Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. As-salatu wa s-salamu ala Sayyidina wa nabiyina Muhammadin wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim. As-salamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Bismillah. Today, insha'Allah, we will be starting Surah Al-Rahman. One of the Suras that we all love to read. One of the Suras that shows the blessings, the bounties that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala has created for us. So if we have a look at the last two eyes of Surah Al-Qamar, the Surah before Surah Al-Rahman, the Surah Al-Qamar ends with Indeed, the righteous will be enjoying gardens and rivers in a seat of honour with the powerful Almighty. Listen to these two words with the powerful Almighty. This is so majestic, it touches the heart. But Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala starts the next Surah immediately by saying Al-Rahman. So this powerful, the most powerful, the Almighty is the same as the most merciful. He is the most merciful. So Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala talks about being mercy in several Suras. And to show that he will have mercy for the Ummah of Sayyidina Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam in the Day of Judgment. And this is one of the promises that he has given to Sayyidina Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam when he said When Sayyidina Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was so worried about his Ummah, about his nation. Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala promised him that we will not let you down with your Ummah. So Allah will have the mercy for us in the Day of Judgment. And Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala says So everyone, everyone will come back to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala to the merciful, to the most merciful. We will be there. When we start by saying Bismillahirrahmanirrahim We start with the name of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim Someone might say, oh, how can I, how can I do something good? I made so many sins. How can I, how I feel ashamed to stand in prayer? I cannot meet Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. So Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala is saying Bismillah by the name of Allah, get into any action by the name of Allah The most merciful. Ar-Rahman Now what's the difference between the two words Ar-Rahman and Ar-Rahim? So Ar-Rahman is for both believers and non-believers. Even the non-believers have mercy among each other. And Allah will have mercy on them when they do something good, then this will be recognized. But Ar-Rahim is for the believers only. And the proof is Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala is merciful with the believers. He shows extra mercy to the believers. So to start with Surah, we find that this Surah has 78 ayahs. And it's a Makki Surah. It was revealed before the migration of Sayyidina Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam to Medina. And it's the only Surah that starts with one of the names of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala, Ar-Rahman. In the Surah, we will find an ayah that was repeated 31 times and we will talk about that. And the reason that this Surah was revealed, there are several reasons. The non-believers used to say, when they were asked to prostrate to Allah to believe in Allah, they used to say, And when it said to them prostrate to the most merciful, obey the most merciful, believe in the most merciful, they would say, what is the most merciful? Should we obey to someone who gives orders to us? They don't believe. They don't believe in Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. So their word was, what is a Rahman? So this Surah is an answer to this question, Another reason for the revelation of this Surah is that when the non-believers used to say about Sayyidina Muhammad SAW, He is taught by a human. A human is teaching him Quran. So Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala answered in this Surah, Ar-Rahman, The most merciful, taught the Quran. So this is the starting point of the Surah. Ar-Rahman, the most merciful. This is one of the most beloved names of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala to our hearts. It gives us tranquility. It gets us back to connect again with Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. We know that he is merciful. We know that no matter what sins we have, we have a merciful God. So Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala taught the Quran. The Quran is a catalogue for the life of man. It has everything that a human being needs from birth to death and even after it. So whoever applies the rules of the Quran would be a winner. As I mentioned, it has everything related to man. Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala created us the eyes so we should not. He asked us in the catalogue not to look at anything haram. He created for us the ears and we have not to listen to any haram. He gave us the hands so we have to abstain from stealing. He gave us the tongue. The tongue is the only muscle in the human being that does not feel tired. But we have not to use our tongue for lying, for backbiting. So Allah gave us all the bounties. He created us. He perfected us. He gave us a catalogue, a programme so we have to follow in our life. He created man. He taught man the only eloquent of speech. What is Al Bayan? Al Bayan is to be able to express yourself to someone who is listening to you and to make him understand what you want to say. This is your language. This is the language that you are speaking. So if your family speak Arabic, then you will be fluent in Arabic. If your family speaks Urdu, you will be fluent in Urdu. If whatever language the family speaks, then the child will get this language from the environment he lives in. If you want your child to learn another language, to be more eloquent, then you have to put him in the environment that teaches him this new language. So Allah taught Adam all the names, all the names and those names were transmitted to us. Now let's go back again. A baby would learn the language of his family. His grandparents learned the language from their parents and the grandparents learned it from their grandparents. Go back up, up, up until you reach to Sayyidina Adam, who was taught all the names by Allah. I remember in the ayah Allah says, He didn't say the actions or the verbs, only the names. He taught Adam the names. So this is Rahma from Allah SWT. This is a mercy from Allah SWT that he created some kind of communication between people so they can understand each other. And the more learned one is the more eloquent one. So what did Allah SWT do also? He created everything in this dunya. The sun and the moon move by precise calculation. Very precise, so accurately. The sun indicates the beginning of the day and the end of the day also. So it indicates a day. The moon indicates the beginning of the month and the end of the month. And if you think about this, the worship, worshipping Allah SWT, most worships are connected to the moon and not to the sun. For example, if we connect fasting to certain days, then these days will be the same. If it's hot day, it will stay hot, we will always be fasting during hot days. If it's a cold day, then we will always be fasting in a cold day. But in order not to fast always in the same time, always in summer, for example, in order not to go to Hajj always in summer, Allah SWT linked these worships by the moon. And we know that the lunar year is always 11 days earlier than the previous year. And that's why we fast during all the year. It's not just in summer, it's not just in winter. And this is out of the mercy of Allah SWT that he made us, now we're talking about fasting, that he made us fast certain hours, not always the longest hours. So to go back to the sun and the moon, we know that Allah SWT said in Surat Yasin, It's not allowable for the sun to reach the moon. Both never collapsed anytime, they never touched anytime, they never got closer anytime. They might be one in front of the other, but not at the same place. And this is the scale of Allah SWT, it's a precise scale. It's precise calculation. When Najmu and Shajar-u-Yas-Judan and stars and trees follow the orders of Allah SWT. We know in the Arabic language the word and Najm has two meanings. The first one and Najm, the meaning that we all know is the star in the sky. But the second meaning, we call the plant that grows on the surface of the earth, without a stem we call it Najm. So we have two meanings of Najm. And if we look closer at the ayah, we are talking here about plants and trees. In the previous ayahs, we talked about a shams wal qamar, the sun and the moon. Think about this, the sun and the moon are in a pie, the plants and the trees are on the ground. So everything in this dunya was created according to the calculations to the precise catalogue of Allah SWT. Everything is following the orders of Allah SWT. Everything is fulfilling the mission that they were created for. And the heaven he raised high. Do you see any poles that are holding the heavens? No? It's just a word. And it is. And he has set, Allah SWT has set up the balance. What's a balance? The balance is a symbol of something that would give the views to everything. What should we do? We should follow the views. So why did Allah SWT created this balance so that you may not transgress your balance? He just said, it's not allowable for the sun to reach the moon, nor does the night overtake the day. But each is in an orbit, swimming. So there is a balance in this dunya. And we have, we as humans have to keep this balance. Allah SWT ordered us to be so, we have to be so. He ordered us to, to be good. We have to be good. This is the balance. If we follow the orders then we will be, we will be winners. We have to do that. وَأَقِيمُ الْوَزْنَ بِالْقِسْتِ وَلَا تُخْصِغُ الْمِنْزَانِ So establish dews injustice. And do not make deficient the balance. Your balance should establish just always. You should be fair. You should be fair in all your relations. To Allah, to Prophet Muhammad, to people, to nature, to children, to plants, to animals. You have to give every, everyone their dews. And we, when we explain Surah to the Mu'taffifin, when we reflected on that Surah, the Surah started with ويل للمطففين الذين إذا كتالوا على الناس يستوفون وإذا كالوهم أو الذنوهم يخصرون It's wall to those who, who give less than dew. When they take a measure from people, they take it in full. But if they give by measure, they will cause loss. They will not be just. So this is again from the mercy of Allah SWT that he wanted to have justice and dews and rights for everyone. والأرض وضعها للإنام And the earth he laid out for creatures. وضعها means he made it flat so that we can live on it. الإنام is everything that Allah SWT has created and has روح. So Allah SWT has created earth. And there are people in everywhere. And he made this earth huge so that if someone got restrained in one place, they can leave and go migrate to another place. Whether for to seek knowledge, to seek sustenance, to see whether running away from wars, whatever. You can always leave one place to go to another place. والأرض وضعها للإنام And what did he place in it? والنخلو ذات الأكمان The rain is fruit. And palmetries having sheathes. There are dates in these palm trees. So there is food on this earth. And imagine that look at the air. It starts with fruits. Surah Al-Waqarah, when Allah SWT said, Wa Fakihateen Min Ma Ya Taqayyaroon Wa Lachmi Taayyurin Min Ma Ya Shtahoon. And fruit of what they select. And then followed by the meat of their desire, whatever they want to eat. And this gives us the fact that it's more healthy, it's so healthy, it's healthier to start eating fruit before you start eating the meat. Wa Al-Habbu Dhu-Lasfi Wa Al-Rayhan. Allah also created for us grain. So Al-Habbu Dhu-Lasfi, grain having husks and scented plants and the pulps of those grains. Al-Hab, for example, we have wheat, lentil, beans, ever beans. So these are called Habb. Al-Asuf is the cover. So what is the relation? Wa Al-Habbu Dhu-Lasfi Wa Al-Rayhan. So let's take the wheat, for example. The wheat has a cover and it has the inner seed. So when you want to grain it, grain it all. Don't separate the cover from the inner part of the wheat. And that's why we have so many problems with wheat and flour these days. They don't use it as what Allah recommended them to use it. Wa Al-Habbu Dhu-Lasfi Wa Al-Rayhan. Fabi'i ala'i rabbikumatu kathiban. So which of the favors of your Lord would you deny? Which of the blessings that Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala has created for you would you deny? You choose. Here look at the ayah, rabbikumah, to kathiban. So we have dual here. Allah is talking to two things, two entities here. Sayyidina Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said, I read Surah Al-Rahman, this Surah, I read it for two, the Jinn. And they answered, they reacted to it way better than you did, you human. Whenever I used to say, Fabi'i ala'i rabbikumatu kathiban, when I got to see, to say, which of the blessings of your Lord would you deny? They said, not with a single one, ya Allah, we deny. We do not deny a single one of the blessings, we thank you. So we have to learn this. Whenever you read Surah Al-Rahman and you pass by, Fabi'i ala'i rabbikumatu kathiban, you should answer, la bi shay'in min ni'mika rabbananu kathib, falaka alhamd, we don't deny any of your blessings, ya Allah, and we thank you for all your blessings. This ayah was repeated 31 times in this Surah. Repetition has some benefits, so what's the benefit? It will remind us of each and every benefit that Allah SWT has given us. Each and every blessing that Allah SWT has given us. Okay, but you will say that it will be mentioned in one of the ayahs that talks about punishment. Okay, how can this be a blessing? This is a real blessing that Allah SWT is warning before he punishes. This is one of the points that shows the mercy of Allah SWT. خلق الإنسان من صلصانك الفخار. Allah SWT has created man from clay, like that of pottery. وخلق الجان من مارج من نار. And he created the gin from smokeless flame of fire. You know that Allah SWT created man from clay and then after he perfected it, he blew the spirit in man. خلق تانت له روح. Now imagine yourself, you are building and you want to demolish this building. So what would you do? You would destroy it from top down. Now Allah created, gave the spirit as a روح at the end. So at death, the first thing that will be taken from man will be the روح, what was given to him the last. وخلق الجان من مارج من نار. And the gin is created from fire. Now you might ask the question, how would Allah SWT punish gin in jehannam when they are created of fire? We as humans are created from clay. This is what Quran says, خلق الإنسان من صلصانك الفخار.  This is clay, this is clay. So Allah SWT is the most powerful, he can do whatever he wants. He can punish from the same thing that he had created from the same material that he had created with. So خلق الإنسان من صلصانك الفخار وخلق الجان من مارج من نار. What's next? فَبِئَقِّ آلَا إِرَبِّكُ مَا تُكَذِبَانَ وَلَا بِواحِلَةٍ يَا اللهَ فَلَكَ الْحَمْدِ Not with a single one, just thank you ya Allah. رَبُّ المَشْرِقَيْنِ وَرَبُّ المَظْرِبَينَ He is the Lord of the two sunrises and the Lord of the two sunsets. What does this mean? How come that we have two sunrises and two sunsets? Okay, for this we would say, we know that in Surah Al-Baqarah Allah SWT says وَلِلَّهِ المَشْرِقُ وَالْمَغْرِقَ To Allah belongs the east and the west, because this is singular. And here Allah SWT says رَبُّ المَشْرِقَيْنِ وَالْمَغْرِبَينَ The Lord of the two sunrises and the two sunsets. So we have dual here. In Surah Al-Safat Allah SWT says رَبُّ السَّمَوَاتِ وَالْأَرْدِ وَمَا بَيْنَهُمَ وَرَبُّ المَشْرِقَ The Lord of the heavens and the earth and that between them and the Lord of the sunrises. What does this mean? How can this be? Singular, dual and plural. For at the same place, wherever we live. Someone lives in, let's say Fremont. So they know that the sunrises from this side and it sets from this side. So there is one place that the sunrises from and one place that the sun sets from. But when we know that the sun does not rise into a place, except that it sets from another place. So when it sunrises for us, it sets for another people. And when it sets for us, then it rises for other people. This means that each rise has a set. Each sunrise has a sunset. And each sunset has a sunrise. So there are two sunrises and two sunsets. Now, let's say that the earth rotates. So for each second, it's sunset, the sunrises for some people and sets for other people, for each second. So this means that it has several rises, places where it rises and places where it sets. And this is how we understand the singular, the plural and the plural way of saying the Lord of the two sunrises and the Lord of the two sunsets, the Lord of the East and the West, where the sun rises and where the sun sets, and the Lord of the sunrises as plural. So now, Allah SWT is saying, Not with a single one, ya Allah. We thank you. So Allah is repeating the ayahs now, okay? Now, when we have this, when we read the different ways that Allah SWT mentioned in the Quran about the same thing. And when those jinn answered Sayyidina Muhammad SAW, let's now stop for a second. When we read the Quran, we have to interact with the Quran. It's not just pages that we are flipping. No. It's a way of reading that When we pass by an ayah that has Istighfar, then we have to ask Allah SWT for forgiveness. When we pass on an ayah that has glorifying to Allah and thanking Allah, we have to say Alhamdulillah. We have to say Subhan Allah. When there is an ayah that talks about repentance, we have to say, ya Allah, we ask you, we witness that we are repenting. And we want you to accept that. We have to interact with the Quran. It's not only just ayahs that are being repeated. There is something that we have to be aware of every time that we read this Quran. And Subhan Allah, each one of these ayahs that are repeated in the same surah remind you of all the blessings that Allah SWT has created for you, in you and for you. Fabi'ayi ala'i, rabbikum atukadhiban. Maraja al-Bahraini al-taqiyan. So Allah SWT released the two seas, meeting side by side. What does this mean? We can read the next ayah and understand both together. Beinahuma barzachun laia bariyan. Between them is a barrier, so neither of them transgresses. All right, now what does this mean? So the water of the two seas meet together but they don't mix. And this is of the mercy of Allah SWT. Imagine that the pure water, the tasty water meets with the salty water and we only have salty water. How can we drink? How can we live? How can it will be impossible? Take for example, the Red Sea. The Red Sea is open to the Bahra al-Arab, okay, from the south. And this is the only place that this sea is open to because it's as if it's semi-closed sea. Now, this Red Sea meets with Bahra al-Arab in Babel-Mendab Street, the gate of Babel-Mendab. Now, the scientists noticed that the Red Sea, the water of the Red Sea is thick, heavy and because of strong evaporation and the closeness of this, it's semi-closed, the Red Sea. So the water is so salty. So it goes down of the Bahra al-Arab. The water do not mix. And the same thing is for the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean. They both meet at the strait of Gilberta. So the current of the water gushes into the Atlantic Ocean. They don't mix completely. They meet, but they don't mix again. Which of these blessings do you deny? None, ya Allah, we thank you. So what would the merge of these seas, of these water, do? Out of both seas comes the Red Sea. Pearl and coral. By nature, both the pearl and coral live in salty water. They live in the place where these seas meet, where the pure water, where the non-salty water meets the salty water. We know that there are cultured pearls now, but this is not what it's meant. So Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala is saying, wa lahul jawar il munshayatuhu al-bahrik al-A'lam. And to Him belong the ships elevated in the sea like mountains. So the huge ships that float on top of water are what are likened to mountains on earth. Think about this area, where there are huge, big ships at the time of Sayyidina Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. No, these things were built centuries ago. This is an indication that the Quran is not the words of Sayyidina Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. This is an indication that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala knows what was, what is, and what will be in the future. Think, reflect, reflect on what you are reading. Which of the blessings of you Lord would you deny? Naniya Allah. We believe in all the blessings. We believe in all what you have created. We believe in everything that you have done. And we thank you for that. So now, let's think of what Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala wants us to know from these ayahs. Allah wants us to think deeply, not just to read in flip pages. The same Surah, amazing Surah, so powerful Surah, starts with mercy, gives tranquility, makes us think of Allah's bounties. So this elaboration on the Surahs, these meanings of the Surahs will get us to understand the deep meanings. And of course, Allah is the All-Knowing. We just do our best just to get whatever Allah gives us of the knowledge. But the real knowledge is with Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. So we ask Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala to connect us with the Quran. We ask Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala to give us comprehensive understanding of the Quran. We ask Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala to guide us with the Quran. We ask Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala to enlighten our path with the Quran. And we ask Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala to make us of those servants of Allah whom he is pleased with, whom they got the orders of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala and fulfilled everything that they were asked for. This is our class for today. Insha'Allah we will go on next time.


I think whenever you talk about greatness and people who really inspire you and motivate you to do better and really want to push you to be the best that you can be in your profession, you know, it doesn't get much better than Ashley Atkins. I mean, she just makes it look so easy day in and day out. She knocks out YouTube videos and she does, you know, 12 hour shifts and she comes home and the eyebrows, the eyebrows, they're still on fleek after 12 hours, patience, spitting and kicking and screaming and she's sweating, but the eyebrows, I don't know, can't call them. Greatness. Absolutely greatness. What's going on guys? It's your boy Brad and if you don't know who I am, I run the YouTube channel Nurse Bass and if you check the link in the description below, you can find the link to my channel and I recommend you go and subscribe if you haven't already, but I've been sitting here for Mrs. Atkins herself to let you guys know that she is actually finally flying over my way and we have collaborated on many videos in the past, but this will be the first time that we're able to link up in person and not have some content for you guys.  What kind of content, nursing, whatever it might be, do you want to hear us make videos on? We're going to get together, have lunch and not have some content and it's going to be a good time. And yeah, so we just wanted to take a poll from the Ashley Atkins subscribers. Also if you check the description below, you will see a link to the video that she made for my channel discussing this and it's 10 times better than this one. She makes fun of me pretty well and I think that you guys will enjoy it. But anyways, again, it's Nurse Bass. Go subscribe if you haven't and we look forward to reading your comments and your suggestions for these videos. Okay? You guys take it easy. Peace.


So Jillian said, thanks for a great keynote. Can you tell us how you got started at Open Source? I started as an engineering manager in 2000 at Ophoto, and it was Linux and Apache and Open Source Java that really let us build one of the first photography businesses on the internet. And without the fluidity of the code, without our ability to not worry about licensing, the only thing we had to pay for directly was our database in order to scale the distributed systems we built. That was all Open Source. We kind of took it for granted. It was just the tools that were obviously the right ones for the job. And then in 2005, I was working for Microsoft, which was a very strange turn of events because I was very anti-Microsoft, Microsoft competitor for my career before that. I joined the venture capital group and went to some conferences on their behalf. And software as a service was just starting up. One of the things that I noticed at these conferences was that nobody was talking about Microsoft anything. It was all Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Java. So I came back to the company and I wrote a strategy paper, about a 10 page paper along with a few really thoughtful folks in the industry, including Andrew Akin. That strategy paper basically said Microsoft needed to embrace Open Source. It needed to make its technology very cheap, free to startups and needed to figure out how to work really well alongside Linux. Obviously that was some crazy thinking, but instead of getting fired, I got my paper was included in Bill Gates' strategy week and then that made its way to Bill Hilf, who was running Linux and Open Source for the company. And he invited me to come work in Seattle, leading Open Source and Linux technology strategy for Microsoft. And so I started that job in 2006. Let's see, take a look at some of the other questions. In regards to microservices, are there any lessons learned of what not to do that I can share? Yes, the key thing, and I didn't put too much color commentary in the keynote, the key thing that most of us who've been doing microservices for a few years up to a decade is that they're a really, really good idea to start with. The team's very excited, it's very small, it's very tight. You get a good service out in six months, you iterate it several times over the next year. About two years into the lifecycle of a microservice, people are starting to leave the team.  It sort of starts to go into maintenance mode and people forget exactly how everything works. And with that rate of change and the brain drain, people forget how to change the microservice. That's all well and good, technology should stabilize. But the details of how to change the stack get lost because in microservices 1.0, there was so much focus on giving the team all of the control, pick any technology you want, don't limit the team, go as fast as possible. And again, for the first year or two, that's a fantastic idea. But as soon as you get to the next step, which is two years in, three years in, you need to update it or modify it, you need to fundamentally standardize your stack because you're gonna have people moving between teams in a 100 person organization, a 200 person organization, you're gonna have new people need to come in, pick up new technology and make it work for you. So standardization ends up being absolute mandatory. I think I have a little background noise here. I'm gonna close my window. So the big lesson for me is that you should have freedom within an opinionated framework. So if you're gonna get into microservices for real, you need to figure out what is your application platform? What's the set of technologies you're gonna enable? So probably a fairly small number. How is your platform engineering team going to work to support all of your application developers? How many databases you're gonna use? What style of storage are you gonna enable so that you have a coherent environment that more teams can actually come through over time and that you're not creating just instant legacy? When you create that platform organization, and I've seen a lot of these at Google, at Cloud Foundry and modern organizations using Kubernetes, my last job before DataStacks, I was Cloud CTO and CIO for Autodesk. I had about 1,000 engineers in 40 different locations. We had a lot of activity going on. Our ability to govern that activity was really limited. So getting into microservices quickly is great, but coming into it with a platform strategy is much, much better because that will make all the work that you did up front useful later on. Got an excellent question here on what are your tips for becoming a more data-driven organization? How can multiple internal groups work together? I think I'll take these questions a little bit separately. So becoming a data-driven organization, there's a cultural orientation here that has everything to do with decision-making while a lot of organizations talk about becoming data-driven or how much data matters to them. If the decision style that the executives and the organization still make is like, I lead from the gut. I listen until I know the answer and then I just tell everybody what to do. That's never gonna be data-driven. So a wholesale shift towards science so that nobody's ideas are inherently more valid than other people's just because of their hierarchical position. That's the fundamental shift to becoming data-driven because if the decisions will get made and can be reassessed and compared to others based on the strength of the hypothesis, the data that we'd need to gather in order to prove or disprove the hypothesis and your ability to iterate it, that's kind of the core. Once you see management teams allocating money, changing organizations, setting objectives based on science and in a way that everybody in the organization can participate in equally because everybody can bring data, then you have a real hope of creating a data-driven organization. Without that, it's a lot harder. Now, once you've got that, then understanding how to think is really important. There's an outstanding book that I recommend without hesitation to everyone interested in this which is how to measure anything. And this is a book on how do you use data to understand quantification of uncertainty so you can make better decisions.  And so that is about being able to have somebody else who didn't write the microservice access that data in a way that's consistent and coherent. So data platform teams, you see that at Home Depot, you see at Target, you see fairly advanced data platform teams at FedEx and other advanced organizations. There's a whole mode of curating the data, making sure that you have good access, you've got good policy. But I would say that the technology piece is the last step almost after you've got the cultural piece nailed. Being able to have good access to data under clear policies so that by the time you get it to your data scientists or business analysts, not only do they know that the data quality is good, but that they actually have permission to use data. So that sort of advanced topic that all data-driven enterprises are talking about now and working on is data ethics. Not only do we have ethical access to the data, but the ways that we're going to apply ML to this, the questions we're gonna ask about the data, the inferences that we'll get, are those ethical or should we not be asking those questions? So that's a data-driven organization answer. With a question about how can multiple internal groups work together, I think it comes back to having a common way that you make decisions. I find that I've been at a number of companies in the last 26 years, I find that the decision-making ends up being the most broken part of internal collaboration, because you create a lot of politics and who gets to say what about what? If you don't establish a really good ground rule for hypothesis-driven, test-driven, data-driven decision-making, then you'll have a hard time getting along and it all becomes very relationship-based, which is hard for outsiders to penetrate, and I tend to think it's anti-inclusive. There's another really good question here on service meshes powering connectivity between microservices. Do we see that the data mesh is using similar technologies like Istio, Lincardia, or Kuma to keep the communication between components standard across the mesh layers, or does the data mesh have separate requirements? This has been an area of a lot of focus for me in the last year or two. Data meshes seem to be evolving in a way that is similar to service meshes, so you need a data proxy. The affordances around that proxy seem a little different from what you see with Envoy, for example, at the HTTP services layer, you've got an expectation that everything can be accessed through HTTP. With data, you're not always accessing information through HTTP. We have all high throughput protocols. We have very particular older patterns that we use, and so a data proxy has got to have more capabilities than what we see in Envoy currently. But the overall architecture that we see for a data mesh, much like the service mesh is above that proxy layer, being able to connect it with policies, with filters, with programmability, that's sort of the next horizon. You can see in service meshes, it's typical that you're gonna have the ability to write modules or filters using something that will reduce to web assembly, maybe something like Lua, something that is user programmable. We need to be able to have that so that you can have control over your data plane the same way that you have control over your service plane. So we see similar architectural patterns, but different requirements, mostly because of the speed that you need to operate at and the particularities of how data can find itself, how you can access the right endpoint for data in a distributed system. Often you have to worry about partitioning rules, you have locality of reference, you've got network locations, things that you typically don't worry about as much in a stateless architecture, where you're doing over-the-top connections through a service mesh. So these are all awesome questions. I think I'm probably just about out of time. Got a few direct messages here, a couple of questions left in the Q&A. I think I've answered what I've got there so far. So happy to take other questions offline. Hopefully this was a good use of your time. I hope you enjoyed the keynote. I think there's an amazing opportunity for many of us who are working on the next generation of microservices to come together around building an open environment and an open architecture for data meshes. One of the things that I believe fundamentally, and I've been practicing for many years, is that you need to have freedom for your own data. You can't have it locked in a single cloud. Most of the people that I talk with are trying to figure out how to future-proof their architecture. They're doing hybrid development, they're doing multi-cloud architectures, and they know that the limiting function for their ability to control their technology future is where they can move their data. Dave McCrory has given a great example of data gravity as a cognitive metaphor that's so powerful. So if you overweight your gravity into one cloud or to one premise, it's gonna limit your ability to move and escape that vendor or renegotiate your contract. So how can we collectively make sure that your application data plane is uniformly accessible from whatever cloud that you choose to use? The answer for sure is gonna be open source. It's gonna be a range of open source technologies. I care a lot about Cassandra as a database, but I'm also super interested in Spark and Flink in Pulsar and Kafka in RocksDB, right? There's a range of technologies that are all kind of being worked together into the realization of a mesh, but it's this control layer and our ability to have a policy layer to talk about what's happening in data. How do these bits actually get stored? What class of security do you use? What kinds of audit rights and post-talk analysis do you need to understand who's used the data and is it all fine? That stuff that's gonna take us probably a few years working together as an open community, probably following on the heels of what's happened so effectively in service meshes. And then I've got one final question here on some successes to share, lessons learned that can be applied to someone's own project. I had the privilege of being recruited to Google in 2016 to run the Kubernetes business as VP of product management there and the rate of adoption of Kubernetes has been absolutely spectacular. I would think I would point out two successes in Kubernetes that are interesting to me. First was the courage of how the Kubernetes organization was being led. I was the CEO of Cloud Foundry at the time and I met with Craig Mclucky who was the leader for Kubernetes. And Craig took the brave stance to say that he really liked some of the things that were happening in Cloud Foundry. He liked how the technology worked. And there were a lot of social pressures on him to create more of a hard wall and to create kind of a zero sum game between Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry at the time. So he took that step and said, hey, there's some stuff about Cloud Foundry I really like. That made it pretty clear for me that here's a really open thinker, here's probably the beginning of an open community. What can we give away from Cloud Foundry? And so I had Abby Kearns take over a project called the Open Service Broker API to take Cloud Foundry's service broker capabilities and convey that to Kubernetes. So I think that was a big success to be open-minded enough that we could create a positive sum game across these two very different projects. Later on, once I was actually at Google, I had an opportunity to look at the leadership structure for open source projects over time and looking at the leadership structure inside Google. It was a bit confused. Who was in charge of Kubernetes? How was it getting done? What was the, what was the peering and the teaming? And it's important to look at open source, not just in terms of it's a bunch of open source code, but really look in a disciplined way at the organization that is going to structure that code. It's Conway's law, right? The communication patterns of the organization determine the architectural structure of what you get out of it. So what I did as VP of PM at Google was to make sure that we had a very clean, consistent, clear organizational structure. I put a Parna Sina in charge of Kubernetes. So it was really clear there was one leader for product management. She had an amazing partnership with Chen Goldberg, who is the director of engineering for Kubernetes and the two of them were able to have a high band with relationship, get along super well. They're both excellent leaders and they brought good organizational orientation and a high trust between them. So I think that ended up creating ongoing velocity for that project. I had less and less and less to do with it as it went faster and faster and faster. So I think if you want to succeed in an open source project, look very, very hard at the strength of the leaders, the clarity of the communication they have with them and your courage in being able to extend out to other projects and have the trust available to create positive sum games across not just what little piece of the world you think you're working on, but to see the connectedness with related projects, even ones that may look competitive to you. So with that, I believe I'm out of time. I hope that those comments have been useful to anybody who's trying to solve these class problems and look forward to chatting with folks in this community a lot about data meshes in the near future. You can always find me at samatramji.org or sam.ramjiatdatastax.com or SRAMG on Twitter. So thanks for your time.


A great deal is asked of our immune system. On one hand, it has to respond rapidly and violently to invaders, but at the same time limits both the response and the collateral damage to the host. Anaphylactic shock, like when someone with a penodology dropped dead after eating a peanut, is an example of an overactive immune response. The flip side is an underactive immune response which can put you at risk for infection. If you suffer some severe trauma, for example, it's not enough to get to a level 1 trauma center. Death related to sepsis, blood infection, still a major problem. And a major factor is the depression of our immune system, caused by the stress of the trauma. So what these researchers did was to try to stimulate immune function in trauma victims by injecting them with beta-glucan, a type of fiber found in yeast, mostly car crash victims, but also gunshots and stab wounds. And not only did the beta-glucan group suffer less sepsis overall, they have five times fewer complications and no deaths, compared to nearly one in three dying in the control group. I've talked about the role of oral beta-glucans in the form of nutritional yeast to boost immune function in adults and children, but if it's so immunostimulatory, then might it increase inflammation, worsen allergies? Actually, dietary yeast may offer the best of both worlds, possessing both anti-inflammatories, as well as anti-microbial activities. On one hand, activating the immune system to prevent infections, on the other hand, capable of reducing inflammatory reactions. Given their best of both worlds nature, enhancing immune defense, while simultaneously down-regulating inflammation, beta-glucans are suggested as a replacement for immunosuppressant drugs to treat inflammatory diseases like inflammatory bowel disease. Turns out that's a bad idea for Crohn's disease, since it can make things worse, same with another disease called the hydratinitis supprotiva. But what about allergies like hay fever? They did a nasal provocation test with tree pollen and then siphoned off some mucus, and those that had been taking beta-glucans had lower levels of some inflammatory compounds, or should I say inflammatory compounds. And based on just that, they suggested it might help people with hay fever, but you don't know until you put it to the test. A randomized placebo-controlled double-blind study compared the effects of daily supplementation for a month with about a teaspoon of nutritional yeast worth of beta-glucans versus placebo on the physical and psychological health of self-described moderate ragweed allergy sufferers. The ragweed family is one of the leading causes of hay fever, and give people a placebo, and nothing much happens. But in the beta-glucan group, a significant drop in symptoms and symptom severity, fewer runny noses, fewer itchy eyes, and fewer sleep problems. So no wonder, less tension, depression, anger, fatigue and confusion, and more vigor. So improved allergy symptoms, overall physical health, and emotional well-being with the beta-glucans found in a single teaspoon of nutritional yeast, which would cost about five cents a day.


You've always wondered what the abscissa and the ordinate are. It's really easy. The abscissa, the x-axis. It's not an abscess. And the ordinate is the y-axis. I have nothing funny to say. Rather ordinary. Yeah, the x and y, it's an ordinate the order and it goes up and it's simple. The x-axis is the abscissa and the y-axis is the ordinate. That's all you need to know. That's it. And that's even less than a minute. This is the ordinate and the abscissa. The ordinate. It's orderly. It's this one. It's the y-axis. Abscissa, which you can't have without the ordinate. It's about an abscess. It's the x-axis. It's not an abscess, I guess. Anyway, the point is, is that ordnates and abscissas. And why did we do two videos on this? Because you can't have one without the other. That's why.


Hi, I'm Andre and I'm going to present our paper, Syndrome Decoding Estimator, which is joint work with Emanuele Bellini. The NIST standardization effort for post-quantum secure cryptographic schemes is approaching the end of the third round and as we know this round will end with a selection of schemes to be standardized, which makes it an increasingly important task to understand the exact security guarantees given by the proposed parameter sets. Since we want to standardize the most efficient, meaning the smallest, parameter sets that actually achieve the desired security levels. In this talk we focus on code-based schemes. There are still three remaining in the third round, that is Classic McElise as one of the finalists and bike and HQC on the alternate list. So the goal of this work is to establish precise security estimates for the parameter sets of these schemes under different metrics, whereas these metrics especially target different memory models. So code-based schemes are usually based on the hardness of the syndrome decoding problem, which we define in a minute and the best known algorithms to attack this problem are information set decoding algorithms and the landscape of information set decoding algorithms is quite diverse, meaning there are a lot of different algorithms of this class and this makes it a difficult task to estimate precisely the complexity of each of these algorithms to then find the minimum over all these estimates to finally derive the security guarantee of a proposed parameter set. So in this work, we observe relations between all major ISD improvements, which allows us to unify them in a kind of framework. So we find that all of them are internally solving some kind of nearest neighbor routine or nearest neighbor problem and their biggest difference is how they solve this problem. So by substituting the routine used to solve this problem, we obtain the different formulas, the different estimates for the complexities of these algorithms and we provide these formulas in a tool called syndrome decoding estimator written in Python, which allows to estimate the hardness of arbitrary instances and using this tool, then we obtain precise security estimates for the different schemes. The talk is structured as follows. In the first half, we will investigate this framework and see how the different ISD algorithms fit into this and in the second half, we will then talk about the different memory models and the precise or concrete security estimates. So let us start with the definition of the syndrome decoding problem. So for the syndrome decoding problem, we're given the parity check matrix of a code. It's n minus k times n matrix and the syndrome s, a vector of length n minus k and integer omega. So everything is binary here. We are working in F2 and we are asked to find an error vector e of length n, which fulfills the identity h times e is equal to s and has an hamming weight of omega, so meaning it has exactly omega coordinates equal to 1. So visually, we will represent this as follows, h times e is equal to s and note that e is basically a selection of columns of h that sums to s. Before now diving into the details of the different ISD algorithms, let us make some basic observations. So we can permute an instance and still maintain this identity here. So this means we can permute the columns of the parity check matrix as long as we apply a similar permutation to the error vector. So this basically models the fact that we can multiply the parity check matrix by a permutation matrix from the right as long as we multiply the error vector by the inverse permutation from the left. And this allows us to redistribute the weight of the error on the full coordinates. So we can achieve a random weight distribution on e. So now we have here our permuted instance and we can apply another transformation by still maintaining the identity, that is we can multiply both sides with an invertible matrix. And we can craft this matrix such that we diagonalize the left part, the left n minus k times n minus k sub matrix of the parity check matrix. And of course this changes the syndrome, but we maintain the identity. And as I said the permutation allows to redistribute the weight on the error. So in the following we will assume that this permutation distributes the weight such that we have a weight omega minus p on the first part of the error and weight p on the second part where p is an optimization parameter of the algorithm. And we can write this identity as h prime times e2 is equal to s prime plus e1. And it's noted that the error weight in general is small compared to the length of the vector. So e is a small weight vector, meaning that this identity here is we can somehow define an approximate identity between h prime times e2 and s prime approximate in the sense that it holds up to the addition of e1, but e1 is small or of low hamming weight. And ISD algorithms then work in a quite similar fashion. So all the algorithms work in a quite similar fashion. They first permute the instance to redistribute the error weight hoping for weight p on e2. Then they apply the Gaussian elimination to diagonalize the left part of the matrix. And finally, they try to solve this almost identity. So finding an e2 such that h prime times e2 is close to s prime. And note that the optimization parameter p allows to shift either more or less work into this third step. So for example, for p equal to zero, this third step becomes trivial because there's only one possibility to check. But the higher p gets, the more costly the search for e2 becomes. But on the other hand, the more weights we shift into e2, the more likely it becomes that we permute the error weight as desired. So should the third step not result in a solution, the algorithm starts over with step one, so a new permutation because the permutation did not distribute weight p on e2. Now let us look into different ISD algorithms and how they approach this third step. So here we will skip the original ISD algorithm by Prang, which basically chooses p equal to zero and dive directly into the improvements made by Stern and Dumair. So here we have the identity h prime times e2 equal to s prime plus e1 visualized. And both algorithms, the one by Stern and the one by Dumair, start by splitting e2 in a meet-and-the-middle fashion. So they split e2 into vectors where the first one has weight only on the first half and the second one only on the second half. Together they form a vector of weight p. Now we label both parts of the vectors with x and y accordingly. And then by splitting the matrix in the same fashion we can move the dependence of x and y on different sides of the equation. And this allows us then to create two lists, one containing h1 times x for all possible choices of x and another list of containing h2 times y plus s prime for all possible choices of y. And now we can find e2 by finding actually e1 close pairs between those lists. And this means we are basically interested in finding close pairs between those lists which are nearest neighbors, which is the nearest neighbor problem. So now both algorithms do not solve the nearest neighbor problem directly on all coordinates. They work on a projection of coordinates. So for example, let us take the last l coordinates of the vectors and then try to solve the nearest neighbor problem on these coordinates and finally checking if for the found solutions they are short on overall on all coordinates. So the algorithm by Stern now simply assumes that for the chosen projection the weight of e1 is 0. So e1 is 0 on the chosen projection. This then allows us to perform a simple search for equality on this projection between both lists. And for all matching pairs it then checks if the sum is short on the remaining coordinates. And of course we do not know if this if the projection of e1 is 0. So we have to repeat this procedure for several projections until we might assume that one of them does for one of them is the whole set e1 the weight of e1 is 0. And some of you might have noticed that this procedure of finding near elements between two lists by projecting them to random coordinates and searching for equality on these coordinates is actually known as a procedure called Indic Modvani Locality Sensitive Hashing. So Stern's algorithm is solving this nearest neighbor problem by using Indic Modvani nearest neighbor search. So now Dumer's algorithm differentiates in the way it solves this problem. So it does not no longer assume that e1 is 0 on this projection but it has some weight on this projection. And of course we cannot search for equality anymore because the identity now depends on e1 again and we did not account for this. Now the algorithm splits the weight on the projection of e1 again in a meet-and-the-middle fashion similar to how we split e2 and x and y and moves one of these parts to the other side of the equation. This then allows to not only perform a meet-and-the-middle on e2 but also on the difference. Meaning we do not only enumerate x in the list but x and the difference and y and the difference respectively. And this of course increases the lists but we also can search for equality on this projection again. So this is basically a meet-and-the-middle algorithm for solving the nearest neighbor problem which is how Dumer solves this nearest neighbor problem. Next let us investigate how most recent ISD improvements work and how they employ nearest neighbor search. So most recent ISD improvements usually split e2 not only in two but in four or even more add-ins. And we find that for the cryptographic setting four add-ins is almost also splitting into four add-ins is almost always optimal so let us stay with four for the moment. And then the algorithm again similar to the algorithms by Stern and Dumer create multiple lists here containing h prime times xi and adding the s prime to the last list so that they are now need or they are now searching for one element from each list which such that they sum together to something that is small. And they find these elements by combining two lists at a time and first again on a projection searching for some vectors which are close or add up to something small and then in a final step they search for vectors that are small on the other coordinates. And as they were already small on the projection they will add up to something that stays somehow small. And of course to create those lists the algorithms need to employ nearest neighbor search algorithms again. We find that by using the kind of meat in the middle technique to solve this nearest neighbor problems we obtain variants of the improvements known as MMT and BJMM named after the inventors Maimoyer and Dumer and Bekha Jew Maimoyer. And now by substituting these subroutines for nearest neighbor search we obtain different IST algorithms. For example by if we exchange the meat in the middle strategy on the last level by a nearest neighbor technique by Maia and Odzorov we obtain an IST algorithm similarly known as Maia Odzorov IST algorithm. Unfortunately the nearest neighbor search technique by Maia and Odzorov is not very practical so it inherits huge polynomial overheads such that in our practical considerations we exchanged it by the Indic Modvani procedure which gives the first practical variant of the Maia Odzorov algorithm. And now by exchanging the subroutines on both levels by the nearest neighbor search technique from Maia and Odzorov we obtain an improvement made by both and Maia. Again since Maia Odzorov nearest neighbor search does not yield good practical complexities we exchange it by the Indic Modvani variant. So this gives a simple framework to determine the practical complexity of different IST algorithms. Of course the time complexity formula shown here is further simplified but it boils down to the number of permutations needed to ensure the correct weight distribution times the time it takes to compute the diagonalization of the matrix plus the time for the tree computation. And the time for the tree computation is mainly dependent on the chosen nearest neighbor routines which determine the time needed to construct the intermediate and the final list. Before we look into what this means for the security of the proposed parameter sets let us investigate the cost of memory because all algorithms we've seen in this talk so far rely on some enumeration procedures which involve lists of large size. Here we see a timeline of ISD improvements and when they originated. So please note that this is just a selection of improvements there are plenty of others omitted here and as we said in the beginning we also omitted in our presentation the original algorithm by Prange and also an improvement by Lee and Brickel. So note that these ISD algorithms would actually only require a polynomial amount of memory so they do not rely on enumeration procedures but all algorithms we've seen use an exponential amount of memory and as a rule of sum you can say if going from left to right these algorithms use more and more memory and the access to these amounts of memory will definitely slow down the computation of the algorithm. So the question is how do we account for this in our security estimates where the conservative answer is probably we don't but the more realistic answer is we introduce a time penalty. So an algorithm with time complexity t and memory complexity m is set to have cost t times f of m where f is some penalty function. So for example we obtain quite directly the conservative setting if we set f of m to 1 so or some other constant which is why this setting is known as a constant access setting. There are other established penalty functions such as the logarithm or the cube root or even square root which are then known as the logarithmic the cube root or the square root memory access setting and we will investigate these three settings here constant logarithmic and cube root in our in our considerations. Now I said that the algorithms have an exponential amount of memory usage but this is only half the truth because it depends on the on the weight omega so exponential is the memory usage only if the error weight is a constant fraction of the code length so of the length of the vector but for cryptographic applications this is usually not the case. So let us investigate how relevant the memory usage is for cryptographic sized parameters. Here we see the the memory usage for the bike and HQC setting where which use a very low error weight omega of just size square root of n and on the left we see the plot where we have on the x-axis the code length ranging from basically zero to parameters offering about 250 to 300 bits of security and on the y-axis we see the logarithm of their memory usage for the exemplary algorithms or by bgmm stern and prange. We see that all algorithms for all parameters use a quite moderate amount of memory so no memory so no algorithm actually exceeds the memory usage of two to the 45 bits of memory so for bike and HQC memory seems not to be the relevant factor. The picture changes a bit if we investigate the meccalese setting. For meccalese we have an error weight which scales with n over log n so it's higher than in the bike and HQC setting and this translates to the memory usage of these algorithms. We see for prange still we have very low memory usage but for the improvements which rely on enumeration so for stern and bgmm we have a drastically increased memory usage where stern uses roughly two to the 100 bits of memory and bgmm almost two to the 200 bits of memory for parameters that offer about 250 to 300 bits of security. So for the meccalese parameters besides the question if such amounts of memory will be ever available the the excess timings to these amounts of memory will certainly slow down the computations of the algorithm. Equipped with this knowledge let us now investigate the security level of the proposed parameter sets again starting with bike and HQC. NIST provides three categories security categories that relate their security to AS meaning set is set to be secure in category one three or five if it is at least as hard to break as the respective AS instantiation and let us start with a conservative model so this constant x setting where we do not account for the memory usage and we find that bike already matches all security levels under this metric and here in the table we see the security margin that bike has over breaking AS meaning in bike category one is three bits harder to break as AS 128 for example and the negative number would therefore correspond to a security deficit. Of course if we now introduce memory access costs then we can only increase these security margins and the same holds for the HQC for the HQC scheme also here HQC matches the security levels already under the conservative in the conservative model so we recall that bike and HQC both use a very small value of omega so for all instantiations we see here the memory usage is quite low with only two to the 40 bits of memory so a maximum of two to the 40 bits of memory we see again for bike and HQC memory is definitely not the most relevant factor. Let us next investigate the meccalis the classic meccalis parameters so the same categories hold for the meccalis scheme the only difference is that the meccalis team provides three parameter sets for the category five five a and five b parameter sets roughly giving the same security and category five c set meant to provide very high security guarantees starting with the constant access model we find that only category one and the category five c set are matching their security levels but to be fair this is known to the meccalis team and they say that the algorithms used to obtain these security estimates use high amounts of memory and the access timings to these amounts of memory will make up for the difference and they are somehow right these algorithms use a high amount of memory which ranges from two to the 90 to two to the 200 bits of memory and as I already said the their existence of these amounts of memory are already questionable so before looking into memory access timing or memory access costs let us investigate how the complexity behaves if we limit the memory so if we employ some memory bounds so remember that the algorithm has this optimization parameter p which allows them to shift more or less weight into the enumeration part and by decreasing this value of p they shift less weight into the enumeration part which allows them actually to consume less memory and we see that we decrease the deficits a little bit and we increase the margins but overall the picture stays the same the same we observe if we impose logarithmic memory access costs so here the algorithms are penalized by the logarithm of their memory usage but they still have the same memory usage as in the constant access setting depicted by the same color here so the memory usage as a memory cost is actually too low to make the optimization choose a different strategy if we then go to the cube root access setting we see that the picture changes drastically so that here the memory access cost is so high that the algorithms optimization actually tries to avoid the use of memory meaning we see that the memory here ranges only the memory consumption ranges only from two to the 25 to two to the 47 bits of memory and most of the parameter sets are then able to match their their security levels even if not equally well and the category three set seems to be somewhat an outlier here which is not able to match the security level under any of the employed metrics so what does this mean for the code-based cryptographic schemes for bike and hqc we have seen that they match their security levels already under conservative metrics meaning in the constant access model where we do not impose memory access costs which is the result of the very low error weight they are using and as a rule of sum one can say that the more or the higher the error weight becomes the more memory these the more memory these algorithms use and hence the more relevant it becomes or the more necessary also to precisely model the memory access costs we've seen this especially for the McElise submission but also for the bike and hqc team we suggest to decide for metrics under which the parameters should be proposed and then to ensure that all proposed parameter sets match the security levels equally well so our paper is online thank you very much and for details please give it a look


President Bolaame Tinnabu has received Kogi State Governor-elect Ussma Ododo and Governor-Hope Uso Dima of Imu State at the presidential villa Abuja. The meeting also had in attendance the national chairman of the Unprogressive Congress, APC Ablai Ganduje and Governor Yahya Bello of Kogi State. Speaking at the meeting, Tinnabu congratulated Ododo on his election and Uso Dima on his re-election for his second term of four years. Because that Ododo had defeated Mutala Ajaka of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, and Dino Meliah of the People's Democratic Party, PDP in the Kogi gubernatorial election, Uso Dima also defeated Samuel Anyang of the PDP and Athan Acharno of the Labor Party in the Imu State governorship election. And everybody who is happening in Obantu, is very ill who have competency in their elected governor, Ussma Ododo. You work very hard to make a living, both of you, and make the party proud. We thank the teaming masses who voted for you and for all of you. But the challenge has just started. The challenge is just starting to serve in the face of the challenge of governance. Making sure that people from your various states are carried along first. You become a very great servant of the people from this mandate. So go meet your glory. Go meet what you do right. He's got everyone of you. I don't touch that head of yours.


Biofilms are complex communities of bacteria that can be found on many surfaces in contact with water. These communities offer protection from environmental stresses such as temperature and pH fluctuations, UV exposure, and predators. They also cause significant damage to industries such as aquaculture, oil and gas, and desalination, leading to the development of strategies to prevent biofilm formation and cleaning of infected surfaces. This article was authored by Karla C.C., Arda Carvalho.


Four men in the Brainerd Lakes area have been arrested and are accused of soliciting a minor for sex. The arrest comes after a multi-day investigation conducted by several law enforcement agencies. The four men facing felony charges for solicitation of children to engage in sexual conduct are 39-year-old Mark Bungard of Breezy Point, 61-year-old David Colvin of Brainerd, 56-year-old James Brooks of Big Lake, and 30-year-old Michael LaRue of St. Paul. The Crowin County Sheriff's Office says that many cases remain open and more arrests are expected. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


Hey everybody, Steve McFarton here, beautiful Old Alberta. Love it here. And I've got a 2020 Laramie with the Sport Appearance Blackout Edition.  It's got blind spot detection system on it. It's got the power fold in here. With the Laramie, you've got memory seating, power pedals, 12-inch green navigation, heat sink, cool seat, crew cab on the Laramie. This one here, we got the heat of second row seats. Well, as you know, it's a power folding side step to come out on it. Got a little step here to make a little easier to get into the box. Really cool to have. Back up camera, back up sensors and a hitch and it's ready to go. It's got spray ladder, it's all ready. So again, where are you gonna go? Mountain Dew Dodge. Where is that? That's in beautiful Old Alberta. Who are you gonna see? Me, Steve McFarton. Have a great day.


Hi, I'm Rusty Komori and this is Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou Boys varsity tennis team for 22 years and we're fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. My book Beyond the Lines is about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence, and finding greatness, which is what this show is all about. My special guest today is my two-time state tennis singles champion and he's featured with unforgettable impactful stories in both of my books. He is Robbie Lim and today we are going Beyond Tennis Championships. Hey Robbs, welcome to the show. Hey, how's it going coach? Thanks for having me on. Well, I want to know Robbs. I know you went to Punahou from Kindergarten through 12, but tell me about your life growing up. Yeah, first of all, really appreciate you sharing my story with the world. It's been awesome to see so many folks from all over the country and the world buy the book and find some great learnings from it. I've certainly been using it myself in my day-to-day just to touch up on what I learned because tennis was a very formative part of my life and I'd say the varsity tennis team at Punahou was the most impactful part of that whole thing. In terms of growing up, I was unfortunately pretty average. I was a pretty average kid up until eighth grade. I was a B student. I didn't have the hugest friend network. In tennis in eighth grade, I had serious doubts about whether I would even make the varsity team in ninth grade and that was certainly my goal to make it. I worked really hard and eventually got it done, but you know, wasn't finishing in the top in the state and there were serious doubts from a lot of folks I knew who would tell me directly, hey you're not going to make the team in ninth grade. And so it was really quite, I'd say, average up until maybe ninth grade. Rob, what is it about tennis that you love so much? Yeah, I can't say that I actually loved it until I started playing on the varsity team. I think the main thing that changed for me was that we were able to turn an individual sport into a team sport. And tennis, it's tough feeling very alone on the court. I was a singles player.  And you can't talk to anyone. It's a very lonely sport and somehow I think we really turned tennis into an amazing team sport where I felt like I was playing for something greater than myself. I was playing for the team, I was playing for the school, and you know, it's looking back. Everyone wanted to beat 1-0. They all brought their A-game. Even other schools that weren't playing us would come and cheer against against us. They all wanted someone to take down to take down the streak. And I felt confident knowing that even the number one singles player or the number one doubles team on the team as soon as they would finish their match would go and cheer on someone who's playing fourth singles. No one left. Everyone rallied behind everyone and supported each other. And that was a pretty unique experience for me in tennis. Yeah, Rob, you touched on something really important right there that tennis is you know, an individual sport and what I wanted to do as coach was to make everyone feel a part of a very special team. And you know, we were all a reflection of each other and I wanted the number 12 player to feel just as important as the number one player. So really creating that superior culture of excellence was what my goal was. What are your thoughts about that? I thought at the time that it just happened. And frankly, I did not give you that much credit for it. Having managed teams myself now and been a people manager, that's been the hardest thing I think I've ever had to do. And creating a culture of excellence, creating a culture that people are inspired by, that people want to be around, that has a positive interaction on a daily basis, and is set up for performance is incredibly hard. And there are a lot of things that we did big and small that really started at the top and the leaders and it resonated through the rest of the team. And that today was the best team I had ever been on. I hope that it's not the case for the rest of my life, but so far that's the model of success that I have. So you appreciate me even more now then? For better or worse, I do coach. So Rob, I like to admit that you were right most of the time. Only most of the time. I was doing 100 pushups for showing a minute late. Yeah. That I did not appreciate and frankly didn't think that was that was sometimes I thought that was a little strict, but it managed to get us all bought in. Yeah, you're totally right there. And Rob, I know you were at Punahou from kindergarten through 12th grade. Would you compare our boys varsity tennis team to your experience playing college tennis at Dartmouth? Yeah, it's quite different, I'd say. For one, I wasn't playing indoors and I wasn't snowing everywhere. Which was a different experience in and of itself. But I guess I had and that's a that's a Dartmouth team there. I think I had different priorities on the Dartmouth team as I did in high school. My goal was to play college tennis. And I'm glad I had the opportunity to do that for four years. I had a great time. It was a blast. Certainly a different team culture. A lot less process, a lot less. I think we were very close as a team. But I believe less committed and less bought into what we were trying to do. Rob, so you know your family, I absolutely love your family. I mean your parents, Richard and Karen, and then your younger brother and sister, Mikey and Kristen. And the reason I called you guys the limb dynasty is because you won two state singles championships. Your younger brother, Mikey, won two state singles championships. And your younger sister, Kristen, won four singles and doubles state championships. So that's why you guys are the limb dynasty. Now what is Mikey and Kristen doing now? Well, Mikey and Kristen, I have a great relationship with both of them. Mikey's my best friend. We did everything together growing up. We would always compete with each other, mainly in a healthy environment. I think there are a couple of times my parents might have been a little worried, but for the most part, very supportive of each other. And I think what he's doing is amazing now. He's working at Tradewind Capital and he is trying to help local business owners, you know, basically keep their businesses with local ownership. He's trying to keep businesses in Hawaii. He's trying to create jobs in the state of Hawaii, and he's moved back to go and pursue that dream. And it's something we've been talking about since 2015 and he was able to make that dream come his reality. And my sister is, she's in New York City working for Square, the payments company. Kristen, she kicked my butt and everything. She held me accountable. She's still holding me accountable. She calls me out and she's my best source of feedback. So she helps me get better. Rob, your wife, Wendy, is super, super sweet. I mean, how's everything with Wendy now? Yeah, another thing I mean, I learned from the tennis team, varsity tennis, it's not really about where we are going as much as who we are going with. And it's the people that really make the journey. Wendy means the world to me. She made me chase her for years before she finally gave in, but she's been a great partner. She's been a great coach and role model for me. And in many ways, I look up to her. She started an amazing company called Senrav and it's selling next generation handbags. And she's been a very successful entrepreneur. It's really been a privilege to support her. And she has really challenged me and pushed me to get better every day. Rob, let's talk about our boys varsity tennis team a bit more now.  Yeah, as I said before, coach, I think the team was one of the best times I ever had. I look back on that team with very fond memories. It was the closest team I've been a part of, very formative for me. I think it was a metaphor for really life and leadership. A lot of the values that I learned on the team I'm carrying forward to today. And I think one thing that really stood out to me, and I think about often because I still have this, but when I was a senior, you gave me a trophy. You gave me the state championship trophy.   These are amazing, amazing. This is like the Lombardi trophy. I mean, these are huge wooden carb trophies and easily could have kept them all, but you gave them to the team. And I think that really meant a lot to a lot of us that received these things. And I think that's a big takeaway for me is that when things are going well on my team today, it's trying to give credit to the team and vice versa, taking the blame when things don't go well. And so that's just one example of I think a leadership trait that you exhibited that I've tried to take forward to today. Yeah, you know, I was presented 22 of those big beautiful co-estate championship trophies and today I own zero because I gave those 22 trophies away to a player on every team that I coached, not necessarily the singles champion or the doubles champion, but someone that I felt was just really instrumental in going above and beyond and keeping the team together and really enhancing our team bond. Now, Rob, what are some of the lessons you learned through tennis that helps you in life? Yep. I think it's really about the team that unlocked tennis for me. And I wasn't a top player in the state until I started on the varsity team and I felt I had something more to share and more to play for. And I've tried to replicate that in the rest of my life. And to me, it started with the people and I think you talked about this in your book, The Four Peas, but people I believe is probably the most important part of it. In my team today, it's about recruiting, it's about getting the right people in the right roles, finding ways to empower them and that's really what it comes down to. I spend a lot of time recruiting, a lot of time trying to find the areas that people can fit into or they can really bring out their best selves. And that's really the best way for me to get leveraged in my career. It's the best way to help companies scale and the right people make things easy. And vice versa. Robbs, I love hearing all about that and the most effective leaders create other great leaders. And for me, I'm so proud of you in everything that you're doing from back then and now and for your future, but we're going to take a quick break, Robbs. And when we come back, we're going to continue going beyond state championships, okay? Sounds good. You're watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii with my special guest, Robby Lim. We will be back in a quick minute. Hello, I'm Lillian Cumick, host of Lillian's Vegan World, the show where we talk about veganism and the plant-based diet located in Honolulu, Hawaii. I'm a vegan chef and cooking instructor and I have lots of information to share with you about how awesome this plant-based diet is. So do tune in every second Thursday from 1 p.m. Aloha. Welcome back to Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. My special guest today is my two-time state singles tennis champion, and he's featured with unforgettable impactful stories in both of my books. He is Robby Lim, and today we are going beyond tennis championships. Robbs, in my book Beyond the Lines and my new book Beyond the Game that's coming out soon, you're featured in both of them. Now, in the first book, I talked about you and your experiences leading up through your junior year, and then the second book Beyond the Game, I talk about what happened during your senior year. But let's talk, I want to ask you about what are some of the principles that stood out to you in the book? Sure. Lots of principles in the book. The four Ps stand out to me probably the most because that's fundamental. But we talked about people right before the break, and I think that's just essential to get right. And purpose. Purpose is really important. It's the best way to inspire people. There's really a number of ways to get people to do things and to work together. I don't believe in a fear-based approach. And what we used in varsity tennis, and we talked about in the book, is about finding a purpose and finding a vision and mission that everyone's aligned around. And really in the varsity team, that was about achieving greatness and being the best team we could possibly be. And everyone really, really bought into that purpose on the team. Every shuttle ball run, every, even in the warm-up before practice started, we would run five laps. And people would try and would not mail that in. People would actually, on the team, would actually be giving it their best effort because we thought that that made us better. And when we saw someone, anyone on the team really pushing themselves, that inspired the rest of us to get behind that person, to rally behind them. And you provided a lot of positive reinforcement to those who really did showcase that they're giving it their all. Rob, my top priority for you guys was to really create champion athletes of character first and then great tennis players second. So my focus was really about character and then having you guys be very self-disciplined and team-disciplined, which would lead to us having strong solid habits, which would lead to winning. And what are your thoughts about that? Yeah, that comes down to process. Another P in the book, but extremely important and in many ways ties a lot of the people and purpose together. And we had great, great process. We had amazing process on the team. And some of that was small and some of that was big. But we knew how to prepare for every match. We knew how to prepare for the state championships. We knew how to be in a position where we are in the best shape of our lives. And it started off with little things like showing up on time. Like it's really hard to actually start a practice when someone's come in half an hour late or 45 minutes late, not taking it seriously. And what was impactful for me is that even when the top player, the number one player in the team came one minute late, that set the entire team back. And everyone actually believed that. And so we would all try and show up on time, make sure we sprinted from class to get there. And that we were all in together. We had a great process around that. If you swore, that's 100 push ups. And swearing brings down the morale of the team. It's a negative thing and negativity breeds itself, right? And so we try to stay positive and try to encourage each other through positivity. And that's part of process. Rob's, and another thing that I was really wanting you guys to do was, like you said, little things was a big difference.  And one of the big things that I would say at the beginning of the season is, hey guys, we're going to have some major adversity this year. I don't know when it's going to happen, but it's going to happen. And the reason I would say that was to really have you guys look forward to adversity, look forward to challenges rather than hoping and praying it doesn't happen. You know, when inevitably it's going to happen. And so it was a mindset, it was a focus. And you guys would always come up to me before we'd placed certain matches and be like, Hey, coach, is today the day we're going to have adversity? I'm like, guys, not today. And then the next match, you guys would be like, coach is today the day. And I'm like, guys, today is the day. And you guys, it was like releasing a pack of hungry wolves because you guys are just so excited looking forward towards these matches. You remember that? Absolutely. And adversity is not only on the court, right? It's elsewhere too. I mean, people who are dealing with injuries, people are dealing with family situations, with schoolwork, with breakups. That would seem to be a big theme sometimes. And I think we were all in it together. And we felt that we would support each other as a team through that adversity. And I did feel like we were prepared for that adversity because we knew it was coming. And we believed you. And especially the folks as we got more senior on the team, by the time you're a senior, every year there is adversity. And it might not be the whole team. It might be one player that really goes through something really, really difficult. But it did come. That was, that was a pretty consistent theme throughout the time that adversity did come and challenges did come. And luckily we were able to bond together to get through it. And you know, Rob, every three or four years in my experience, I mean, we could have easily lost because there's times where we're playing Kamehameha schools or mid-Pacific or Eolani. And three of our doubles teams are playing against three of their doubles teams from that one school in the quarterfinals at the state championship. And you know, if our guys don't bring it and we lose, then we lose. So, but we never did just because of that mindset where we're looking forward to it. And oftentimes our opponents would be the ones that would have fear and that would, you know, crack under that pressured situation. Now you mentioned something earlier about you being an average player.    But one of the biggest things I feel, you had heart. And it's something that you can't measure. It's something that's deep within. What do you think about that? I honestly, I don't know if I can take credit for that. I have to give credit to the team on that one. I mean, the moment, the big moment of where I was in the most difficult situation was in my junior year state championship. I had been to the hospital with, I think, four bags of IV solution for crapping after the quarterfinals. And I had barely pulled out that match. I think my next match was at 8am the next day against an opponent that was better than me, frankly. And I found myself, I woke up, felt terrible, could barely move, was super sluggish. I found myself in a massive pole. I was down 6052. And I remember being 30 all, and my opponent was serving. And I am pretty sure that almost everyone there thought, including myself, thought the match was over. But I distinctly remember one moment from that match. And that's, there was a guy on the team named Shazi. And he was the last person to make the team that year. And I remember Shazi was literally hanging on the fence, cheering for me nonstop after every point. In just this incredible belief that I would pull through and we would pull through and we would somehow get through this match. And somehow we did, somehow we were able to win that match. And I didn't feel like I was alone there. I felt like I had a whole team behind me that just really believed that we could pull through. And that was a, that was just a magical moment for me where Shazi really inspired me. And I think I owe him a lot and respect him a lot for that. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up Shazi because, you know, for me as a coach, I wanted to make sure that everyone on the team played a role. Everyone contributed. And everyone felt a part of that special team championship. I mean, when we look back at what we accomplished, I mean, every player on the team through those 22 years, I mean, played an integral role in that. And that's, as a coach, that's what I wanted to make sure that. And, you know, for you as a leader now, I'm sure that that's what you're doing with your teams. I hope. That's what I aspire to do. And I think what I've learned is that it's just, it's much harder. It's hard to create that type of culture. I think we had a very special culture. We had a very special purpose. We had a very robust process. And we had amazing people. And when we, those, those kind of stars aligned on that team. And that is really hard to create. And it's really hard to replicate. And it's hard to maintain. And so that's, that's what makes the streak so impressive is that that happened for so long. And we were able to continue that going for, for 22 years. And I remember, I remember being in sixth, seventh grade, just looking forward to that and hearing stories about the team and how close folks were. And, and even, even after I graduated, just coming back and visiting and once in a while, we dropping back to practices, right? And, and that culture was still going. Yeah. I mean, it, it was a lot of stress for me, Rob. But, but you know, those three P's led to the fourth P, which is performance. And that's what going beyond the lines is all about. And that's why I wrote about that in the book. Because, you know, I want people can be wanting to win, you know, and they focus too much on winning rather than doing all the things that you should be doing. And then winning becomes a byproduct of all the things that you've done. Now, there were a lot of other people that were jealous of our success, jealous of you, jealous of me, jealous of our team. But I would always tell you guys, it's, it's probably because they actually admire what we were doing, you know, our character and striving for excellence. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I think I, you know, I, I faced that a lot. And it wasn't always easy, easy going through, you know, growing up in the tennis world when I had so parsed, you know, below average strokes, I'd say, probably below average talent. And a lot of people would talk, would talk and say, Hey, how, how is this guy winning? How is this guy, you know, I think last year, you know, he won state championship, the state championship, that was a fluke. It happened again, that was another fluke. And there was a lot of that going on. And, and I think having the team to support and cheer me on through these moments was really important. But that's also, that's also character building that teaches, you know, it taught me a lot about self belief and, and believing in myself and believing in my teammates that had my back. And at the end of the day, that we'd all do the right thing for each other. Rob's, you know, it was all about controlling everything that we had control of and not really worrying about things beyond our control. And Rob's, I got to thank you for taking time in your schedule to be on the show today and sharing your insights. Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. It's been an honor to work with you and learn from you in these past, it's been a long time now, 20 years or so. And, and I'm looking forward to going beyond the game. That one's, that one's hard to get, to get a hold of right now. Well, it's, it's on pre-order on Amazon. Yeah. I have, I have it. It's, I'm waiting for it. It's coming, Rob's. It's coming. All right. Thanks, Rob's. I'll talk to you soon. Okay. All right. Thanks a lot, coach. Take care. And thank you for watching, Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii and a special thank you to my clothing sponsor Eolani Incorporated. For more information, please visit RustyKamori.com and my books are available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I hope that Robby and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha.