake. So if your markup is simple, it might not be practical. Abstraction is really only useful when the thing you're abstracting is complex. So, yeah, sorry. Helper nesting looks like DSL magic from the outside, but it's the simplest possible form of Ruby DSL magic. What we do is we build the outer tag and then say this inside is going to be the content of a block that's passed to it. Then we yield control to that block. But what if you've got something even more complex? When we look at these screenshots, these are both cards, but they're really different kinds of cards. And so you need a lot of configuration options. When I was a much dunger developer, the way I would do this would be like the mega helper approach. And I'd be really proud of myself because I was making fewer lines of code. But it would be a really bad abstraction and I would not be able to read it four months later. Helper nesting can help with this. But when I look at this particular instance of helper nesting, I wonder how to make it clear that the body methods are really only ever intended for use within the parent method. I can hope the people look at this code and get it. But if they guess wrong, then the errors might not give them useful feedback. On the other hand, when I'm trying to solve this problem for my coworkers, I need to make sure I'm not building some huge non-railsy thing. Because no one wants to learn the hipster Betsy framework that's not documented. And so what I do is I take form four as an inspiration and form builders. I'm not straying super far from the Rails way here. I'm leveraging its metaphors so that you can use them to understand this code. And this is great. It helps me sell this code to my teammates. If code does not improve my teammates' lives immediately, I'm not going to get buy in for that code, nor should I. We don't need to change the pattern we're using all that much. We're still using the build a thing and then yield control pattern. It's just that instead of building one parent tag, we're building an object that knows how to render the entire component. Note that we're passing in the view context. This is the class all helpers are included into when you build a Rails view. We grab it using self and inject it into the component builder. There are a few different schools of thought about how you're supposed to inject view context into non-helper things that use views. And I like this method, it's least magic of them. Little verbose, but no magic and that's good. Your basic component builder is going to have three major parts. Initialization, a rendering shell, and a collection of sub-renders. The only thing you need to do in the initialization step is grab the view context and stick it in an attribute. I'm using H for that here, which is convention I borrowed from Draper. I usually hate single letter variable names, but here the convention lets us focus on all the times we call content tag or link to or other actual methods. If we're just typing view context over and over it obscures what's important about the code. The other thing you can do if you need to in initialization step is configure top level CSS attributes or repeated text or stuff like that. In general, we want to keep this configuration pretty lightweight. We want to push the bulk of the work to the sub-renders. So next we build a render shell. This looks remarkably like the parent of a nested helper. It's the exact same thing. And so again, we're just building out the outer tag and then we're yielding control to the block. The sub-renders are going to do the bulk of the work. They're going to output all of the different bits that form the main body of the component. And note that again here, we're still adding comments that illuminate what the markup generated is so that we can anchor ourselves. I personally find code that's very content tag heavy hard to read. And this is a great way of removing that layer of abstraction temporarily so I can focus on what's going on rather than what this code is doing. Again, when we've got this all assembled up, the way we implement this in the view looks a bit like this. When you are testing these, please use Noka-Gerry or pick your XML parser, I don't care what. You're going to be tempted at first to try to test them using plain strings, or maybe regex that matches against those plain strings. And that's going to be really, really brittle. It will seem simpler at first. It will not be simpler in two months. Learn from my mistakes. And again, all of these techniques I've shown you are in many cases pretty heavy weight. You don't always need to find a nail for any given new hammer. If your gut tells you at least techniques are overkill for your project, trust your gut. Once you finish codifying a view pattern, the next and final step is documenting it. And this is super easy because we've made these code comments and you start the documentation for us. For bonus points, what you can do is you can use RDoC's include directive to link to any given partial or so that you might be using within your code. And those will actually be inlined into RDoC by magic, which is a really great way of making your documentation auto-update. And auto-updating documentation is super important because then you do not need to actively maintain it. And it can stay reliable without further input from you. But only your developers are ever going to look at your RDoC, probably. We want a communication tool that lets us communicate with designers and maybe even other stakeholders. We want something like this. Luckily, it is much less hard to build than you might think looking at this like nice finish looking thing. Since this is style documentation for the resource constrained rather than style documentation, happy unicorn fairyland, we need to ruthlessly prioritize what we're going to include on the first pass. The great news is that that's not that much. There are two real world use cases that this document is actually going to be used for. We just need to make something that encompasses both of them. They are a developer's skins, or a developer is given a wire frame and skins through the style guide for a plausible looking element, which they then copy and paste into their current working code. The other is the designer and developer are talking and they point to things. And so given these use cases, our minimum viable product just needs pictures of components and example code for those components. Anything else on top of that, like use case descriptions and et cetera, is great, especially if you've got a larger team. But you don't need to do that in the first pass. And I advise you to not do that in the first pass and burn yourself out. There are a few different tools we can use to do this. My favorite tool for doing it in Ruby is a tool called hologram. It's a gem, just install it like normal. The best tool for you, if you're using a JavaScript heavy front end, like Angular, Ember, React, whatever, I think that's what the kids these days are using, is going to be a tool called KSS. You want the node version of KSS, and you want this for two reasons. And one of them is that the node version of KSS is actually the only version of KSS that has a lot of the features I'm going to be talking about as important later. The other is that your style guide generator language always wants to match your view implementation language. So I'm going to be using hologram in all of my code examples. This is RailsConf. It works by a little like our doc, really. You put special documentation comments in your CSS files, and the processor turns them into documentation. Putting your docs in your CSS, or someplace else central, is a great little nudge for your tree mates that keeps documentation from dying. It's really easy to forget or deprioritize documentation when you keep it in docrandomstuff.markdown. It's harder when it's right above the code you're working on, yelling, I'm here, fix me. You're going to feel really guilty if you don't. And so a good style guide generator is also going to give special status to your code examples that can get showing you here. Hologram's output looks a little like this. You're getting a super happy little picture of a card right above the code that makes the card go. We're fulfilling both of the needs of our style guide MVP right in one tool. It gives us both of these by not magic, but writing. We could stop here, but we can also get a little better. We've built out all these cool few helpers that codify our abstractions. And hologram processors are just executing Ruby, just like KSS node processors are just executing JavaScript. And so we can put our helpers in these examples. This takes a little bit more work to set up. It's a little finicky. It's a little Rails version dependent. It's too much code to be worth putting on a slide, but it's linked in the blog post that I'm going to be showing you later. If you can do this, I advise you to. It is super magic because then your markup changes when you update your helpers. All of these changes automatically propagate to your style guide. And so again, you don't need to do as much maintenance work going on. Living style guides are way more important and are way more useful than the kind that you set and forget. So the ideal is something that looks a little bit like this. Note that the example both outputs the HTML that the helpers generate and the helpers themselves. This is really important for helping out designers. It lets them prototype rapidly using your actual style guide primitives. And they can do this even if they're not necessarily that comfortable with code because it's right there for them to copy. And I'm going to describe something for you that you think will never have happened, but it has happened to me multiple times. And that is that a designer actually does make one of these prototypes. And then the designer comes to me and gives me this prototype. And I go, hey, I'm just going to wire this up really quickly. And it goes really smoothly and it goes really wonderfully. And then I notice something that's not quite right. Like there's a little bit of content that works differently in the real world than it did in the designer's happy, lorem ipsum. I'm going to make things up world. And so then what we can do, because we have this shared understanding, because we have this shared code that we have built out and documented, is we can pair on how to make things better. We don't need, we get to lose that process where a designer and a developer start yelling at each other in JIRA or giving passive aggressive once every three days comments in JIRA about impracticality and ugliness because we can just go and talk to each other. And we've got this mediating document that helps with that. It lets us work in this really fast, happy, user-oriented way. And it's a lot more fun if you're doing that. If you have a style guide that lets you collaborate really effectively and happily and then it doesn't matter if it is a messy and ever-changing working document. Honestly, I think that kind of helps. It means that it's accessible and it means that when we need to update it, then making those updates is accessible rather than something we need to treat as a big deal. So if you take one and only one thing from this talk, it's that that is the goal and it's that you can achieve it. The one core truth in the Vagel is if it works for your team, roll with it. It's important to understand the building blocks of UUI. It's important to use abstraction to effectively manage those building blocks. It's important to constantly communicate about what those building blocks are to keep everyone on the same page. Whichever methods you use, you can get to the stream. You deserve to get to the stream. Good luck. So here's a link to both the blog post with code samples and a blog post from Pivotal that helps use that hologram up with Rails in some nice ways that keeps guard that uses guard to auto update things. This is me. My name's Betsy. I'm on the internet in a few places. My Twitter is mostly feminism in pictures of my cat and occasionally science fiction and occasionally also code. I work for an organization called Act Blue. We build fundraising tech for Democrats and we amplify the voices of small-dollar donors. Our average donation size is about $30, and since 2004 when we were founded, we have raised 1.1 billion. About 1.1 billion of that has been in the last one month, two months alone. Like about that, okay. And this helps these donors' voices be heard in a real way by aggregating it. So it really helps us keep the party more focused on the needs of people who don't have huge sums to donate. It means a lot to me. We're committed to a modern web development stack and a culturally and technically sustainable approach. And we're hiring. Please talk to me or to my boss who's going to raise his hand now if you're interested. I'd like to thank Coreline, Ada MK, Chris Hoffman, the people of Arlington, Ruby, and Zeal and Act Blue for all giving me feedback on early versions of this talk and helping me make it hopefully good. Any questions? Absolutely. And I'm going to be tweeting out this, tweeting out the link to right after I step off the stage. We are located in Massachusetts, but we're very remote-friendly. I live in D.C. We probably have more remote developers than non-remote at this point, and it's a great remote culture. I can say that from experience. Cool. Thank you for coming.


The Under-21 Convention, Orlando, Florida, 2016, here we're going to learn about something that is super important. A lot of the guys have been talking about our external beliefs, our internal beliefs, but now we're going to learn about our expression through what we wear, how we present ourselves, but not just our clothes, but the philosophy of that, in particular men's style. So who we have today is a pretty amazing guest, I'm very excited and I know you guys are all going to dig this a lot, but we have Tanner Guzzi. Come on stage my man. Thanks. Cool, thanks guys. I am excited to be here and I've really enjoyed what I've heard from the other speakers thus far. This has been a phenomenal conference and I hope you guys, I would imagine, I mean it was fun to kind of walk through and weave my way through and see the notes that you guys have taken and I can see the value that you're getting from it. I know the value that I've gotten from it and I hope that I can contribute to that as well. So before I dive in, I feel like I want to tell you guys a little bit about me because that makes this a little bit easier for all of us. So Tanner Guzzi, I am from Salt Lake City, Utah and there are quite a few questions that immediately pop into your heads as soon as I say that. No it is not the mecca of menswear, nobody ever really thinks that anyway, right? Yes I'm Mormon, no I do not have multiple wives and yes I did serve one of those missions where you wear black suits and name tags and do all that so there's that aspect of it. I'll give you a little bit more. I am the oldest child of five, all of my siblings and I are now married. I actually have two kids and one on the way, she is due in August and I'll give you a little bit more info on that as I tell you a little bit more of our history. And I come from what a term that I learned today, I have two parent privilege and I am extremely grateful that I had two parent privilege and I am extremely grateful that my wife and I are providing two parent privilege for our kids as well. So that was probably one of the better things that I have already learned thus far today. So a little bit about who I am and I'll give you guys a little bit more as it's relevant to some of this style information. Okay, so one of the things that guys in my corner of the internet, whether that's mens influence or style in general, one of the questions that we often take for granted is, why does any of this stuff matter? But especially with the style guys, why does style matter? I mean, it's just clothing, it's just linen or animal hair or something else that's put on my body. And really originally it was just to protect me from the elements. So why does any of this matter? You guys ever thought about it? So one thing that it does do is it helps our brain shortcut and be able to make judgments based on patterns. Now the world will tell us that that's bad, that we shouldn't make those judgment based on those patterns. And to a certain extent I agree as long as you're willing to make them and then override them once you're given different information. But we can't always assess everything based on its own merit. We have to take those shortcuts, we have to use those patterns. And clothing is a huge way to do it. Now in the course of the day, I've already had three gentlemen come up and introduce themselves to me and say, I knew you were a speaker. Why do you think they knew that? Because of what I was wearing, right? One of them specifically told me, he said you don't roll into a conference looking like you do and not be a guy who's speaking and presenting, right? I haven't done anything else, we hadn't said anything, we hadn't communicated. Sure there's body language and there's presence. But even that is either exaggerated or downplayed by the clothing that I choose to wear. So style is a big one and it's one of those things that it helps us facilitate our interaction with the rest of the world. It helps us determine who's in tribe and who's out tribe. It helps us determine the value of what we have. It helps us signal our status, it helps us signal our fertility. It helps us signal all these other traits that we seek as virtuous in other people. And it applies just as well to men as it does to women. However, there's a big difference between the way that men and women should approach style. And this is one of the things that I see a lot. Because most men have kind of this either negative relationship with their appearance or they just have a neutral one. They assume that as long as I don't look bad, then I don't really care how I look. And I'll tell you that any guy who says that he doesn't care about his appearance, all you have to do to calm on his bluff is say all right, come to work tomorrow on a snuggie, a pink one, right? One of those big old blankets with sleeves. No guy's gonna show up to work in that because he's gonna be embarrassed by it and he's not gonna feel comfortable or confident in it. And so men we do care about our appearance but mostly we just care about it in this neutral context. As long as I don't look bad, then I'm fine. As long as I don't look ridiculous, then I'm fine. But we miss out on so many opportunities for what our clothing can do for us by not getting into the positive realm of having our appearance do good things for us as opposed to just not doing negative things. Now that jumps into this whole concept of visual appeal versus visual power. As I speak to guys at different conferences, as I meet men across the country and even throughout the world, one of the things that guys who are new to the world of aesthetics or style tell me is, yeah, my mom used to dress me or my girlfriend buys clothes for me or my wife dresses me. Nine times out of ten, I don't need them to tell me that because I can tell. Because when a woman dresses herself, her primary goal is visual appeal. She wants to accentuate the things that are appealing about her. We've learned that that's part of a sexual strategy. That's part of accentuating the things that biologically we as men are attracted to in women. The problem is is they take those same goals and when they apply them to you, you end up looking cute. And no man should ever look cute. It's not your goal. It doesn't help facilitate what your goals are. It doesn't help accomplish what you want to accomplish. No man should ever look cute. Instead, a man should be seeking visual power, all right? It's a subtle difference as far as what's actually accomplished aesthetically, but socially it's a huge difference. And that's why it's very easy to tell. For me, it was pretty easy to tell the difference between those who are speakers or those who run their own businesses, those who are kind of here to help with the conference, versus some of you guys who are brand new here to learn. I don't mean that as a value judgment, but it certainly is an observational judgment. It's pretty easy for me to tell, because some of you guys look like you just don't care or that at least you care not enough to look bad, or that you just at least want to look kind of good in the way that a girl would think you would look good, but you don't look powerful.  Because if you think about it, so much of what your clothing communicates is what your social status is within your tribe. And we'll talk about tribe a little bit further down. But the value of men within the tribe is always, always, always, or at least almost always, but mostly always, determined by the other men within the tribe. It's not by the women. The women will reinforce that, but it's not determined by the women. And the problem that most men have, whether it comes to pick up and just trying to define their self-worth by how many women they can bed, or trying to dress in a way that's attractive to women, is that we're allowing our value to be determined rather than be reinforced by a relationship with women. When it should be something that's reinforced by the tribe. For me, that's my God, that's my country, that's my family, those are other variables, but it's your tribe, not just who's this hot person and what does she think of me and does she like what I'm wearing? Does that make sense? So I'm gonna show you some ways that we can actually see the difference here. What's your reaction to a photo like this? See a dude putting on makeup. Little bit kind of uncomfortable, maybe you shouldn't feel uncomfortable because we live in a progressive world and I don't know what to think about this, and blah, blah, blah. But viscerally, that just doesn't look right, right? Because he's accentuating things that are visually appealing, but making his eyes look bigger, he looks more innocent, he's got soft skin tones, it's not indicative of hard work, he doesn't look like he's willing to embrace any sort of physical risk, there's nothing there about a protector or provider. And you see a woman putting makeup on and it looks fine, it looks great. Okay, let's take it one step further and you see an older gentleman who's getting a little bit of makeup put on and you see this in the context of, okay, he's probably a broadcaster, maybe he's a politician who's going on national news, it's not that big of a deal, you can start to see a little bit of the context of it. This is kind of a neutral, right? It's neither good nor bad, it's just making sure that things are good. All right, what do you think about these guys? That's makeup, right? That's a whole ton of makeup, but that is a whole different story that they're telling. Is that appeal or is that power that they're communicating? That's power, right? You think you'd want to go into war against those guys?  Right, no, that's a whole different story that they're telling because of what they're doing with the same objective content. That's the power of style. That's the power of understanding the difference between visual power and visual appeal. These guys are masculine, dominant, intimidating men as opposed to the guy before that was neutral, the one before that who is effeminate. So that's one of the big differences. All right, let's go a little bit further with this. What do you think? Power or appeal? Appeal, okay. I would say there are a few things in this that are indicative of appeal. You've got all the lacing, right? He's got the tights on, he's got the white gloves, he's got the powdered wig, the mole. This guy does not look like he has ever been anywhere near a day of hard labor, right? Not even close. And even then when this was culturally appropriate, you think of like the Scarlet Pimpernel as kind of the good balance between this refined dandy versus the rugged individualist who was actually going out and doing things. Even then, this was still kind of a weird way to communicate masculinity. But take this similar outfit to the next level. What do you think? Power or appeal? Yeah, but he's wearing lace. He's wearing skinny pants. He's got a powdered wig on. Why is it power instead of appeal? Colors, okay? Go ahead. Yeah, the environment. Part of it is that you know who he is and what he's done, right? Part of it is that you know the context of what this man has done and the environment in which he finds himself versus this gentleman over here. But that's the great thing about style is that it can either reinforce all of these other variables that help you communicate your masculinity to the rest of the world or it can provide a contrast to them and downplay it. What you wanna do, especially in a world that doesn't value traditional masculinity, especially in a world that tries to tell you there's only one way that you can actually aesthetically express that masculinity is you wanna figure out the best way that you can do it and then leverage it as much as you can because the contrast between you and the sissy, limp-rusted hipsters of the rest of the world is gonna be so much stronger and it's never been easier to dress better than it is now. So you can think the baby boomers for ruining the idea of masculine aesthetics, right? So huge difference between those two. How many of you guys have seen this image before? Right? Okay, a little bit. You ever thought about this? To me, this is the perfect summation of the difference between visual appeal and visual power because you think about it, a well-tailored suit doesn't really show a whole lot of skin, right? It's not showing anything that's actually gonna be turning a woman on from an appeal standpoint. You have no idea what kind of shape a guy is in. I mean, yeah, you have some general context but you don't know for sure. You have no idea about anything from an appeal standpoint but it tells a whole story about his power. It tells you about his financial situation. It tells you about his social status. It tells you about his social dominance. It tells you about his attention to detail and his level of discipline. And so it gives you an entire story and those are the things that women are primarily attracted to and so those are the kinds of things you can signal by dressing well. Does a well-tailored suit do that? Absolutely. Is it the only thing it does it? Absolutely not. Otherwise, a well-tailored suit objectively across all time and across all cultures would have been the pinnacle of men's style and it certainly hasn't been. That's something relatively new and relatively recent. So what does this mean for you guys?


Well, thank you, Richard, for that introduction. I'm happy to talk to you all today about reversible metal electrode deposition as applied to smart windows. This is a project we started in the McGee lab about a year ago and is now funded by the Precourt Institute for Energy here at Stanford. So we're looking at smart windows, which are windows that you can dynamically control the transmission of with a voltage. So you can control them from being clear to dark and switch them back and forth as you like. The main motivation here is for building energy efficiency. Buildings consume about 40% of US electricity consumption. And about half of this comes from lighting, heating, and cooling costs. People who study smart windows have determined that, on average, depending upon the climate and the size of your building, you can get about 20% energy savings for these lighting, heating, and cooling costs. So there's a big potential here for smart windows. Smart windows have been commercialized, but only on a small scale so far. And there's a few important reasons why that is. I'll talk about it in a bit. But in addition to building applications, you can think about some other applications, such as using these in the sunroofs of car windows or in switchable sunglasses. So most smart windows today utilize what are called electrochromic materials. These are materials that change color, essentially, when you apply a voltage. And these materials are incorporated in an electrochromic device. This is essentially a double pane window. And on each of the panes of glass, there's a transparent conducting oxide. Typically, this is tin-doped indium oxide, or ITO. And on one of these panes, you put down your electrochromic material, which changes colors. And on the other pane, typically, there's a counter material, which just accommodates for charge transfer when the window is switched. There's also an electrolyte in the middle of this device stack that facilitates ion transfer. So the most successful type of electrochromic materials out there right now are transition metal oxides. And the best of these is tungsten-6 oxide. This is a colorless compound. But when you electrochemically reduce it, it turns deep blue. Now, when this process is accommodated by lithium ions, essentially what you have is a lithium ion battery. The architecture is the same. But now you have this added feature of having a color-changing lithium ion battery. So why haven't electrochromic materials really been successful so far? There's a few problems. One is that it's very hard, it turns out, to color-tune these transition metal oxides. Tungsten oxide's blue.  Another problem is these electrochromic materials work by absorbing light. And when they do that, well, they re-radiate heat, and so you lose out on some of the heat management there. They tend to be pretty expensive due to the multiple layers that are involved. You need at least four layers, and the commercial systems out there have maybe six or seven layers. And these are very difficult to scale up. They're typically deposited using sputter deposition, and this gets quite expensive to do on a large scale. Now, another big problem is if you want to switch your window, let's say once a day for 25 or 30 years, that already puts you on the order of needing about 10,000 cycles. And kind of the best lithium ion batteries in the world right now have cycle lives of about 5,000. And so this is a big problem. So when we got into this area, we wanted to pursue an alternative to electrochromic materials. And the idea we looked into was that of reversible metal electro deposition. Here on your cathode, what we're doing is we have some sort of metal salt dissolved in solution, we use water, and we're just gonna electrochemical reduce this to a metal on the surface of the window. Now you need a side reaction for this. Simplest thing you can think of is actually just taking metal that's on the frame of the window hidden and re-oxidizing it to that same metal ion. So your net reaction is just simply moving metal around electrochemically to turn it dark, put it on the center of the window to turn it light, put it back on the edge where you can't see it. The nice thing about this approach is you only need about 20 nanometers of metal to get a completely opaque window. This is good, but it also represents a challenge. You need to be able to uniformly and with nanometer level control, deposit a metal over the large area of a window. Another nice thing about this approach is that metals are reflective. And so you do a little bit better than the electrochromic materials in terms of heat management there. So I wanted to show you what kind of a typical device looks like that we construct in the lab. We start out with our cathode, which is just a transparent conducting oxide, like ITO on glass. And then we have our electrolyte, which contains our dissolved metal ion.  So the first prototypes we've built first used copper and lead as the electroactive metals. Now we've moved on to using copper and silver because we don't want to use lead. Copper, electrolyte deposits very nicely and uniformly. There's a lot of work done on this metal. We throw in another metal like silver to make sure we have a black window, because that's what we want. So I want to show you what kind of the transmission characteristics are of these smart windows. This is an electrochemical cell and you can see that once we apply a voltage, this is looking at the transmission as a function of wavelength and time across the visible and infrared portions of the spectrum. Within a minute we can drop the transparency of this window from 90% to about 25%. And then we can go ahead and reverse the polarity of the electrode, strip that metal off of the surface and restore the transmission within another minute. So this shows that we have reversibility in terms of transmission. We also did another experiment now monitoring the transmission at one wavelength. So 600 nanometers, yellow light, running the deposition for a little bit longer, three minutes, such that the opacity drops to a 5% transmission. Then with no power consumption, we can hold the system there for 24 hours and go ahead when we want, switch the system and then it can stay transparent indefinitely. So this shows that these windows have good resting stability. We only need to apply power when we're switching the device. So the key actually to get all this working and I'm gonna have to skip a lot of the details, is actually depositing a thin layer of platinum on the surface of the ITO. This helps control the morphology of the metal deposit and gets something that's relatively uniform at least with respect to the wavelength of light. This helps increase the nucleation density of our electric deposit. We use platinum because platinum's electrochemically inert and we use a very thin layer so you can't see it. So with these systems, we can get very good cyclability. If we, of course, 1,000 cycles, if we don't include that platinum seed layer, the degrades very rapidly over time. And this is looking at the scanning electron microscopy and we can see that basically as a function of cycle number, the first cycle or after 1,000 cycles, our morphology is staying relatively consistent. So this was a good sign and again, something we didn't see without that platinum seed layer. It turns out this is uniform enough that actually what you get by eye is the formation of a mirror because we can switch this back and forth. We were calling it a reversible electrochemical mirror. We went on to, this was all in liquid electrolytes where I showed you, we went on to develop a gel electrolyte. This is better for device fabrication. You don't have to worry about these things leaking as much and if someone breaks your window, then you're not gonna get liquid all over the place. Challenge of this is that you've increased your ion diffusion with the increased viscosity. And so it turns out we figured out that the nature of how we put down this platinum layer becomes even more important. So the system that we've kind of settled on and optimized is putting a self-assembled monolayer down with an organic molecule on the ITO surface and then we have this style group that can bond to the platinum nanoparkals and that makes everything work pretty well. And right now we're able to cycle these windows more than 5,000 times. We haven't gone further yet to do that in the future. But this is with a copper silver gel electrolyte on a 25 centimeter squared scale. So I wanna show you what that looks like.  Oops, let's see if that goes here. There we go. So now we're doing deposition on the surface of the window on the ITO glass. There's a golf ball with a Stanford logo there in the foreground. You can see the reflection coming in.  This is wooden device. This is kind of the frame, just these prototypes. But now we're replating metal on the edge on the counter electrodes, which are hidden behind the frame, restoring the initial transparency of the device. The exciting part about this is one, we're getting uniform deposition on this kind of larger scale, 25 centimeters squared. And this was taken at cycle 1500. So we're getting uniform to even after cycling it a lot. So how are we doing compared to electrochromics? Well, we think we have an advantage because we're a reflective technology and by playing some optical tricks, we hope to be able to control whether or not we have a mirror or a black looking window. And if we're doing, can do that, then we'll be better than the colored materials out there. In terms of switching speed, we're competitive. We have minute or switching time on this scale. And cycle life, we're kind of right there with electrochromics, but we need to test this more. We think these materials, this approach should be a lot cheaper. One, we don't have all these different layers. We're not using a lot of platinum, so that won't be a problem. And we're only using one side of ITO, which is another expense. In future work, we'd like to understand the electro deposit morphology better, really do some good fundamental electrochemistry here. Control whether or not we have a mirror or like I said, a diffuse reflector, something that would be black. And look at how we can scale these up with some clever counter-electrode design and look at the cost. So in conclusion, I hope I've been able to show you today that we can uniformly and reversibly electro deposit metals for smart window applications. The key to this is controlling the nucleation of the metal on the ITO surface. We think we're doing very well compared to traditional approaches. And this is really a new project, so we're excited and think it has a lot of promise in the future. So thank you all for your time and I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have. What is your counter-electrode again without blocking the light? Oh, yeah, yeah. We're using copper wire. If you have copper wire, then your deposition will be expected to be probably not uniform because of the current path. It's not uniform on the other side, so how do you overcome that problem?  Eventually, we're gonna have dendrite formation after a lot of cycling. It's something we're aware of. Moving forward, we'd have to use some sort of inert scaffold and just have enough metal and pass it over to the other side. Over here, someone? Okay, let's thank Chris again. Thank you, Chris.


Hi, I'm Jeff Watts and I'm here to tell you about the latest features that have been added to the agile coaching cards app this week So the agile elves have been busy on the battle of this week And after the favorites feature was added we can now filter the cards so that we can just see our favorites Or the whole deck and do that the individual card level or at the deck level I can then go in and remove a favorite and It will disappear from my list here We can also when we go into our favorites deck So this is the deck that contains the favorites from all of the cards that we own We can filter those by the specific decks and you can have just one deck or lots of decks Open and you'll just see the favorites from those decks again in individual card view or In the multiple view Another cool feature that's been added this week is the flipping card feature. Yeah, I said flipping So basically you can have double the information now So if you have a look at here in the top left hand corner of the card you see this opportunity to flip the card and After the information on the front So if you're interested in this who really wants the product or service that I'm building Why should they buy or use what I'm building rather than the alternatives? You can flip it and see the back of the card and it'll tell you a little bit more about that try creating some personas Explore their values goals and preferences for example Some cards won't have backs like this, but when they do you'll see this side in the corner and you can flip it That's pretty cool But all of this new functionality is free. We just keep adding extra features. There's no extra cost We've also been working on some new decks and they're now available to buy One deck is part of the agile coaching and facilitation bundles And that contains a number of icebreaker activities So in here find some activities to kick off a meeting Workshop or just add a little extra energy to your day You can buy the deck on its own or part of the bundle Now a bundle is a selection of multiple decks so you can buy More than one deck at the same time and the price of all of those decks is fifty percent off What it would be if you bought the decks individually The other four decks that I've added are part of a new bundle called positive affirmations Affirmations are positive statements that you can use Repeatedly on a daily basis to help you challenge and overcome Some self-limiting beliefs or self-sabotaging or negative thoughts The idea is that you repeat them often and you start believing in them And you can start to make some positive changes based on those changes in beliefs So we've got one for product owners So it's impossible to please everyone so I won't try to Feedback on the product is not reflective of me as a person either good or bad and So you repeat these on a daily basis and your neural pathways will start to change You'll start believing a little bit more helpful Statements about yourself. We're a deck for product owners one for scrum masters one for team members Yeah one for coaches So all of the roles that I've got one of these decks for are tough and I found that people in these roles whether product owners or scrum masters or coaches or team members They get a bit stressed out get a little bit anxious when they're new to the role when they're growing in the role They're unsure whether they're doing the right thing a little bit of self-doubt creeps in and These positive affirmations. They're good confidence builders. They're good reminders of what to focus on and To just to get you out of that trap of negative thoughts Shift them for something a little bit more helpful Please keep the feedback coming. It's been really good so far Tell us what you like about the app Tell me any bugs that you find any new features that you'd like to see or some cards that you'd like to contribute Been really good feedback so far. If you like it, please leave us a good review on the app store or the play store I think the stars go up to five Do that and don't forget the competition. You can win a free deck So all you need to do is share your favorite card from my coaches casebook bundle On social media and you could be in a chance of winning a new deck either one that's already there or a new one coming up If you've already bought all of the ones that are there so far So that's it until next time. Happy app-ing


Activity for teaching English winter camp, making sock snowmen. For this activity you first teach related vocabulary about winter clothes, and then the students get to make and dress their own snowman. Let the students be as creative as possible, and create themed snowmen like Disney characters, superheroes, or animals. All the students need to do is stuff the sock in two parts. First, they stuff the bottom of the sock, this is the body sew out a lot of stuffing. Then tie an elastic band around it to secure. Next, fill the second part of the sock with less stuffing to form the head and tie with an elastic band again. The remaining part of the sock at the top, can be used to make a hat for the snowman by simply folding it over. Now the snowman is ready to decorate. This is such a fun activity and your students will love it. Make sure to let the kids take their pieces of art home after the class. Thanks so much for watching. We are ITTT, the leading provider for TEFL and TESOL training courses. If you liked this video, please subscribe by clicking the button down here and click on any of the videos here on the left for more interesting teaching tips for getting certified to teach English abroad and online.


Nice shot. Don't wait. The KO lineups? No.  I'm flashing through, flashing through by football.