So, I'm welcome to the International Legal Roundup with people's dispatch where we bring you some of the top stories from across the globe. Let's take a look at today's headlines. Columbia witnesses another national strike against President Gouke. Protests intensify in Nigeria after shooting of protesters. Israel accuses of shooting officers who shot dead an autistic Palestinian man. Western Europe sees massive spike in COVID-19 cases. Thai government repeals emergency order against popular protests. On Wednesday, thousands of workers, peasants, teachers, students, indigenous and apartheid-sounding people took part in a national strike in Columbia. The protests were held against the social and economic policies of President Ivan Dukke. Several peaceful demonstrations were held throughout the country in rejection of the economic crisis, the rising unemployment, police suppression, and assassination of social leaders. In the capital, Bogota hundreds of workers from diverse sectors hit the streets and marched towards the Plaza Bolivar. The workers were demanded a guaranteed basic income, more funding for health, education and housing sectors, and an end to the killings of human rights defenders. In Bogota, participants of the social and community MINGA for the difference of life, territory, democracy and peace also joined the strike. MINGA is an indigenous Quechua word and refers to collective action for the benefit of the community. Similar massive protests were also carried out in cities across the country. The cause for the national strike was given by a large number of social organizations and trade unions. Yesterday's national strike happened exactly one month after the national strike of September 21st. The strike in September happened six weeks after the demonstrations, following the police killing of a 46-year-old law student and taxi driver Javier Ordoniz in which 13 other people were killed by the police. Moving on to our next story, the anti-Saharist protests in Nigeria continued on Thursday, October 22nd, defying round-the-clock curfew in the country. The protesters turned up in large numbers in different parts of the country in support of the demand of police uniforms and also to denounce the state oppression. On Wednesday, a day after the army opened fire on the peaceful gathering in capital Lagos killing more than 10 people, several protests were held denouncing the state violence. The firing on the peaceful protesters on Tuesday night has also invited global condemnation. On Tuesday, protesters who were peacefully gathered in the leaky camp in Lagos were fired upon by the armed forces deployed to prevent the protests. Graphic video of the shooting has been circulated on social media and has gone viral. On Wednesday, a small group of angry protesters burnt down the offices of the television continental and a newspaper The Nation News. Both of these media outlets are owned by former Lagos state governor Bola Tinubu. According to Sahara reporters, protesters believe that Tinubu has been responsible for the deployment of the army, leading to the killing of the protesters. Tinubu belongs to the ruling All Progressive Congress party. People in Nigeria are demanding the end of the police's Special Anti-Roberty Squad or SARS, which has been accused of several atrocities and corruption. Protesters are also demanding widespread police reforms. Though the president, Mohamed Buhari, has conceded both the demands formally on Sunday, the people have deep distrust about the implementation and want some concrete action. The police officer who short-dead Iyad Al-Halaq, a Palestinian man with autism on May 30, was charged with reckless homicide by the Israeli authorities more than four months after the incident on Wednesday, October 21. Civil society and human rights groups, however, have criticized the decision to charge the officer with a lesser crime when it is beyond doubt that he killed Iyad with deliberation and incomplete violation of his orders. The case against another officer has been dropped following the investigation by the Israeli Justice Ministry, which concluded that he ordered his subordinate not to shoot. 32-year-old Iyad Al-Halaq was killed by the police officer at a checkpoint in occupied East Jerusalem while he was on his way to school. The killing had created a massive outrage among Palestinians who took to streets demanding justice with the slogan of Palestinian life's matter. Several Palestinian groups have condemned the Israeli government's move to charge the accused officer with a lesser crime instead of murder. Halaq's family had earlier accused the Israeli government officials for destroying evidence in the case. As well as erected several check posts across the occupied territories and several Palestinians have been shot while crossing them. In most of the cases, the police and security officers responsible for such killings are never charged. Some of them are charged for minor crimes and the Israeli justice system has been lenient even towards those who have been found guilty. Now going to Europe on Wednesday, Spain became the first Western European country to have more than a million COVID-19 infections. It is only the sixth nation in the world to have recorded a million cases so far. Other countries in the list are the US, India, Brazil, Russia and Argentina. The number of new infections and deaths in the country has seen a steep rise since late August which had forced the government to bring back some of the restrictions on people's movement lifted earlier. On Wednesday alone, Spain recorded around 17,000 new cases with over 156 deaths. The country has a total of 34,366 COVID-19 related deaths so far. France, which is recording more than 25,000 new cases daily for some days now, is set to join Spain and become the seventh country to have recorded more than a million cases. As of Wednesday, it had 999,744 COVID-19 cases with over 34,000 deaths. France has imposed curfews in nine regions including the capital Paris and several more regions are expected to face similar curfews soon. Several hospitals in and around Paris are facing an overload of cases. In the second out of COVID-19 outbreak, Italy, one of the worst affected countries in the first outbreak, has broken all previous records in terms of new infections. On Wednesday, it recorded 15,199 new cases. This is the single largest one-day increase in the country ever. The spike in new cases has forced the government to bring back curfews. According to a Reuters report, the regions near the capital, Rome, will have curfew beginning at 5 am on Friday, October 23rd. Germany, which had been able to restrict the number of cases and overall deaths in the first wave of the outbreak, is now recording the highest single daily infections ever. The country is recording more than 10,000 new infections every day and its total deaths are nearing 10,000. On Wednesday, the country's health minister tested positive for the virus. The UK recorded over 26,600 new cases on Wednesday. Its overall tally reached 789,229. Several other countries in the region are recording a record number of new cases. The World Health Organization has already warned on October 16th that the number of deaths due to COVID-19 infections in Europe can exceed 5 times its April peak in a few months if urgent lockdown measures and other precautions are not taken. The Government of Thailand repealed the emergency decree earlier week after it was passed. On Thursday, a government order was passed in the afternoon stating that the purpose of the emergency order that prohibited mass gatherings was supposedly achieved. The repeal of the emergency order coincides with an earlier 24-hour deadline given by protesters on October 20th to repeal the decree, promising a surprise that the demand was not met. The repeal of the decree also comes immediately a day after thousands of protesters marched on Wednesday late at night and submitted an unsigned letter of resignation and three-day ultimatum for the resignation of Prime Minister Prayod Chanukha. The letter addressed to the people was received by the PM's Deputy Secretary General and the police after an hour of demonstration outside the government house which houses the Prime Minister's office. With submission of the letter, the representatives of the protests also gave a three-day ultimatum for the Prime Minister to vacate the position and release all political prisoners. The demonstration comes in less than a week after the police and the parliament had forcibly cleared a similar demonstration outside the government house. The submitted letter requires Prayod to concede his position as the head of the government. The challenge the government had imposed an emergency decree on October 15th in a bid to put an end to the anti-government protests that have been raging for more than three months now. The decree banned public gathering of five people or more and imposed harsh restrictions on media coverage as well. And this is all we have today for this episode of The International Lady Roundup. For more such stories and videos visit our website vbosisphile.org, subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Thank you for watching.


Hello, everyone. Welcome to my talk today. My name is Mary Grigleski. I'm here to talk about Apache Palsar and Apache Pino about all about optimizing speed and scale of real time analytics using these two open source projects. I'm really happy to be here today. And if you are interested in getting a copy of this slide deck, of course it is also available if you have virtual access and I have already uploaded the slides up to the schedule.com or that site. And so you should be able to get that. If not, then it is also available here. Basically, it's a bitly link. And basically it is just store on my Google link on my Google share drive, but you can access it here. So now even if you miss it, don't worry about it because it will be this slide deck is will be made available to you or is already available for you to look at. My name is Mary Grigleski. I'm a streaming developer advocate at Datastax. Datastax is based in California is a leading data management company. We specialize in essentially database as a service. And primarily to we are very open source focus. We're all about Apache projects. First and foremost Cassandra. If you are user of Cassandra, then you probably have heard about company too, because we have the VP of the Apache Cassandra project is that our company too. And also too, you know, besides you can use it open source, of course, or you can use it, you know, launch it yourself into the cloud. Better yet, you know, is to use our database as a service.  It never goes down. So, and now to the company also adding in streaming. So that's where I'm going to bring a bit of an introduction about the streaming side that we have with Datastax today. And that's Apache Pulsar. And so essentially we're very much cloud native platform, everything is kind of meant to be operating on the cloud. Even though you can still use our non cloud version, but we're, we're encouraging folks, you know, you realize that it's actually save you a lot of time if you use our cloud platform. Previously, I was a developer advocate doing Java stuff at IBM. So I also was involved a lot to mostly, in fact, with open source projects. There's WebSphere. There's also WebSphere, the open source open liberty too. So that's where I was plus I also did a bunch of reactive systems to if you're pay attention to an event streaming that has always been something dear to my heart. I'm based in Chicago. I'm a Java champion. I'm also the president and executive board member of the Chicago Java users group. So that's a volunteer run group. That's I'm a really big believer in community tech community, we all learn together and share things. I also helped to co-organize a couple of IBM run sponsored meetups to in Chicago. In the background, though, I have extensive experience in doing product and application design development, integration work deployment experience. You name it, I've done it. I specialize more in event driven reactive systems and open source and cloud based cloud enable distributed system. So that's my area. And these are how you can get a hold of me but I'll share with, you know, my information with you towards the end of this presentation. Now I just want to bring kind of like quick to your attention to this talk, right? I was supposed to be doing it with Star Tree and with because of the real time analytics part and supposed to be Karin Walock. However, she's no longer the community manager at Star Tree, and actually Mark Needham, who's based in England, the United Kingdom. He was very happy to do the talk, however, I think because of the short notice and there's just not time to do it. And so I just want to bring you all to his attend or bring, you know, him to your attention, because if you have more questions about Star Tree, about a page he will be the person that you can reach out to. So these are his links, right? He's a developer advocate but he's also strongly very technical too. His experience has been a lot into like big data analytics that type and he's a great guy to work with. So don't be afraid to reach out to him to Mark. So, okay. Now, let me kind of give you a quick kind of rundown on what we're going to talk about. So, first of all, what is real time analytics will spend some time kind of giving you the, you know, the basics of what is real time analytics. And then we can then go into understanding the problems that we're trying to solve, which is the types of analytics use cases, examples of user facing real time analytics and evolution and also over time real time analytics. Now, the thing is then the next thing then is basically saying that we know the kind of problem that we are trying to solve. Right. What is the solution. So just want to kind of present to you to open source solutions. One, Apache Pino, which is the one that kind of handles all the real time analytics part right and and then the other thing is a real time ingestion right you you're analyzing all the data comes in but how does it comes in. And that's when Apache Pulsar comes into play right it is an event streaming platform so I'm just going to introduce to you these two platforms essentially and bear in mind that this is going to be very much introductory level. If you want to kind of get more information I provide you with a lot of links to that you can get to and plus companies, data stacks and also start to we have folks there to help you at any time. Okay, so, what is real time analytics right real time analytics is basically the discipline that applies logic and mathematics to data, right and then basically data that comes in right it doesn't mean anything if you don't do anything kind of useful to it and basically there's logic there's mathematics in fact we live in a world that we rely a lot in mathematics right all the scientific stuff and it basically then for real time analytics is that it provide insights right for making better decisions quickly and this comes this definition comes from Gardner right and the folks I'm sure you're familiar with Gardner. I'm a famous analyst, famous analyst company. And so if you kind of take a look at it right we are kind of all talking about events, you know, in these days, we hear about event driven event storming event driven event driven microservices serverless, all of these things. And for the other two, it is actually around the concept of events right in my own talk that I introduced much deeper level of Apache pulsar I talked first to about what is what are events right what exactly it is that we're trying to capture. It's kind of harder to look at right, especially when we right when we first started programming I bet all of us, you know you to myself included right, we learn how to do things a bit on the old fashioned way right the traditional way when we do coding. We never did any event driven stuff because it's it's hard to do it's not easy. We're dealing with concurrency we're dealing with asynchronous style of processing. So what like events are right to the to computing. And so if you kind of take a look at it right if I give the definition, I go to, like a dictionary dot com right so it's talked about events are essentially a point in time and space right, time and space. Okay, first of all event happening and it assumes itself a position in space, XYZ coordinate right if you want to bring the math in. And then there's also time to so basically to the data changes over time if you plot, you know time as a fourth dimension you can see over time right the data the value changes but interestingly to how we kind of process data in for events is that we basically treating events once it happens is basically immutable, you cannot change it right so it kind of brings in a lot of very interesting way how can we capture events and we make sense of, you know all of the data that are captured by events and then we also then have other ways of saving all of these events for later analysis kind of purposes for example. Now the thing is though in today's talk we're talking about real time events so that's why to we want to get into events because it's only through events and I don't think there are any other better way if you don't use event how can you capture all the changes of data in real time Okay so there we go. Events is one thing and from events we want to draw some insight right we look into the events we take the data in chunks you know in the huge volume we want to draw some conclusion to it some insight right to make sense and and as you can see right. The insight we draw we can basically based on the results of these insight we kind of lead to a set of steps for taking action on all these different conclusions that we have drawn for example right. And then say for example you have your data warehouse right you realize that you know a lot of people are ordering you know something let's say right now almost holiday time in you know in the US we celebrate Christmas so basically to their companies are stocking up right a lot of the. You know vendors are stocking up all of the Christmas presents and there are certain things that are very popular so basically to you kind of keep track of the you know of your inventory and then you realize oh wow that this year what is popular right let's say some kind of. You know game can think very popular everybody's trying to get it then basically to you can take a look and over time you can say oh wow. Every day there's so many people ordering and we make you know maybe 2000 units and they're sold out within two days and we know we need to increase the inventory for example right so that kind of like based on events some insight drawn and doing action on it. Now as you can see right the value of data over time as you can see value on the y axis time on the. x axis value on the y so as such to when an event happens. And basically when it happens right away you can see the value is being high so over time though then then the value of the data becomes stale. So, as you can see, then what we're trying to capture is real time is basically with the, you know that when it happens you want to capture that value immediately kind of sends it to some processing and draw insights and then have action on it that type of stuff so. Now, who is interested in this data that can be analysts, management or users right now that's the thing to in today's talk we want to kind of highlight the fact that in this day and age right the modern day and age we're talking about. Giving users access to the data analytics part and then that's what is kind of becoming kind of more important than just analysts looking at some business intelligence dashboard or management reading some reports right even all those things they are less of a real time kind of flavor to it but users and user analytics for example. I'll be showing you some example of where we are seeing users analytics becoming more and more important. Okay, so if we kind of take a look at this quadrant I really like from mark right he has this quadrant. Basically, right you take a look at real time analytics, divide into four pieces right the machine facing. That's more about observability right and kind of that aspect right machine facing it's like, it could be like your, your, you know, cloud is like running, you know, all these things and, and you're observing it and see the what is the load look like over time for example right observability. How many transactions are being performed all those things. Now, internally to then you have also human facing right so you take maybe certain kind of applications that are make sense to the business and basically these are human, you know, beings that take all of these, you know, kind of like let's say my, I operate a store, and the store is making sales things and I want to have a real time dashboard that shows you know what is the, the sales figure it looks like right over time that's human facing right. And then now, if you kind of look a little further to is that you bring in a lot more like complexity to this picture is basically kind of more complexity is actually is more valuable for the business. For example, recommendation engine, as we all know right if we're shopping for things and we want to be able to kind of, let's say I'm shopping for car and I want that car to be a certain way say for example even for me two months a year ago or actually not two months a year ago I was searching, looking for a car I actually want a manual transmission, and I always like Honda right so Honda does actually unfortunately doesn't make CRV or HRV with manual transmission so then I have to kind of look for some other way so immediately to if I input those information to a car search kind of configuration thing it can immediately comes back to me and say hey you know what, get a Subaru for example right or how do you put down Subaru right. So I actually that's what I got I finally found the car that Subaru is a SUV right and sports utility vehicle that has actually manual transmission right so it's kind of really cool I think yeah so that's one thing. Another usage right how what do you use this for fraud detection right we all have bank accounts we all kind of know that there are always thieves kind of out there right in real banks you get thieves trying to break into the bank and steal money. On the internet right on cyberspace in computers, you also have hackers trying to kind of commit crime and steal somebody's money. So this kind of kind of, you know, essentially the systems that we can deploy to is some sort of fraud detection system that are monitoring maybe your account right. Let's say you are all based in Tokyo, and then often your bank account got some debit is basically the money was kind of drawn withdrawn in Hokkaido or something right. So in that case there's a problem there and you have your fraud detection system that are event driven in nature so immediately it knows that Oh, something is wrong I get notified. I grab all the data is basically you know, this, the customer account to the customer is living in Tokyo but they're strange debit being taken in Hokkaido so please check and they will notify you and then you take action on it and you might say oh I'm on vacation so not an issue right like that. Okay, so those are examples of some real time analytics right and also tune. I think in here to that provides you with even more kind of higher level kind of a business value would be like say an order tracking system right and order that these kind of things are more external because you're tracking for example you have package delivery here in the US Web Amazon delivery we order things and it delivers on Amazon truck and so basically the order gets tracked over time and gives you real time data is basically was could be saying that Oh, you know I'm I live in Chicago so the the I order some things and basically it's being shipped from New York right something New York City so New York City comes and then to Chicago and I'll be like okay let me see it is in downtown you know but I live in more uptown so I kind of follow it and those things are what we need right in order to be able to analyze all the data and provides very useful information real time to the end user. Okay, so with that let me kind of go into the next thing is exciting right so types of analytics use cases. So there are dashboards and bi like business intelligence kind of tools that we are more maybe as we were younger back in the days right, we were kind of helping out to generate reports you know based on some data that occurs during the day we collect all the data from spreadsheet from different department whatever it is and then basically we take the data and drop some graphs and show some kind of movement of your money price of your maybe you're working for a trading firm some instruments how do they change it over time things like that right as you can see over here dashboard give you these they're not real time. And then the thing is to we live in a world everything is all artificial intelligence and you know machine learning so machine learning to in fact they're prime kind of candidate to be using like real time analytics and also kind of using some way of ingesting all these data in to type of really good candidate for this kind of use cases right. Okay, and then another thing is basically user facing analytics so, as you can see right those two are kind of older times and so now in a newer times as we can see, we all have linked in profile on your LinkedIn profile for example and by the way this is picture Karen and she was supposed to be, you know, presenting with me but she kind of left me with these slides so I can use them. So, but let me kind of kind of step through all these first so dashboards right bi tools as you can see these are kind of more like fixed kind of graphs you can look at machine learning for example right these are like they immediately kind of process you know huge amounts of data to that kind of travel through time and gives you an analysis of, you know, upper bound, lower bound profile and now Middle East score all these things you can kind of, you know, look at the data and draw immediate conclusion and alert people, the aggregation for example in this case. And here to I wanted to get to this one, like user facing analytics right we all have linked in profile. As you can see right it says who view your profile, how many people look at it and over like a spread of from July 7 to September 27 so gives you this kind of kind of a basic and now and analytics which is very useful to sometimes we like to know. So basically this I wanted to let you know is that is powered by Apache Pinot so LinkedIn is a customer of Apache Pinot so they're using that to do the produce right as can you imagine they have like many users, and they can give us kind of really fast kind of time of processing all the data to has your profile so it is pretty significant to so actionable insight so these are insight right that's what we want to draw and why should I care right so as you can see over here operators and we go back right operators are doing business monitoring and basically then the analysts then will kind of look into business insights and then basically to the insights can become, you know, in the hands of me the users, customers, and they can use this for making money to monetization to. So, as you can see, right, this being able to have access to so much data, basically help transform the business world that we live in. These are examples of user facing real time analytics as you can see right as you, you know over here to total number of users 700 million query per seconds 10,000 plus and latency right the SLA is less than 100 milliseconds so as you can see is real real fast, the freshness of the data is in seconds right so that's what it is so as you can see over here, we all know, you know real time analytics in on our dashboard and LinkedIn so here to there's also, you know, recruiters that are using it to analyze candidates right. So, are they qualify am I looking for a certain people with certain number of years of experience in certain area so and where they are located all of these things so, as you can see you know the opportunities are limitless in here. And over here to even an example of Uber eats to it might be something that not sure if it is in your area but in the US to we have Uber, and then there's Uber eats which is like food delivery service but as you can see, having this real time component to it really helps because what happened is that over here right. You can have let's say give you an example right, I own pizza place I'm the restaurant owner, and I have customers order food for me and over here as you can see there's missed order or orders right and they're down time all these things and having it real time is actually very useful.  If you get it you say that oh you know I'm the owner of course I don't want to lose my customer, I might react to it right away and say hey, let me make you the, you know the mushroom pizza and immediately I'll deliver to you I'll replace it with no cost, you know, you keep the other one like that right so those are kind of opportunities that you can look into having something like real time is certainly very very useful and examples of real time analytics like stripe is a payment system right. So there's a lot of kinds of, you know, kind of thing to deal with financial especially financial statements right reporting, detecting bugs and problems and detecting financial risk, managing stripes liquidity, auditing past actions all these things that you know financial companies are needing it kind of, kind of very useful to so stripe also uses a lot of it to that's a, you know, not sure if you guys have stripe here in Japan but the thing is stripe also is a payment system I believe it is global but anyway so over here to the kind of problem then we are trying to solve is basically teams are executing money movement right and you have financial data consumers in different departments so so let's see what kind of problem we're trying to face right so these are kind of unique challenges and opportunities. You want, you know, high precision accuracy requirements you know aggregations must be exact, and there are many small unit transactions plus small currency units that can vary too. And there's also like transactional level kind of integrate on granularity reports must be reproducible.  Then the problems and you are being serviced on an airline just think of that right you're ready to fly and, let's say from Japan to the US and often like oh system doesn't work and the, the, you know, the staff would have to manually do things and those kind of things are kind of pain right so as you can see in any situation you can have that and you have to kind of address them. Okay, so, again, back to financial places there are strict compliance and security requirements to and all these things so as you can see right so over here as you can see over here. Internal analytics you can actually have latency a higher because internal maybe less about making money is more about analyzing things. Freshness can be seconds to minutes concurrency hundreds of users but for external analytics as you can see, we need really super fast like milliseconds kind of latency right it doesn't have much delay. Freshness has to be in seconds and concurrency has can be millions of users to them like that so. As you can see, evolution of real time analytics so real time analytics landscape is rapidly changing right there's a start with OLAP right there OLAP system were more like batch type of systems right there data collected you want to do online analytics processing these are like evolving with these trends and what we used to have internal facing analytics and data was much more structured and approximate data inquiry consistent consistency. And also to there's queries to you can slice and dice them and that's what kind of like their data warehousing kind of technique to use it right so at that time to is more about gigabytes to terabytes of data, but look at today right. So we want user facing analytics. These data are semi structured. Also, we want to have strong data and query consistency, and these are full sequel semantics to it to and plus to the amount of data from terabyte we're going to go into petabytes of data. Now, how do we then deal with a building a user facing real time analytics system right. So, as you can see right there are real time ingestion, and you know, high dimension, now melody and philosophy of an ingestion has to be has to we have to meet these kind of the requirement. Essentially, this system has to be highly available, very scalable, and also cost effective to, and also to over on the other side is basically then kind of can generate the seconds freshness. Thousands of you know, query per seconds and milliseconds of latency so very, very fast and not much latency. So we want to introduce to you a patchy pulsar. So let's take a look at pulsar first. So as such right pulsar is a patchy pulsar is an open source project as I mentioned to you already event streaming. And the thing is it uses a pop up architecture much like Kafka, but kind of bear in mind to there I've been asked to about what the difference is. Well, certainly there differences, because a patchy Kafka was designed back in like 2005 or six or that timeframe. So at the time, the cloud wasn't so much in the forefront yet it was still starting so but then for Yahoo, they already are you can go into the cloud and everything and then they realized that whatever Kafka was doing would not be able to address some of the concerns that any kind of cloud environment would need, especially for event streaming. I mean as such do you know event streaming is kind of when we do an event programming is a lot of moving parts it's not as much like you know when we code is static thing right it's more like dynamic kind of in nature. So it uses a pops up kind of producer consumer type of you know architecture this pattern, and essentially to then they realize on the runtime the broker which is a Java runtime broker, and you can have more than one broker to and this will help to increase throughput of your messages to get through so there are also those things being supported in pulsar, and also to as you can see zk stands for zookeeper zookeeper as some of you may be aware that's also an Apache project and that's, you know, as you can see it's very open sourcing here zookeepers basically you know kind of like managing a zoo you know many things are happening the data is changing. So I'm there to kind of oversee all of these kind of clusters and the configuration all of these sort of like look at it kind of like an overall managed manager kind of managing everything. Now, the thing is though, you still can think a look that the broker is the one that is kind of being the core of everything it coordinates and talk with the bookie talks to the zookeeper and talks to the producer and consumer so broker is essentially the center piece of everything center mind of everything. As you can see broker interacts with all of the bookkeeper, the bookies, I wanted to point out to the apache pulsar right it doesn't want to deal with it so to speak right doesn't want to deal with all managing all of the log messages it's a lot of work if you kind of think of you have to manage the messages that comes in and deliver them and there are many rules sometimes you deliver these messages right it can be if you're familiar with messaging systems and they're there can be huge chunk of data coming in you need to chunk them. There are many things and there are what about messages not being picked up you know you have or not being acknowledged by the consumer you have to keep them in the system. There are also rules about time to live right. Kind of all these things and dead letter queue right if they get if the letter, for example, the topics is that there's something right you need to have special topics to handle those things and many things so basically pulsar says I am going to deal with all the important part working with producers and your consumer delivering the messages. Let me find let me ask a bookkeeper which is apache bookkeeper and their specialty is to manage huge amounts of data. Read and write to disk and also manage them and if you have data that's already you know in the system you need to do searches and look up there highly efficient as well. So as you can see that's the architecture of apache pulsar. Okay, so real real quick right let's kind of take a look step into you know what is event streaming and a step beyond just event messaging, basically to pulsar is not just a messaging thing right messaging we're dealing with okay messages travel from one point a source to a destination. But the streaming is basically I handle a whole and ongoing delivery of all these event messages so makes it very very powerful to that that the need you know for this kind of system. So, let's take a look then what is driving the change why do we need event streaming but as such we already could talk about real time analytics is a good candidate to make use of, you know, like event streaming. So, for example, we want the data to be real time right to this will enhance your customers experience right create a competitive advantage for your business to. And another thing is basically, it allows you to use data pipelines for machine learning type of applications for AI type of applications to, or it also helps with scalability aspect right. You have many brokers handle all of the messages that comes in, but because the broker doesn't have to worry about where to send the messages to I only label it and say okay messages comes in. I have a topic so it's basically telling the broker how to route the messages. I have a topic label it. And so basically to in that case it frees up. All of the producer clients not to have to worry about keeping address of the receiver you decouple the center and the receiver so as a result if you need to scale it is actually much faster because of you know, you just need to have the topic right to handle all of the messages So, so essentially that's what it is and the hero to just summarizes, you know, it allows event streaming, it allows for real time processing right make decisions in real time and that's what our analytics need right not after the event in just high frequency of messages with very low latency. So over here I just wanted to point out to, there's also streaming and then versus not streaming so let's take a quick look at it right. What we are used to in the past are not streaming so basically they're extract transform load ETL process like they're more batch. Basically in just data, and then data comes in, and it persists it to some sort of data store let's say a database. So from there, you can select the data do whatever you need and then from there, you push the data down to the so to speak, stream it like pipeline whatever it is. But as you can see, it's slower because you involve a data store in between. So anytime you do this kind of data store, I think you can get slowed down, you know, no matter what you do, even though you think, Okay, it's faster faster I always faster, you still slow things down. However, for doing streaming and here's the thing you're ingesting data, and the data doesn't actually get to the disk is basically all in memory you're ingesting it you processing the data right away. And what do you do right let's say I mentioned about pulsar function to later, the pulse of function can allow you to transform all the data that's flowing through the pipeline. When you transform you can write it to a sink right it can be written to the elastic search sink, a database sink right so to speak and so on and so forth so that's the advantages of using streaming versus not streaming. And here it is pulsar I want to kind of give a, you know, five minutes kind of intro to it now. This is an open source project created by Yahoo. Yahoo contributed to Apache software foundation in 2016. It has become a top level project less in less than two years because everybody is recognizing how important is now to do event streaming in the cloud and they can deliver pulsar itself has a very native kind of cloud native awareness is designed with the cloud in mind cloud native design cluster based and also is a multi tenant kind of a model. Essentially you can have data that you can separate into different units of namespace of operations that's already kind of being done in a 10 multi tendency format. So makes it much kind of nicer to write all of these things to pulsar handles for you. Again, it separates out the compute and the storage compute is the broker handling all of the messages of the policies blah blah blah did you know kind of get the message from producer deliver them accordingly and handles all the dead letter cues whatever time to live. But at the same time, all the things you're not you're done just throw it over the fence to the Apache bookie right so it separates out so anytime you need to add a note to your cloud infrastructure. Basically, it can scale independently and this makes your job easier right for example if you use something like the older messaging systems then if you need to like, you know, do redundancy. Increase the number of notes in a in a cluster whatever you have to do a lot of manual thing right with some of the older messaging so. So that's the thing, and also to you can write your client code in Java in C sharp to and Python and go and other community contribution to including I think I believe rust is there. Scala is there to if you're into those things. Okay. Also, it guarantees your message delivery so if a message successfully reaches a broker so it will be delivered to the intended target to so don't worry about it you know if your network goes down. Once your message reach a broker at the broker will take care of things for you so guarantee. And also to there's this serverless function I talked about, essentially to serverless functions is works kind of like AWS AWS Lambda, it basically small bite size you can transform the data as it flows through data pipeline within the cluster so it makes it very very efficient very convenient right to do a lightweight to, and also it has a tiered storage off load so if you have data that's kind of becoming cold and stale you don't want to take room up in the main storage you offloaded to the long term storage so it's also kind of handles a lot of the so to speak of the infrastructural concern for you so it's kind of freeze up if you're a developer is actually makes your life easier. Okay, so what is Apache pulsar over here, I think I already mentioned about is Yahoo, and they're increasing number of GitHub stars contributors like that so now who else is using I wanted to point out Yahoo in here. Yahoo Japan is also one of our biggest user, and then there are other companies that's listed here and there are more to that are not shown in here but these are like the major initial adopters of Apache pulsar. The pulsar is different but I just want to point out this producer consumer that's what you write the code in right producer consumer client and then work interact with the broker broker will communicate with the bookkeeper and zookeeper you need to look up messages you go through the broker to so. All right, so all these I won't kind of step through they do get into quite deep about you know what why do you want a pulsar but I just wanted to highlight a couple of, you know pulsar kind of specific features. You know the data pipeline right we talked about the pipeline of think of it like water flowing through the pipeline, get into pulsar does all the transformation when it's done and output data to a sink that's the idea data pipeline, and then essentially to what does the transformation is using pulsar functions lightweight right allows a complex stream streaming processing very lightweight. It's kind of like a AWS lambda or Google function. So it's only supports like Java, Python and go but there will be more languages supported to, and then there's also pulsar schema to so schema is anytime you do need to do distributed messaging over the wire, you need to deserialize it right or serialize it to flatten your data structure. You can get it over the wire over to your destination you need to deserialize it reconstruct the object. That's a lot of work to right. And so basically if you use this feature called pulsar schema. It basically will keep track of your changes of your data structure so that just something to let you know there's also pulsar IO so I talked about source and sync, you need to write you know different connectors you can output it to a Kafka sync, a source could be Cassandra, whatever it is, like if it isn't there, you can write your own using pulsar IO. Okay, so these are data sex flavors I don't want to spend way too much time because this isn't so to speak you know these are our commercial side of things these are extra streaming, but you get a $25 credit if you want to use that to test things right essentially is pulsar already managed in the cloud is it's kind of makes it very easier. $25 per month and $300 a year so give that a try right I have the link in my resource section to there's also Luna streaming right enterprise support and open source to if you want to do an open source. Now, back to here. So, building a user facing real time analytics we use pulsar and then who else we combine it with Apache Pino Pino, I just want to quickly kind of point out to you as you can see there are different sources, you know going to the events is very much event driven kind of way of doing things to and basically to real time ingestion, it has, you know pulsar coming in the Pino controller, and then it also segment off you know using zookeeper of the different server and then brokers will handle all of the queries to, and it consumes and index and serve and one thing just wanted to point out the star tree index in here. It's actually very fast is their proprietary algorithms to but like I said you can also talk with market will give you more information. And summary to as you can see, you know latency wise is milliseconds freshness seconds and concurrency is millions of users. Okay, start tree index so I won't go into all the detail, but this is what who other companies using Pino right stripe I mentioned LinkedIn is a big one too. And then with that, you know, I think I will just go into here to share with you, you know, these are Apache Pino, and how do you reach mark, you know, and he also has this example of using pulsar and then feeding into Pino to to do a simple test case to. And then Apache pulsar as I mentioned, astra.datastex.com is where you go and get a sign up for a free account get $25 credit to helps and I guess I guess it's here. Okay, I think here. Okay, back here. And okay, these are just additional discount and things and also oops, I think you have to go back and okay. I think I think I have to basically go back here, sometimes to this one. Okay. And then if you want pulsar on YouTube, there this is the link and also I have my Mary's Twitch stream on Twitch every Wednesday at 2pm central time, please follow me I'll do a lot of hands on coding. Also, follow us on Apache neighborhood pulsar neighborhood you can contribute to it is our wiki page. With that, I want to thank you very much. I believe that I'm out of time now but thank you so much for having said through my talk and feel free to reach out to me, also to mark for more Apache Pino questions. Thanks a lot. Enjoy the rest of your conference.


Hey guys it's Liana and I'm here today to talk about the series that I plan to start in 2021.  What ah yeah still planning to start a bunch of new series. Just because a series is not on this list does not mean I won't necessarily pick it up in 2021. It just means that I'm not actively currently planning to prioritize starting it in 2021. But things can change very quickly as we all learn in 2020. These are in no particular order. They're just the orders that are open down in. So it's not like top priority to lowest priority or anything like that. It's just it's just a list. So first on my list is The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. Which is one of the series that like fantasy lovers, fantasy readers, knowers of fantasy things have at the very least heard of but most likely read. I have not. My brother actually read these in high school. I don't think he read all of The Wheel of Time but he read quite a few and he's trying to get me to read them when I was in high school. I didn't because it didn't appeal to me at the time. I think my dad's read most of not all of the books in The Wheel of Time. I have several friends that love The Wheel of Time. It is this classic fantasy or newer classic fantasy. It's just one of those it's one of those series. So I feel like it's about time that I give it a go. I've got the first book The Eye of the World. I did technically read a few pages of The Eye of the World in high school when my brother was trying to get me to read it. But I read maybe a chapter or two. I was not the right person or the right mood or the right place or the right time for it. So I'm going in with a low expectations but high enthusiasm if that makes sense. So I'm trying to keep expectations low because I want to give it a chance. And I've heard even fans of it criticize it and say that like you have to really read a few books before you really get into it. Which like okey doke really still in it. I've heard people talk about like this lag at the middle of the series. It's quite a long series. So I'm just going in with like very middle expectations. Very just like okay let's just see what this is about. I'm not expecting it to blow me away. I'm not expecting to hate it. I'm just like let's see what it is. Next up I have Malazan, a book of the fallen by Steve Erickson. Steve and Erickson. I did also technically start reading the first book in this series years ago. I had just sort of started getting back into reading. And I had gotten a few mass market paperbacks from Amazon that were just sort of recommended to me by the algorithm. So I got Gardens of the Moon and I had it with me when I went to go buy my first car. And they took a really long time like fixing up the car because it was a car max so they always do like a check and like whatever they do like an inspection type thing. And it took way longer than usual. So I was in the waiting room for a couple hours trying to maybe read Gardens of the Moon. It was not really working for me because I was a car max. And I've never really tried it since. I have heard that it is notoriously difficult to get into and that it is kind of this complicated not character or plot driven bizarre type thing. I'm a very different person than I was then. I'm not presently in the car max waiting room. So I'm giving it another go. Next up I have the Dresden files by who even is that by? I feel like I should know. Jim Butcher.  This is a kind of series that I feel like a lot of people have read and love as quite the cult following. I honestly like I first heard of the show The Dresden Files that I think is based on those books. I didn't know there were books. So the first time I heard someone say they like the Dresden Files I was like are those like books based on that TV show? Kind of like how people think that Witcher books are based on the game. So like I just was like wasn't that that one random thing that there was like a bad TV show for? But I've since then become more aware of and familiar with the fact that these are a series of books that people quite like and it's urban fantasy with sort of like private investigator wizard thing. I think there's like approximately one million books out in the series so far. From what I hear this sort of there is an overarching plot but they are also very much like the Crime of the Week type thing and I'm a sucker for those type of TV shows. I love watching things like Bones and Psych and I just out of there I like Crime of the Week type shows and having like quick reads that are each oh I loved Nancy Drew I read like nothing but Nancy Drew when I was a kid. So I like fantasy. I like Crime of the Week and people seem to like these so I'm gonna give them a go. Next the book of the new sun by Jean Wolfe. First book is Shadow and Claw. This is a like sci-fi fantasy series and I do mean like or like science fantasy I guess that's what that's called. I don't know though they had all those categories when it was written it's older. I picked it up kind of randomly because the synopsis sounded really cool and I didn't much like a lot of the books that I've read that turned out to be iconic well-known well-regarded much revered works that I had no idea when I picked them up. Fun of those kind of like how I randomly picked up Neo though and then was like oh this is like a thing. So I randomly picked up the first book Shadow and Claw because the cover caught my eye the synopsis sounded interesting. I was like this this sounds up my alley and then Pierce Brown really highly recommended it after that and I was like oh I've got that book and then I've like I've seen more like it discussed I guess as being one of those like incredibly well-regarded type books in series that have been like really influential. So I've got it Pierce Brown likes it and I'm gonna try reading it. Next up is Lock and Key by Joe Hill. I had intended actually to and I did technically very barely started during Halloween month but also known as October. This is a series of graphic novels, comics, thingies, picture books. I watched the adaptation of Lock and Key on Netflix and I really loved it and my friend is trying to get me to read more graphic novels she's always trying to get me to read more graphic novels and there is an audible adaptation of it so much like with Sandman that's sort of my goal plan approach intention to to read along while I listen.  But Audible Plus, the new is it all at Audible Plus? The new Audible thing where there's like a selection of audiobooks for free. If you're part of it like Kindle Unlimited the audiobook of Lock and Key is available at least right now. Maybe that'll change so I really need to hurry up but that's my plan to listen and read along. Next I have Dark Tower by Stephen King. This is I originally intended to start my Stephen King journey with Dark Tower because I was like well I'm mainly a fantasy reader and he has written an epic fantasy series so I would make the most sense to start there except I was then told by a bunch of people no don't start with Dark Tower so all those people told me to start with Pet Cemetery instead and I did start with Pet Cemetery and I liked Pet Cemetery. And since then I read Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King which is a fantasy. I really enjoyed it and I think I'm finally ready now to start my Dark Tower journey. I own the first two books in the Dark Tower. A friend of mine gave them to me because she wants me to read more Stephen King. It's about time I find out what I think of that iconic series. Next up I have The Dark Artifices by Cassandra Clare. I have been intending to read this series for a million years and I have some really cool editions of it and I feel like I need to read The Dark Artifices before I read the new series that is a sequel to The Infernal Devices but still a prequel to The Mortal Instruments and a pre-prequel to The Dark Artifices and because Cassandra Clare's series situation is intense. I've given up on The Mortal Instruments as a thing that I will never read because I just can't deal with it. Universally I've pretty much heard people say people who did not previously like Cassandra Clare The Dark Artifices is genuinely really good so I plan to read The Dark Artifices and then read... Is it called... What is the new series? The Gilded Hour? Is that... No, I feel like that's the name of a historical fiction book. The Glittering Hour? The Glittering Hour. Well, Chain of Gold is the first book in the series anyway. So yeah, I want to read The Dark Artifices because everyone seems to agree that they're great and mainly I really really want to read the new one which is the historical fiction-y type one because I really liked The Infernal Devices and I want more of Gem. Gem Carstairs is my baby!  I got it from Book of the Month, ages and ages ago. I thought it was a standalone actually but recently have become aware that it is not a standalone and they changed the covers and I don't like the new covers so that's deeply upsetting. But the series is called... I don't know what the series is called. But the author, which is actually what I was googling is Rosarium Windup. Yeah, I've heard pretty great things about it. I've heard that it's very character driven, a unique take on the whole dragon thing, and I've pretty much heard great things about it from everyone that's picked it up and from people that I trust. I already own it.  Yeah, I just... yeah, yep. Next is Mad Ship by Robin Hobb. I intend to finish the Farsieger trilogy which I'm loving and intend to dive right into the Mad Ship. Perhaps, depending on how things go, I might be able to read other Robin Hobb series as well next year but the one that I plan to start as soon as I'm done with Farsieger is Mad Ship which I believe is also what you're supposed to read after Mad Ship. I think that's the order of things. I love, love, love Farsieger so far so I fully expect to continue to love it and to want to read more Hobb when I'm done. I've heard nothing but exceptional things about Mad Ship. I've heard a lot of people say that they like it better than Farsieger which, man, like, if it's better than Farsieger, like, wow. I believe the sort of concept behind those books is that the sort of magical type of wood is used to build these ships which gives the ship's kind of personality and sentience. I feel like if it wasn't Robin Hobb, if I heard someone else was writing this, I'd be like, that sounds dumb. But it's Robin Hobb and I've seen now how subtly she writes characters that I feel like if there's anybody that could pull off sentient ships, it's Robin Hobb. So I'm excited. Next up is The Black Company by Glen Cook. This actually is also another series that I did technically start reading like a chap girl way, like, years ago. I also got like a bunch of my market name or texts I said from Amazon and this one I started reading one day on my commute to work when I was taking the bus back then and read like a chapter and was like, eh.  So I just was like, eh, I don't feel like reading that right now. And then it never breaks it up again. And I think I may have gotten rid of it or given it away or something. Like I definitely don't own it anymore. So yeah, now that I kind of know more what it is, know myself more as a reader, know what I'm getting into, it's not just some random thing I picked up and I was like, eh, I want to give it a go.  And I become one with my feared animal, sandanglokta. So I think it would appear appeal to me more now than I did, than it was ever going to at that point in my life. And last but not least is the book of Babel by... Why don't I ever look up other names before I film videos? I just, I don't understand what's wrong with me. Josiah Bancroft. I pre-ordered San Linus Ends when it came, was coming out and I haven't read it yet. And since then I think like four more books in the series have come out. Maybe not four, but more books have come out. I think if it's not already a completed series it's about to be. I've heard nothing but amazing things about it and I was expecting to like it. That's why I pre-ordered it and I intended to read it shortly after it came out and just never run around to it. And I really, really want to read it and I do expect to love that. It sounds so like my jam. Like the sort of character driven, lit-ficky style of fantasy with a completely unique premise. It sounds amazing and I'm really excited for that. So let me know in the comments down below if you've read any of the series that I am planning to start. If you're also planning to start any of these series if you would recommend that I don't read these series or if you're excited for me to experience these series whatever you want to let me know. I post videos on Saturdays, other random times as well but definitely Saturdays so like and subscribe and I'll see you when I see you. Bye.


Hello, and welcome to English 2332, Literature of the Western World from the Bronze Age to the Renaissance, for the summer semester of 2018 here at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. I'm Dr. Eric Luttrell, and I'll be your professor for the next five weeks. We're going to begin the class with some of the oldest literature in the world, literature that was written down 4,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is the part of the world we refer to as the Middle East, but as we're going to see, the literature and other elements of culture that originated here would travel over the centuries, influencing literature of ancient Israel, Greece, Rome, and of course Israel, Greece, and Rome would greatly influence the culture and literature of Britain, Ireland, Spain, and eventually us here in the New World. Of course, that doesn't mean that everything in Western literature originated in Mesopotamia. When a story travels across different cultures, it loses some elements and picks up others, and it's constantly reworked and reimagined according to the customs and worldviews of the people who hear and retell it. That phenomenon, that reiteration of narrative is something we're going to pay special attention to in this class. But that's where we're starting. We're going to start with the flood narrative of Atrahasis and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Both of these texts have early versions that were written down by 1600 BCE, so about 3,600 years ago, and they continue to be revised for the next thousand years. The narratives that preserve the stories of Atrahasis and Gilgamesh were written in cuneiform on ancient clay tablets, which allowed them to survive for thousands of years, but they only survived in fragments. These these tablets are broken. There are words and lines missing here and there and that leaves gaps in the text that have come down to us today. Now, most popular translations of, especially Gilgamesh, fill in those gaps. They say, well, we don't know exactly what was here, but we'll we'll imagine what was here. But the version I've asked you to buy and to read for this class, both Atrahasis and the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes from Stephanie Dally's translation in her book Myths from Mesopotamia. And in this translation, she doesn't fill in the gaps. She shows you where a line breaks off and there's just a dot dot dot or their brackets saying that certain words are missing here and very often their entire lines missing. And what we're going to do is look at how we go about the process of filling in the gaps in a narrative. So this is the only book that's actually required for the class. In other things we read in here, you're going to have options as to which edition, which translation you use. But for this, these texts for Atrahasis and for Gilgamesh, we're going to have to use this version. It's available in the campus bookstore. It's also, I believe there are a couple of copies at least at half price books. After Gilgamesh, we're going to read the biblical book of Genesis. And this is a book most of us feel like we know quite well. But you may find that familiarity can be deceptive. We're going to read Genesis the way the biblical scholars read it, except that we're going to read it in English rather than Greek or Hebrew. But we're going to read it the way scholars do. And we're going to see that even Genesis requires us to fill in a certain gaps. And we're going to try to examine where we get the information that we use to fill in those gaps in that text. Now, Atrahasis, Gilgamesh, and Genesis are all going to comprise the first unit that we're going to do in the first week and a couple of days. After that, you're going to have some options. Now the summer session is only five weeks, as opposed to the 15 week semester we typically have in the spring and fall. And every course is supposed to give you the exact same requirements. Expect from you the exact same work that you would do in a regular semester. But I realize for a lot of people, especially those of you who are working and taking other classes, that's just not going to be possible. It's not going to be possible to do the amount of reading in five weeks that you would be able to do in 15 weeks. And because of that, I'm going to give you some options. After the first unit, which includes Atrahasis, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Genesis, you're going to choose three other units to do for the second, third, and fourth unit. And I've divided those units up this way. One of those units is Greek works about the Titan Prometheus. This is the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. And in this unit, we'll read the Theogony or the Origins of the Gods by the poet Hesiod, as well as his works and days. And then we're going to read Prometheus Bown, a play by the Athenian playwright, Escalus. That's going to be optional unit A. Optional unit B will be Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, just excerpts, not the whole thing. We'll read some sections from both of these. And I expect that many of you have already read at least parts of the Odyssey. But you probably remember Odysseus's adventures with the Cyclops and the Lotus Eaters and Calypso and that sort of thing. But what most people don't realize is those adventures that Odysseus goes through, we only know about those because Odysseus, the character himself, tells that story. When he's stranded on the island of the Phaetians, he narrates his own adventures. And we're going to look at the build up to that and how he comes to the point where he begins to tell his story. And we're going to read it as a narration of events rather than the story itself. Another unit option is Virgil's Aeneid. And this is something that works very well with the Iliad and the Odyssey because Virgil is picking up some of the same story material, but he's writing from a very different perspective. His hero, Aeneas, has very different qualities from Achilles or Diomedes or Odysseus in Homer's works. He's writing, he's putting Roman virtues in these characters from past Greek literature. And we're going to see that his goal in the way he narrates this story is very different than Homer's was. In another unit, you can choose to read the Old English poem Beowulf alongside two analogous works in Old Norse. Those are the Saga of Rolf Krocky and Greta Saga. Both of these were written in Iceland and they record stories about heroes that are very similar to Beowulf. And in some cases, the Saga of Rolf Krocky take place at the same place in Denmark. And people are often surprised when they read Beowulf closely, as well as these Old Norse epics. They may expect to find barbarians or Vikings who just hack and slash and that constitutes the whole story. But all of these, especially Beowulf, depict heroes with a level of social intelligence that is nearly always overlooked by readers the first time they read through these. These works depict heroes who were obviously very physically capable of fighting, but also they bear a sort of social strategic intelligence that is usually overlooked. And these poems also have to deal with a problem that was new in the Middle Ages, and that is how to integrate the Old Pagan stories into literature after their conversion to Christianity. Another reading option is the Song of the Sid. This is a medieval epic about the Spanish hero Rodrigo Diaz of Vivar. This epic takes place at a time when Spain is divided between Muslim kingdoms from North Africa and Christian kingdoms from elsewhere in Western Europe. And in the Song of the Sid, we read about Rodrigo Diaz of Vivar, who was a Christian who fights against Muslims, but also alongside Muslims and Christians against other Christians and Muslims.  And this leaves the rest of his men to call him El-Sid, or Mio-Sid, My-Sid, Commander. And El-Sid is not a noble, and that's something new in this epic. He's born a commoner, but it's through his victories on the battlefield that he becomes a person of some importance. But at this time, society doesn't want to recognize virtue from a commoner, and so that's going to bring him into conflict with other aristocrats in his own kingdom. Another reading option is Arthurian literature. There will be three videos that go through a lot of background material about the history of King Arthur and then the development of the different elements of King Arthur's legend, the legend of the Holy Grail, the sword x caliber and that sort of thing. The text that you're going to read for this is called Morian. It's an excerpt from a much longer work called the Lancelot compilation, but it's about an African knight who travels to Britain to find his father, and he ends up going on a quest alongside Sir Gowen and Sir Lancelot. There's a unit on Chaucer, in which you'll read the general prologue to Jeffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and then read the Wife of Bath's prologue and tale. Besides being one of the most modern characters of the Canterbury Tales, we'll see that the Wife of Bath knows the power of storytelling. Just like Elsie gives voice to the commoners, the Wife of Bath is going to speak up for women at a time when women were usually portrayed as merely the objects of men's affections. But when we read the Wife of Bath's tale, we have to remember that this isn't a woman speaking, this is a woman created by a male author. In fact, it's a man's story about a woman telling a story about a man who's trying to understand women. And two of your options are plays by William Shakespeare. The first is Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, and you'll read that alongside medieval Norse work called The History of the Danes, specifically a chapter about a figure named Amleth. Saxo's story about this sort of Viking Hamlet named Amleth has clear similarities, enough clear similarities to show that this is an early version of what would become Shakespeare's Hamlet. But you're going to see a story that ends very differently and a character that is portrayed very differently. And part of the reason for the difference in portrayal isn't just Shakespeare's genius, which of course there's plenty of that, but it's the fact that in one version, the early version, the author is able to tell us exactly what everyone is thinking. But in a play, the only way you can find out what other people are thinking is from what they say, and oftentimes what they say is intended to mislead. So that has led to centuries of debate over whether Hamlet was actually insane or why he did or didn't do what he does or doesn't do in the play. And the other Shakespeare option is Othello, The Moor of Venice. And you'll read this alongside Cynthia's short story, The Moorish Captain. That is an early version of the story of this African captain who comes to Venice, but is duped into mistrusting his own wife and the people around him by this conniving Iago figure. When you read this alongside of Shakespeare's Othello, you'll see that, okay, the story is very similar, perhaps the same, but Shakespeare's version really gets into the heads of all the characters involved. So we see this thing sort of unfolding slowly, gradually, and we start to understand exactly how the characters shape the world through narrative even within the play. And it leads us to question how much of the way we see the world is actually determined by the way other people present it to us. So like I said, you're going to have three of these optional units to choose for units two, three, and four. Unit one will be comprised of Atrahasas, the Epic of Gilgamesh and Genesis. Unit two is whatever you want it to be out of that list from A to I. Then you'll choose another one for unit three and another one for unit four. And you can make up your mind as you go. If you don't know all three right away, you can go ahead and pick one for unit two on June 6 when we finish unit one. As long as you're able to complete one of these units. Now each of these units is going to consist of the readings, video lectures, and you're going to take a quiz on whichever one you choose. And this is the calendar we're going to go by. So everyone's going to be doing the same readings for the next week and a couple of days. And you can do the readings for unit one on the days that I have them listed here on the calendar, but you don't have to. It is possible to put everything off until maybe June 4th, but I wouldn't recommend it. This is a lot of reading. I mean it's a literature class. I've compressed the class as much as I can for the five-week summer course, but it's still a lot of reading. So be sure to pace yourself. But there are going to be three quizzes from this first unit. They're all due on June 6th. And then after that point, you're going to start the second unit, which is your choice. So all of this is going to be done through Blackboard. Now hopefully you've either already got it or you're about to get Stephanie Dolly's textbook. I have recommended paper copies of other works if you choose them, but most of the other readings and all of the assignments are going to be done through Blackboard. So the first thing to do on Blackboard is read over the syllabus. In the syllabus, I break down the specifics of your grade, where your grade comes from. 25% of that is going to come from the discussion forum. I'll go over that in more detail. The quizzes you're going to get with each unit. So there are going to be three quizzes that are part of the first unit and then three more, one per unit. So there's going to be six quizzes total. You're going to write an essay at the end of the semester and you're going to take a final exam at the end of the semester, which will function very similar to the quizzes, but also contain a short answer section. It's up to you how you allot your time as long as you meet these due dates, but you'll see that our units conclude on Wednesdays and then begin on the following Thursday for the next one. Starting June 6th, if you miss a Wednesday, you won't be able to go back and finish the work for that unit. So it's very important that you complete something every week. You're not going to be able to wait to the very end of the semester and do all four units. Now, you'll notice on Blackboard, I have divided the first unit up into three sections. That's just to sort of make it easier. Each of those three subsections has its own quiz and that's why I divided it up just to make it easier to sort of put these assignments into manageable chunks. Unit 1A focuses on Atrahasas, but also includes a lot of conceptual material. Again, you're going to have to have Stephanie Daly's miss from Mesopotamia. The book is available at the TAMUCC bookstore as well as half price books on South Padre Allen Boulevard. Very important that you get that edition. But first, what you're going to do is watch some of the introductory videos where I go over the different concepts that are going to be important in the class. Things like the difference between a story and a narrative, the difference between historical and personal context. After you watch those videos, then you'll start with Atrahasas and I'll put things in order like this to recommend that you watch this video before you watch this video and then you read this section after watching this video but before watching this video. So for example, in the Atrahasas section, I recommend that you watch the introduction to Atrahasas first where I talk about ancient Mesopotamia and early writing, then watch the War of the Ghost lecture. Now that refers to an assignment that I'm not requiring you to do. It's an assignment that I normally have my students do in a 15 week semester but we don't really have time for that sort of thing. So don't worry if I'm talking about the War of the Ghost assignment that's not something that you're required to do. You'll then watch the video lecture on metaphor and then some of the background material in part two of Atrahasas and then I want you to read Atrahasas. That's probably the best time now. You can read Atrahasas before watching any of these videos but you'll at least need to read Atrahasas before you watch the third Atrahasas lecture. In this and other units, I also include suggested readings or videos or other resources. For example, this is a Nova episode about an archaeologist that I'll mention when we talk about Atrahasas and early writing. These resources are optional and I will say optional or suggested in each of those sections. They're not required. They're just there that if you're interested in the things we talk about and in particular if you decide to write your essay on something in that unit, this would be a resource that would help get you thinking about what there is to explore. Then down at the bottom of every unit or subunit in this case, you're going to see that there's a quiz. Look for this icon. Each quiz is something you're going to take online. It's just multiple choice questions. There are going to be 10 questions in each quiz. You're going to have 10 minutes to take the quiz. You can wait as long as you want up until that deadline but once you begin the quiz, you'll have to complete all 10 questions then. You won't be able to start it and stop it. That's why it's very important that you have a secure internet connection. If you don't have good reception wherever you are, then go on the campus or go somewhere where you can find a computer lab or borrow someone else's computer or go to someone else's place that has a better connection because once you start a quiz, it doesn't matter if you get cut off, if you close your computer or whatever, the timer is still going and after 10 minutes from the time you start a quiz, it will automatically submit whatever you've done so far and if you didn't complete it, then you'll get those questions wrong. So very important you have a secure internet connection when you're taking your quiz. So after you've taken the quiz on Atrahasis and the introductory concepts, then you'll move on to the Epic of Gilgamesh and this is one where it's very important that you have Stephanie Dolly's translation and you won't be reading it just sequentially. You'll read certain sections from the standard Babylonian version of Gilgamesh, then you'll switch over to the old Babylonian version, then you'll watch a video, then you'll go back and read more of the standard Babylonian version. That will make more sense once you actually get to the material but I've given you sort of a list of, you know, read this first, then switch to this page and read this, then read this, then watch this, then read this. If you have any questions, email me but hopefully you'll be able to figure it out once you get there. Then you'll take the quiz on the Epic of Gilgamesh. Then you'll move on to the Book of Genesis and I know almost all of us probably have at least one Bible at home, whichever translation it might be, but I really want you to read from the PDF that I've included here. The PDF comes from the new Oxford annotated Bible. This is a new revised standard version but it also has two introductory essays that are going to be very important for this unit. So you're going to read those two essays first, then watch the video lecture about Genesis chapters 1 through 11. Then you'll go back and read chapters 12 through 32 and then watch the lecture on chapters 12 through 32. Then you'll take your third quiz from unit 1, which is a quiz on Genesis and after that you'll almost be through with unit 1 but there's one other element to this in every other unit and that is the discussion forum. In the discussion forum you're going to make some observation on your own, some comments, some question, something about some of the literature that we've read that interests you or maybe something you happen to know that maybe other people in the class don't or maybe research that you've done on your own. This is where you contribute that to a group discussion where everyone is talking about, in this case we're going to be talking about the same readings. Now in the subsequent units everybody's reading something different so you'll still be bringing information from whatever you've read to people who may not have read what you've read, in which case you might be suggesting, hey this is really interesting you know if you're into this you might want to read this. I really want to see people talking to each other answering each other's questions or following up what other people say and then once all that's done then I'll come in and answer any questions that have been left unanswered and that kind of thing. So the function of the discussion forum is to make up for the fact that we're not in a classroom where you can each talk to each other. You're going to hear plenty of me talking about a text but this is your opportunity to share something about the text with me and with the rest of the class. And it also should be a relatively easy way to help your grade. Remember that your discussion forum posts are 25% of your grade as long as you put in something substantive, as long as you don't just say something like one sentence long that just says a summary of what you've read, then that's going to be something that should be an easy grade as long as you actually put something into it. So those are the basic components of your grade and the subsequent units or you're going to choose what you do but they're going to go basically the same way. You do the reading, you watch the videos, you take the quiz and you write something in the discussion forum. Now as we get closer to the end of the semester I'm going to talk about the essay. I'm going to go ahead and put up the assignment for the essay but this is an essay where you're going to compare different texts and you're going to look at them from different historical points of view. In your essay this is going to be a comparative essay where you look at how the same story is treated from different historical contextual standpoints. This is very different than saying here's what I think about the story. We're going to be very wary of using our own personal context when interpreting a story. I'll get into that more in the lecture about personal versus historical context but in this essay you're going to try very hard to sort of get out of your own personal sort of 21st century American point of view and look at the text the way the authors and the people that lived at the time that text was written would have read it but then see how another person or another culture adapts that story and makes a different narrative out of it. And in the next couple of weeks I'm going to publish a video trying to help talk about how and how not to write a paper, an interpretive paper about literature. And the final thing you can do is the final exam. The final exam is going to have elements of your quizzes. Maybe they might be the same questions, they might be different questions that will be in multiple choice format. Those are randomly assigned but whichever readings, whichever optional units you chose as well as the first unit you're going to see those again. You're also going to have a short answer section where you choose to write a short paragraph answering one of the questions I ask about what you read. After June 27th, after the last unit of quizzes is due, I'll show you all the answers from your previous quizzes but it will only tell you if you got it right or wrong and if you got it right it'll tell you what the answer was but if you got it wrong it won't tell you what the answer is. A lot of people ask me can you please make available the answers to those quiz questions and I'm not going to do that because for one thing the exact same question might end up on your final exam but the the whole purpose of that is if you see that you got a question wrong then go back to the readings and try to find the right answer because most likely that means there's not just sort of one answer that you're missing. There's a particular section of that text or of the historical context that I discussed or maybe the theoretical concepts that are missing so the quiz the reason I show you what you did or didn't do on the quiz isn't necessarily to prepare you for the final exam it's to show you what areas you may have missed out on the first time you read something so go back and try to fill in your own gaps figure out what it is you still haven't quite gotten about that text then you'll be better prepared for the final exam but of course like in any other class the point of the class isn't to take a final exam and do well on it the point of the final exam is to see how well you've done in the class so the goal of the class is learning not test taking the test is an unfortunate necessity for for you and for me so this is a survey class and we cover literature from over 3000 years and there's a lot that we can learn from this literature but part of the reason that I'm I don't have a real problem by cutting the semester down this way and to making these readings many of these readings optional is because the most important thing you'll learn from the class isn't just something from the texts a lot of people look at canonical literature you know the literature that the recognizable literature from throughout history and think oh if I read that then I'll learn some wisdom some ancient wisdom that I can apply to today and forever and that's sort of true but the problem is these texts as well as other forms of literature and mythology are usually susceptible to projection we can take something we expect to find and we can project it back into a text and one of the probably the greatest skill that I want you to get out of this class isn't sort of matching something you see in literature to something you already think what I want you to get out of this is to see how narrative works how people take old stories and put new meanings into them turn them into new narratives and how literature can take us out of our usual way of thinking this is what I'm going to later call defamiliarization I might go into a text just noticing things that are familiar to me but if I really read it carefully if I read it critically then I start to notice that the things I expected to find aren't really what's there or something might look familiar but if I look at it more closely and if I look at it in its historical context I noticed that it's much different than I thought it was on first reading and it's that process that skill that we want to develop most in this class what the texts have to say is great but what you do the action the skill that you bring to reading that's the the thing we really want to develop psychologists and neuroscientists have recently begun to study empirically how reading affects the way we think and interact in the real world and what they found might be surprising people presume that reading is just a form of entertainment entertainment is usually assumed to be either a waste of time or to make us lazy both physically and mentally but studies like this one from emory university have found that reading a novel actually causes developments at the neural level that is the neurons the cells that make up your brain and the changes that happen at the neural level are the same sorts of changes that happen when you actually do something in the physical world another study found that difficult literature literature that defamiliarizes the way we look at the world made people better able to deal with ambiguous situations in the real world it improved middle flexibility the ability to think ahead when confronted with uncertainty these researchers said that exposure to literary texts can support more fluid and flexible representations of meaning in order to allow for multiple potential truths to be weighed with similar levels of curiosity noticed more easily and updated as new information becomes available in other words it makes us better at considering multiple possibilities rather than just seeing something and immediately assuming we understand it the figurative language in literature literary devices like metaphor irony new ways of describing familiar things these also improve our real world thinking understanding metaphors requires us to keep two conceptualizations in mind at once reading irony requires us to add social intelligence to that in order to distinguish between the way things are and the way a character thinks they are the implications are not only that we become better at modeling the physical world but we also become better at understanding how other people understand the physical world where they might be inaccurate or where they might know something we don't that's why some other psychologists have said that narrative works as a sort of virtual reality simulator and these simulations in literature help us understand situations that we've never experienced and they help us understand people who are very different than we are people that we might not ever come into contact with in our normal social environment and in the journal science native of south texas david kid and his co-author tested how people think when they read literary fiction and compared it to way people think when they read nonfiction so we might think oh as long as we read science we're actually learning more than we read some something that's mere fiction something that never really happened it's just an imagination but what they found was that when people read fiction literary fiction fiction that takes us out of our conventional understanding those people were after the reading were better able to understand social situations that were presented to them than the people who read scientific literature and they emphasized that it is this defamiliarization property of literary fiction that causes this they say whereas many of our mundane social experiences may be scripted by convention and informed by stereotypes those presented in literary fiction often disrupt our expectations readers of literary fiction must draw a more flexible interpretive resources to infer the feelings and thoughts of characters that is they must engage in theory of mind practices and theory of mind is something that's going to become very important for us in this class that is the ability to see the way other people are thinking not just you know are they right or wrong but how did they come to that wrong assumption does this person know what i think he knows does this person know that i know that she doesn't know what she what he thinks she knows these sorts of things can become very complicated in the day to day world but they become much more complicated in fiction than they do arguably most of the time in reality so these skills break down into three basic categories that we're going to focus on that is narrative framing when we take reality or we take a story we have to decide where to begin where to end what to include what to leave out and what causes what do we assign a certain intention to a character that the author did not specify this is the difference between the story the events that happened and the narrative then there's also conceptualization addiction that means the words that we use to convey what happened not just the direct description but also the metaphors what do we compare things to and finally there's theory of mind there is that ability to think about other people's beliefs their desires their strategies how they might react in a certain situation as opposed to another reaction now it's these sorts of concepts that i'm going to go over in the video lectures and you can access the video lectures as you saw on blackboard but you've also got this link to the whole playlist so if you're just watching it on your phone or on your computer and you don't have access to blackboard at the time or something like that you can access it on youtube now i recommend that you don't watch these on your phone because there's a lot of small text there's maps there's images and things like that to be might be really hard to see on a phone so i recommend you watch this on a full screen on a laptop or desktop maybe a smart tv if you've got one and and that includes not necessarily watching it embedded in blackboard now blackboard has this interface that you know the first time you click it it might just open it up in a little window but you're going to want to expand it so i advise you to go directly to youtube the blackboard link will have a link to youtube it's usually simplest to just go straight to youtube and watch it there now when you watch it on youtube you can speed it up you can watch it at the normal rate that i speak or you can move it up to to the rate of 1.25 you can move it up to 1.5 especially if you're reviewing something this is very helpful just keep in mind whether or not you speed up the lecture it's very important that you take notes now in my face to face classes i allow students to use anything any handwritten notes they have on quizzes and on the final exam and i encourage you to do the same thing now obviously i can't see what you're doing when you're taking the exam i could use one of the exam proctoring services but those end up costing you a lot of money so i'm just going to skip that you're not going to have a lot of time in the quizzes and on the final exam to you know do much if you're not already familiar with all the material so the best way to become familiar with the material is to actually write it down use a pencil or pen write on paper it's very easy to take screenshots of any of these lectures and that sort of thing but if you just do that you're not actually learning anything if you have to write something down you're going to learn it a lot better and a lot of studies over the past few years have shown that people who take notes on a computer don't learn the material nearly as well as people who have to write it down even though you can't write as much on a paper notebook as fast as you can if you were typing it and definitely not as fast if you just took a screenshot the act of writing it down means your brain has to listen to what's said then decide what is the most important what's the point of this how does it fit with everything else and then decide how much to write down so your brain is already actually trying to understand what's happening whereas you can just type everything you hear without even stopping to understand what the meaning of the words is so i can't encourage you strongly enough use a paper notebook write a lot and then use it when you're taking your quizzes and that sort of thing because by the time you've written it down you already kind of understand it and you're going to remember it a lot better you may not even need the notebook now i'm going to cover a lot of material in the lectures more than you're going to need to know for the quiz so i don't want you to be discouraged by the amount of material i don't want you to be bored i want you to have lots to learn you know and so different people are going to be looking for different levels of of information with all these texts different people have different goals when it comes to a class like this so i'm going to put a lot of information out there but what i really want you to know i'm going to put usually in red letters so if i give you a long quotation like the one on the left and i put some of it in red that means i definitely want you to remember the middle of that the part that's written in red when it comes to concepts that i want you to remember i'm going to put those on these little index cards these note cards like the one at the top right or down at the bottom where i give you the the term in red and the definition next to it when you come across these write them down don't just take screenshot actually write down in your notebook the definition of that because i'm going to use that term a lot later so the reason you want to know this isn't just because it's going to be on quizzes it's because i'm going to be using terms like redaction and narrative and you'll need to remember exactly what those mean and then you'll be able to understand how i'm using them and once you hear me using them in reference to literature a lot it's going to make a lot more sense what these are so a lot of times on the quizzes i'm not just going to ask you a definition the way it appears on a note card but if you understand the definition then when i apply it to a particular text you're going to understand how it applies so i hope you're excited about this there's going to be a lot of work to do but i hope it's really rewarding work and i hope uh you like the text that you read and i hope that you learn a lot about the places and times that generated those narratives i hope you learn a lot about uh you know the larger world through this but i especially hope you learn to develop those skills of identifying how stories are shaped how they're told uh how they're retold how our cultures shape the way that we understand the things that we read if you have any questions always feel free to email me also feel free to stop by my office during office hours those will be posted on blackboard and i look forward to reading your responses and hearing from you i hope this is a rewarding experience