3 things in your kitchen that make natural fertilizers 1. Egg shells The calcium carbon in the crushed eggshells can help your soil's pH Plus, the shards from the shells help keep pestle wet 2. Coffee grounds The nitrogen in coffee grounds helps other materials within soil turn into compost They can also help acidify your soil 3. Banana pills They are a natural source of potassium, magnesium, and sodium, which is super beneficial for plants and gardens


Welcome back. You're still watching the run-up on plus TV Africa and time to shift to another aspect of the election. We're talking about the 2023 Acquire Boom State governorship election, which will of course now take place on the 18th of March, as in the case with other parts of the country. And this time, we're going to elect the governor of Acquire Boom State concurrent with elections to the Acquire Boom State House of Assembly as well as 27 other governorship elections to all other state houses of assembly. In Cumbart, PDP governor Udom Gabriel Emmanuel is term limited and cannot seek re-election to a certain term. Well, architect Ezekiel Anya Utok is running for the 2023 governorship election in Acquire Boom State under the umbrella of the African Democracy Congress as the ADC. Anya Utok said that he is out to create a dependency system for the people of the state to live and have a means of livelihood without begging in order to prove to Acquire Boom people that they can be professionals without begging and take the youth to the government house to be involved in leadership because they cannot move ahead in their current situation. Well, you are welcome to the program architect Ezekiel Anya Utok. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be on your program. All right. Well, your mantra has been vote competency and not party zone. Why have you chosen that mantra? Yeah, that's because we need to understand that government is not another game like football or anything. Government is the institution that is the most important after God. Government is the institution that manages the collective destiny of the people. And as a result, if you are to have such an important institution, the leadership recruitment must understand the essence and that makes it imperative that people must know that government is so serious, so important that you can only believe it in the hands of the most competent. That is why competence, right, ranks very high in my scale of preference on leadership recruitment for the governorship of our state. Clearly, you are a professional being an architect and you've not really been, you're not one of those that would be described as political or career politicians. Actually, I have never accepted any paying office in my life. And that's very deliberate and very intentional. And it is people to know that you can be a professional, a career professional and successful. And at the risk of sounding immodest, I've been extremely successful at the highest level in my chosen profession. And I would say that two things. Number one, I have never accepted any paying appointment in my life. Second, since a quibomb state was created 35 years ago, nobody in the state can bring out four jobs that I have done in the state. So I don't depend on appointment. I don't depend on government. I work strictly as an architect. And God has helped me to rise to the point of being a fellow of the Nigerians instead of architects and being one that has a name in the area of real estate and architectural practice in Nigeria to the end that a certain aspect of housing delivery, which is called social housing, is attributed to me as an individual by the grace of God, as somebody who from no mention brought social housing to become the national mantra with a full chapter in the current national housing policy. These are the things that God has helped me to put together. I've been able to, I mean, in any way you can imagine, establish myself as a success by the grace of God without, without, without appointment.   But here you are going into the race to become governor of a state. Why do you want to become the governor of a quibum state? It's the, it's a problem that we, we, we, the elites, we, the enlightened, we, the privileged, you know, run into. Somewhere in Hilton, when Madame Okonjoy Wehala was the Minister of Finance and the Coordinated Minister of the Economy, CME, we had a meeting and I said something. She, she called me back and said, repeat what you said, and I did. And she said, please, can you put that down on record? What did I say? I said that this country, I owe this country, I owe Nigeria, because Nigeria gave to me what any country in the world could have given to any citizen as its best. And what was that? From nowhere, I got into federal government college worry knowing nobody then rated the best in West Africa and the ninth best in the Commonwealth.  And on account of that education, the son of a nobody, so to speak, that I was has become not just a national, but an international reference point in success. And as a result, I owe this country to give back. I owe the people of this country. Let me tell you, by the grace of God, at 21, I had my first degree. 23, I had my masters. 25, I got married. 30, I had my three children. 37, I became the first Nigerian to get a shelter of free facility for any state government, and I build a shelter of free estate in Uyo. At 45, two of my sons have three children, two boys and a girl. At 45, my two sons had graduated from the university, from Covenant University. At 50, my third child, the lady, graduated from the same university, while my first son had his masters from University of Manchester. Now, if this is not the goodness of God that at 50, all your children have graduated, they are stabilized and they are doing well, why can't you just use the rest of your time to give back to the system? I've been doing that, giving hundreds of scholarships, giving lots of, you know, entrepreneurial support as an individual. But I realize that getting into government, all this money that this people steal in, in, in, in, in quantums that are just, that just blow the mind. I could channel those resources, manage them well, affect the people at a much larger scale than I would, and then show people how governance ought to be and what the essence of government is. So rather than retire and, I mean, if I stop, we'll add the, you know, this could be misunderstood, but when is it within the context of the grace of God? If I retire today, I could never beg till I die, no matter how long I live. God has helped me. But can I say that to all my workers that have been working for me, all the young people that have been my drivers, my cooks, my architects, why can't I come in and help them have to sort of close as much as possible to the sort of Nigeria that I had. I feel bad about all the people at my age category because they went to public schools. They paid next to nothing. They got a good quality of education. And today they are the same people that are raking the public institutions. They are the same people that are raking the future of the young people. We are the same people that have turned Nigeria to become the poverty capital of the world. They ought to be people from my generation that should come out and say, in office enough, let me give back. And I think that this is the very least I could do. You know, you are sounding so fresh to me. Why? Because, you know, it's not often you hear people talk about giving back to Nigeria. There are people who have really benefited from Nigeria, who haven't given back to Nigeria, but instead have depleted Nigeria, destroyed Nigeria. And so this generation of Nigerians have nothing to show, nothing to say they are proud about, you know, the country. And so when people like you have benefited from the country, when the systems were working, so to speak, when you could turn on the tap and have water, when there was light electricity, and before light went off, you were given notification that, OK, between this hour and this hour, there's going to be maintenance, when the public schools were good. So it's so refreshing to have someone from that generation say, I want to restore things back to the way it used to be. I want to say thank you to my country for building me. However, one of the problems that we have with governors in most of our states is the fact that they are not, as I've said on this program, they are not creative enough to make the states viable, which is why I have so many people tripping to Lagos and the FCT. How do you plan to make a Kwaibon vibe? We have the population of about 5.5 million people. How do you intend to make that place viable and not have it be known as the civil service state, as it is known today? I'll tell you one, two, three things about a Kwaibon state. Number one, a Kwaibon state is one of the most blessed states in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Number two, a Kwaibon people are about the most trusting people, their prayerful spiritual and everything. Number three, a Kwaibon youth in particular are about the most gifted in the Federal Republic of Nigeria in the areas of music and dance, we talk about the arts generally, entertainment and of course, particularly in the area of ICT. After Lagos and Abuja, the next ICT hope in Nigeria is Uyo.  When we had the debate, this is the dress I wore. I deliberately wore the dress again today. Have you seen something? My name is there and then you have my account detail. I want to say this on my integrity that nobody in the whole world can say that he or she has contributed 6 million to my campaign. Nobody. You know why? Because he who pays the piper dictates the tune and the greatest problem that we have in a Kwaibon is that the governorship candidates are largely sponsored by external forces who see so much resources in a Kwaibon state. And as a result, they want to get that state by all means for one purpose, state capture. So you have a state that has so much resources and yet when you come to a Kwaibon, you cannot see 70% of the resources of a Kwaibon in a Kwaibon. And that is on account of one thing, capital flight.  I'm going to go with the people of a Kwaibon state. We actually should be having a election next tomorrow, which means we had almost come to the end of the journey successfully, strictly on account of the contributions of the people of Kwaibon. The governorship election has been postponed, you know? Yeah, I said we should have been. Oh, okay. Yeah, we should have been having, which means that we had effectively come about to the end very successfully and done what we needed to do without defending on external hands to fund our campaign. 99% of our campaign is funded between myself and my people in a Kwaibon state. On account of that, we cannot have what we call a Kwaibon for a Kwaibon ideology. By the time you bring in 70% of the resources of a Kwaibon state and put in a Kwaibon state, you will completely transform this area. Let me give you a very little illustration, very small that will blow your mind. Do you know that we have 5, we have 2,226 villages in a Kwaibon state, villages where you have a village head, 2,226 of them. Now, if I put 500,000 Naira in every village every month for their development and transformation, every village, 500,000 every month, it will say, where do you get such money from? Do you know that? Just listen to this. The total amount I've done the math comes about 1.1 billion. 1.1 billion per month is about half what a governor gets a security vote in a Kwaibon state. What that means is that without even having to go for any appropriation or this or that, you have that money resident within you.  But what we've done is ego tripping, I built this mansion, I built that flyover, I built this, it's not about I. If you look at the constitution chapter 2, section 14, subsection 2B says, the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government. Security and welfare of the people shall, I know in legal parlance, though I'm not an architect, not a lawyer, but in legal parlance I made to understand that shall is more compelling than must. So if they say this shall be the primary purpose of government, it means that at the end of your tenure, they should not rate you by how many flyovers or roads you built, but the poverty index, what was it when you came in? What is it when you've exited? How have you made the life of the people better? That is the essence and the primary purpose of government. So for me, the moment I deploy the resources of the people of Kwaibon state, so the basics to the fundamentals, to the stimulation of the rural economy, and then you now have the Acquirebom Development Youth Bill, which is already passed into law, okay? It just means signing, and then you're able to give support. We have the money, we do have the money. You're able to give the necessary support to the startups of the ICT and make it such that right from the primary school, you must learn a computer language from the primary school. Once you have that ideology set in place, you now reposition the state in a way that in the next 20 years, their children are going to be the global players because the way of the future is ICT exclusively. Okay, well, you do sound beautiful. There's no doubt about that. You're almost convincing me, but I wonder how have you been able to convince the people of Acquirebom state in the course of your campaign? Because ADC is not particularly one of the popular parties, and of course your mantra has been, vote competence, not party and zone. Have you been able to convince them not to vote party? You see, people would have been shocked by the results of the elections by tomorrow. Acquirebom people are extremely intelligent, more than you know, and oftentimes they are taken for granted. And I have been here in Acquirebom for over 30 years. They know me very well. And each time they say, wait for the ballot, wait for the ballot, and they would have been a surprise. And you see, what happens is when you talk in terms of moving the campaign by one week, I've listened to some of the analysis people have made, you see, there are two ways you run a campaign. One way is same old, same old. You do what they do, and you don't stand a chance because where do I stand to compete with PDP that makes so much money as government in power? Or other people that have been in power for God knows how long and they've started off so much money. Yet in Acquirebom, that's what they call the big five, okay? And ADC in Acquirebom is different from ADC in other places. ADC is one of the top five in Acquirebom state. Just like Peter will be getting to any party, make the news, any way that architect in Yaitouk enters is already something like in the debates. I mean, there's no debate if they are to have four people or be one of the four. If they have three people or be one of the three, okay? I can say that much because APC, PDP, they will always be there. But there's a strong party that came up from PDP and that's YPP. So that is another strong party and then Yaitouk is there. So if you look at the top four, these are the parties you'll find in Acquirebom state. Now, there's something that, a revolution that came that works so much in my favor and that is the hashtag person, not party. Now, when you look at the parties, yes, they are there, the people are starting to look at the persons. When you bring out the people behind the parties, you cannot but say that in all modesty, Yaitouk is there at the very, very top in terms of the people, in terms of pedigree, in terms of what you've achieved, what you have established in this state, your footprints in the state over the past 20 years, I will say in all modesty that call anybody from Acquirebom, they'll tell you two things about me. Number one is that out of 10 people, at least eight will say, oh, that man has integrity, that man is somebody that is respected. All right, okay, so because time is not so much on our side, I want to ask you this question before we go. It's not even about what you feel about the postponement but local government autonomy is very crucial. If the states are going to develop, are you going to push for that, the autonomy for local government councils? Obviously, definitely. And people will even tell you, yes, before on my behalf because I am very heavy on the federating units within the state, which is the local government and I won't have what they call the fourth tier of government, which is like word governance. Now, what I tell people is that if I go to live in Uyo in Lagos and Abuja, you can come as a local government chairman and live in Uyo. But if I live in Uyo, you've got to go and live in your local government. And I am one person that committed myself to say that out of the 52 weeks of the year and the 31 local governments that we have, I will spend a weekend Friday to Monday at least once a year in every local government. So I believe in local government autonomy, allow them to use their money. It's not always bringing money to develop only Uyo Uyo Uyo so that people will now see how you have built flyovers, built these, built that. No, I want to be rated as that man that changed the lives of the people of the state by allowing local government to have their resources and putting money in every village, not even word, not even local government. Okay. Every month for four years. Architecture, Zika, Nya, Etok, the ADC governorship candidate for Akuaibom State. Well, thank you so much for your time and we do wish you the very best as you go to the polls on the 18th of March to contest the governorship. Thanks so much. And I noticed that you were looking at the account details and they're going to transfer yours. I'll be looking forward to it. Oh, well, let's see what happens. Well, thank you so much for your time. You're watching the roundup. Well, that's what you've been watching. At this point, we have to draw the curtains on the program today. Many thanks for being a part of the show.


Hi and welcome, start of day one, Targa Bambina 2015 here from the Seminovich Oliver State. Cars are heading out onto the stages for the start of this fantastic event. The best news is we've got good weather. The weather over the last 24 hours has just been horrendous, pretty much around all of the North Island so thankfully we've got a little bit of sun this morning as the cars head out for the start of day. From here we're going to head over to Tikawata for lunch, from Tikawata over to the Coromandel and Thames and we'll end day one in Fiti Anga. So we're going to bring you the tales of Targa right throughout the weekend, catching up with some of the fantastic stars that really make these Targa events. So we'll look forward to bringing that to you, we'll catch you at lunchtime, Targa Bambina 2015.


Rwy'n meddwl, mae'r ffordd, Maryam Palmer, a rydyn ni'n amser yn ymgyrchol a'r psychologiau yn IEDT, yng ngyfnodau cyfnodol yn y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell ac yng Nghymru. Rydyn ni'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r gweithio'r cyfan. Mae'r argyrchu'r Llyfrgell yn Oedden, Ffamorunogol Ffamorunogol, Michael Flannery, Argyrchu FeudioóOnia Galvin, IEDT, Llyfrgell H Hunt, NCAAD, Llyfrgell Fvilon a Os Yn Eryddon, Davy Jennings, IEDT ac Maryanna Carroll. Your art of the Test, the work of the crít, the measure to measure the world of matter. Rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r planes of the test, the work of the test, the work of the body of it. IEDT, IEDT, is the work of the test to measure the world of matter. gwahanol o'r clustu dda iawn arweinwyr yn golygu, ac mae'n hoffi'n gyda ddweud i chi'n ddweud yma y prosol i'r ddweud. Ac mae'n golygu'n dweud i chi. Felly, y gyddiad y dyfodol yma gwneud y prosol, mae'n golygu'n gyfan'r gyddiadau bod y gallwn yn ei wneud y ffordd i'r prosol, felly mae'n golygu'n golygu'n gwneud y bach ymlaen. Rwy'n credu rydyn ni, mae'n gweithio'n cymdeithasol ysgol yng nghylch cymdeithasol sefyllfa yn ysgol cyfathau a'r bwysig, ac mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gyffredinol gan y Llywodraeth Digital Sgylchedd. Mae'n rhaid i'n hoffi'r projectol yng Nghymru cyfathau Llywodraeth Digital, ac yn y galfyn a'r Llywodraeth New Ceddi yn wneud drwy'r gweithio'r gweithio'n gweithio'n gyffredinol gan y Llywodraeth Digital. So we are absolutely looking at that, so our case studies are going to link to the digital skills framework. Realised that we should have put the metro map into the presentation but didn't. We're going to share our case studies in our TEL week and we're calling it a TEL week. And we're going to share the case studies online so they will be open to everybody. Very importantly, this is the first teaching and learning project for the cluster. The cluster, let me just give you some numbers. Moving from right to left, IEDT has 2,300 students. Merino has 800. NCAD has 1,200. Trinity has 18,000 and UCD has 30,000. So I call us the two whales in three minnows. And so please do not underestimate the difficulty and demands that coming together as a cluster is it. And I can tell you, we get feedback as institutions about that. So we're coming together for teaching and learning. Just in terms of resources, when we do proportionally for teaching and learning, we've got the same resources for teaching and learning. About 0.25 of a person per student for the resources. So we are doing this work on existing resources and that. So just to bear that in mind. And we have kept that in mind. What can we actually achieve and what can we commit the forum to do? We don't want to make any commitments that we cannot achieve. So coming on to us, that firstly, the other thing is that diversity of right across the institutions, the diversity of disciplines, the diversity of lecturers, the diversity of skills, provides us with an incredible opportunity for engagement in digital that. So one of the key outcomes going to be, now I talk fast, I haven't timed this presentation for various practical reasons, so if I talk too much, I'll me down and that. So the first outcome is actually to disseminate the all aboard digital skills framework. I think as a group, when Anya introduced it to us, because I was vaguely aware of the project but not following it thing, we said this is a very powerful framework. It has been funded by the forum, then we should disseminate it across our institutions. And just love the idea of that. So developing, a development of a shared understanding of the framework, the previous presentation talked about developing discourse. We want people to start using the all aboard framework to start talking about digital skills. I think one of the things, and Philip mentioned it in the questions, that we forget the changes that have taken place. A writer who is encroated often, Lewis Gilbert from America, talks about the small changes that have happened that have been profound. When I started teaching in IDT 17, 18 years ago, 100 in work from a student was normal. It's not normal now, depending on that. The use of PowerPoint has swept in. So there's been a lot of change in terms of digital skills. The second outcome will be exemplars for staff and students in a range of disciplines. We have an idea. We've actually, we'll come back to the case studies in a moment, and will be to enhance digital skills for teaching and learning for both students and staff, and we're conscious of that. And I think one of the key outcomes will be the five institutions working together. Increased communication and collaboration. And while we hope that the projects will be here next year, we've also got to allow for change and diversity as teams change and develop. So those are the key outcomes. We're linking to the Order Board's digital skills framework, and we are trying to develop exemplars that use that and develop our digital skills. So what will we actually do? We'll identify participants locally, and we've said maximum two case studies per institution. In IADT, we have identified our case study, and we've said that case studies can be modules, staff or students. And we've said a maximum two per institution, and really one is a staff-led one, and one is a student-led one, if the students do it. And one of the issues we're facing is certainly locally, and I think right across our clusters, is while students, our poor students union, have a type B application in with that, we've first year matters, we have a lot of, there's a lot on demand on the students union. So it's what they can do. The other thing I would say, and I should have said it in the previous slide, is that, or previously, is that we have a lot of telwork going on at institutional level anyway. So it's building on that and looking at that. We've also learned a lot about each other. For example, going from left, if that's right to left, Trinity use Blackboard, NCEED don't have a VLE, UCD use Blackboard, Marina use Moodle, and we use Blackboard. So we have to take those kind of things into that. When we've identified our two case studies, we're going to work with them to develop it, do a needs assessment and appropriate training, and then use a rapid development process to, if you like, develop them further for the TEL week. And then share the case studies within and across institutions. We propose to use a digital course site for open digital access so that anybody can access it and look at that. And we actually, it's one of those things, we actually decided that before we realised that some institution didn't have a VLE. We looked at that. So how will we do it? Well, this group is the central working group, and we've been meeting since June 2015, representatives of each institution. I'd like to particularly thank Onia Galvin of UCD for calling us together and suggesting that we start a process of discussion and that kind of thing. And it really has been learning to understand each other's language and process and learning to work together in a way can we make sense. And that's the first stage. So this central working group will be responsible for, if you like, the rollout of the project. At local level, we're going to set up local instrumentation groups of staff and students. So, for example, in IEDT, Mary Ann is the staff training learning development officer, our e-learning technologist, the education office of our student union. We have already made to look at what we might be and how we might do it. And then we will bring in additional external support for e-learning as required. And that's where most of the funding from the forum will be going and looking for that external support. And then it's really working with the modules in... I'll leave the IEDT example for the questions and you can come back to us there. So we haven't given you a detailed timeline. We have a detailed timeline, a work package set up, but we literally followed the forum's guidelines for this presentation. So, and in fact, I forgot, I should have put it in that slide, our tell week will run in March from the 7th to the 16th of March. And that's when we've suggested it comes out. So, how will we promote what we're doing? Well, in our work package and our work plan, we've said the first thing is a communication strategy within and across the institutions. Actually, and that's something that I've been working in teaching learning in January for what, 8, 10 years now. And actually one of the difficult thing is that communication because sometimes you're just so busy doing that you're not telling people what you're doing. And that's thing. So the first thing, that regular communication with stakeholders. So we've held an implementation group meeting to tell people that we are applying the project. Obviously the institutions agree we're looking at that. Regular communication with stakeholders trying to tell people. Now, I don't know about you, but within our institution, if you send emails about that, people file them. And they read them. So it's how, you know, it's developing a local communication strategy but also communication strategy across the five institutions so that we know what we're doing because once this project starts, it's going to be a gallop to the end of the tell week and looking at that. Local updates and then an online present is appropriate. And again, you have to tailor it to the size of the institution. So one of us said, oh, we can update our Centre for Teaching and Learning website. And I'm saying, Centre for Teaching and Learning? That's me. Half a quarter of my time. It's Nula, a quarter of her time. So we have to scale it up for the size of the institution and looking at that. Key aspect for communication for national forum for wider dissemination. And Sarah has argued that how the last session today will be about that wider dissemination and the reason we're all presenting to each other is that we know what each other is doing and how we can think about it. And then particularly the tell week. Now, the tell week again has different impacts on different institutions. I know that in my institution the tell weeks I couldn't have picked a worse week for students because it's the end of term and they're going to be drowning in assessment. So we will have to accommodate that to make sure the student voice is there. We're going to do very similarly to the previous presentation and have a day in each of them with, we hope, live streaming. I'm not sure live streaming works. Rena has live streaming. I think UCD has. But that's a technical issue. And we're looking at, let's check anything else, and we're looking at how we actually structure the day and actually make it a worthwhile day. We don't in Dunleary have a tell week. We haven't generally one. We have staff development days with a strong tell. But again, we have to learn to work how each institution is going to do it. Okay. The other one we'll do, well promotion. One question we have considered quite considerably is how will we evaluate the impact? Again, feedback from that. Well, first of all, we're going to take a developmental evaluation approach. Learning by doing of Quinn pattern and looking for improvements. We are not at zero. We're trying to possibly establish a baseline but we're not at zero. But many people in our institution could be. So we're looking for improvements across the cluster and within each institution. And then we're going to evaluate the tell week. And the tell week will be that. The other thing we will be looking at is Kirkpatrick's model of evaluation, looking at the four levels of impact and that. And then hopefully closing the project and finishing it by June. This project has to be finished from this cluster. This phase of it by the end of June for all sorts of reasons. And then we would hope the cluster will continue working but that will depend on circumstances. And I think that's the end of that. Just some references. And I found the spelling mistake in the presentation. Always makes me relieved. Thank you.


Give me one of these bangers and I'll... I saw it go. There you go. Back to lower base shadows our stay. Come here you guys. Come with you. Come with you. Here we have contact for three point sizes. Come with you. Come with you. They glow in the dark. It's got tritium in it. So at night it glows and until you sight in at night. It kind of looks like it's in the dark. I just took it all over the place. There you go. My name is Secondly Tenant Connor Wilkinson. I am with 3rd Battalion 6 Marines and I am the Executive Officer of Headquarters and Service Company. We are in Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, California. MTX is a mountain training exercise so it's bringing Marines out to the mountains in high elevation and getting them accustomed to training at high altitude in a mountainous environment. 2nd Marine Division is from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. So Camp Lejeune does not have that many mountains or high elevation. So we bring 2nd Marine Division out here to get accustomed to training in the mountains and at high altitude so they are better equipped to fight wherever the next war might be. Whether that's North Korea or China or Russia. They all have some kind of mountainous terrain. So bringing 2nd Marine Division out to Bridgeport, California. It really gets them ready to basically fight in any climb or place. Out here we have 3rd Battalion 6 Marines. We have 3rd Battalion 8th Marines. We have 8th Engineer Support Battalion and we have 2nd Combat Engineer Battalion. This type of training helps Marines be more expeditionary because back at Camp Lejeune we are training on flat land where it's not quite as cold. Coming out here we are embracing the elements, getting out into the snow, walking in snowshoes and we are basically learning how to operate in a snow covered high altitude environment. Marines exemplified physical and mental toughness. Well first of all physical toughness. Some of the hikes out here going up and down the hills are very strenuous on the Marines especially for Marines who are not accustomed to the high altitude. And then you add on the elevation factor. Hiking is very difficult out here. Not to mention the weight that we are carrying. Hiking can certainly be something that needs to be considered when doing a movement with a company or a platoon of Marines. First and foremost mental toughness is essential out here. This land is very unforgiving. It's the high altitude, it's the cold weather, it's the snow and it really tests the Marines leadership to be able to lead Marines that are not highly motivated that don't want to get out of the bag in the morning and don't want to go on that snowshoe movement. So the NCOs and the staff NCOs it's up to them to motivate their Marines. So they need to be especially mentally tough to get the Marines to do what they need to do. Certain things for me that were focused on during this training were especially mobility, how fast Marines can move in a mountainous and snowy terrain and that just goes into time space considerations. How fast can you get your platoon or company to a certain position because out here everything's a lot slower. So you need to take that into consideration when you're planning a movement or you want to get your company from one place to another. So coming out here I was supposed to be the maintenance management officer but I soon found out that I would be a porter squad leader and when I was told what that was I really had no idea what I was about to get into. But as I started to understand the mission that the companies wanted to do I understood how hard logistics would be in this mountainous and high elevation snowy terrain. So the porters were tasked with resupplying the companies and out here we use tuckers which are snow vehicles and they can't always get to the companies where they're positioned at. So the porters would load up the tuckers with supplies and then we would hike the supplies from the tucker to the company where the tucker couldn't get to. One thing in particular about this training is it's very hard to get water resupplied to the companies. So what I didn't realize when I came out here was that we would be boiling snow to make water and in a winter like this where it's especially warm and mild climate it's very hard to get that snow to boil the water so sometimes we would have to go into a snow covered area just to get water. I'm Sergeant Brian Labiosa. I'm with 3rd Battalion 6th Marines and I'm the Armory NCOIC. We're in Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center, Bridgeport, California. So MTX stands for Mountain Training Exercise. What it is is basically a training exercise that gives us the opportunity to as small unit leaders build one another and learn about the terrain that we're operating in. MTX stands for Mountain Training Exercise. What it is is basically an exercise that allows us to Marines to learn how to operate in colder climates. Being that it's in the cold weather we're just learning how to deal with frostbite and operate in these temperatures. Second Marine Division does these type of training events to prepare us for any type of terrain and or adversary that we're going to be fighting against in the future. The units participating in this exercise are the Battalion 6th Marines 3A and 8th ESB. This training prepares 3-6 to be more expeditionary ready by allowing us to get used to the climate and just understand what we're getting ourselves into if we get that call to come to a climate like this. Marines have displayed mental and physical toughness by learning how to operate in these temperatures and understand their bodies and the Marines. Some of the things that we're focused on in this training were frostbite, learning how to wear proper clothing and how to operate in this type of climate, such as trail breaking, learning how to patrol throughout different areas of these mountains. I got tasked with the job of being a porter. What a porter is is basically a pack mule for the Marines. It allows the Marines to do their leaders, recon, and be as mobile as possible. Once they reach their checkpoints, we will then go in and give them their gear. That way they can operate with their actual combat load and or existence load, whatever they have for that mission.


I like it when people treat it during my talk because it gives me something to do when I'm coming down from all the adrenaline. And the slides are actually up for this talk at thagamizer.com thanks to the conference Wi-Fi that actually works. And I like dinosaurs a lot. I work at Google on the Google Cloud platform, the real quick pitch because they paid for me to come out here. We have VMs. We have container running infrastructure. We have storage. We have all sorts of cool things and really excited about all the machine learning stuff we've been pushing and all the big data stuff we've been pushing. If you have questions, if you have a website that needs hosting, come talk to me or hit me up on Twitter or email me. I'm thagamizer at Google.com. And because I work for a rather large company, I have to have this slide. Lawyer Cat says that all code in this talk is copyright Google and licensed Apache v2 because lawyers. So now that all that's over, I actually get to get to my content. So big data. Yes. I just made that joke. There's a third joke that I can't make due to copyright rules, but if you know it, you can laugh at this point. So data is at the heart of many of our best loved applications. I really, really enjoyed the fact that I've been in tech for about somewhere between 15 and 20 years now. And I've seen how data and recommendations and all sorts of other things, maps, even just the data on maps, is helping make my life better, like not from New York and from Seattle, but one of the things that makes my day better every single day I have to commute is an app that knows where all the buses are and says, yo, your bus is 10 minutes late. I'm like, great. I'll just sit here and wait and read my book. And as I'm talking to startups, I'm going to events, I'm hearing more and more folks that are like, and data is part of our story, and I'm like, great. And big data appears to be everywhere now, and one of the reasons I personally think that is is because storage is cheap. So this is the part where I get to tell my back in the day story. Back in the day, my very first tech job was racking servers and hard drives for a tech company in Seattle. And the hard drives I was racking were 10 gigabyte hard drives, and those weren't the biggest back then, but they were pretty big.  And now I can go to Target and I can buy the same amount of storage, probably on a flash drive. So storage has gotten super cheap, super quickly. But I don't actually see that many Rubyists doing big data. And I think one of the reasons for that is that it's intimidating. I avoided big data for a long time because I found it intimidating. And the primary reason I found it intimidating was because, oh, my God, statistics. So if you go read a book about data mining or business analysis or machine learning, and I have lots of them, you get slammed with a bunch of formula and Greek letters that look approximately like this. Which even if you are determined and well-educated, it isn't exactly light reading, and it isn't exactly something that you can dive into right away. And I also think people are intimidated by machine learning because there seems to be this feeling in the tech community that you need a PhD to do machine learning. And I'm going to say right now that you don't need a PhD to do machine learning, but that is the title of another talk that I propose to conferences. That is not disc talk. This talk is about exploratory data analysis. This talk is about building dashboards that might make your data more accessible. This talk is about enabling you to do cool things with the giant piles of data that I'm sure that you are currently storing. And if I'm going to do a data analysis talk, I need a data set. So I'm going to use the RubyGems download data. So if you go to rubygems.org, in the bottom right, there's a little link that says data. And I actually encourage you to start looking for this on a lot of websites because more and more websites are offering some subset of their data as publicly and freely available to do whatever you find interesting with. I've pulled data sets from at least three or four websites that I frequented in the last couple of months. And I'm going to give you a quick overview. So they supply two data sets for the Ruby Core team, Ruby Central and RubyGems. One is a weekly dump of their Postgres database, and the other is their Redis data. I'm going to use the Postgres data because it has the information that answers the questions I'm most interested in. So we're going to go over a little bit about what's in that data set. So the main table is RubyGems. It lists all the gems. Here's the schema for that database. It actually is visible. And if I'm going to do analysis, this slug is not actually particularly interesting. So I'm just going to ignore that for now. And there are that many records in that database. So about 125,000 RubyGems out there. The next interesting table to me is the gem downloads table. Here's the schema. It's primarily keys, foreign keys, and a raw number of downloads for that particular version of that particular gem. Really simple. And there are about 900,000 rows in that table. So that makes sense because most RubyGems have multiple versions. The dependencies table. It's getting a little more exciting now. So here's the schema. Primary key requirements is the actual dependency. The RubyGem ID, the version ID, are going to be your foreign keys here. Scope is runtime dirt versus development time. Important thing to know if you're writing gems, make sure you get your scopes right. Created at, updated at, our favorite Rails timestamp fields, and then there's the unresolved name, which turned out not to be particularly interesting for the questions I was asking. So I'm going to ignore that. And this table has 3.5-ish million rows. Link sets. So if you go to a RubyGem page on the right in the nav, there's a list of links. Home, Wiki, that kind of stuff. That's in the link sets table. And there's about 125,000 records there as well. And finally, versions. This is where the cool stuff is. That's the schema. It's huge. There's lots of columns. But I'm going to walk through the things that are potentially interesting. So primary key, RubyGem ID, and the number is the actual version number. There's a pile of dates right there, yanked at, built at, updated at, created at. There's some cool stuff we could do there with an analysis over time or identifying trends. The platform, the licenses, the required Ruby version, and the required RubyGems version are also probably pretty interesting. And I'm actually curious about which authors are more prolific, and I'm happy to tell you the answer to that question, but it didn't end up making it into my talk. And I was also curious about how the pre-released and latest Booleans were being used. So that's kind of a summary of the columns I found interesting. And I added full name and metadata just to make my results easier. And I also added metadata because I wanted to play with an H store in big data. So 750-ish thousand records in the versions table. So now that I have data, the next thing I need to do is start asking a question. Turns out that asking good questions and data is actually pretty hard, but I have some advice if you're trying to figure this step out. One is use your domain knowledge. So I know that occasionally I run across gems that didn't get the gem spec right for development versus runtime dependencies. If I see a gem that is not a mini test plugin that has a runtime dependency on mini test, I get a little suspicious. Likewise for Ho. There's a couple likewise for Jeweler. People still using Jeweler. And so I can use that domain knowledge to come up with good questions. I'm also guessing that a lot of gems depend on the JSON gems, because every project I've ever written pretty much uses at least one of the JSON gems. So maybe there's an interesting question there.  And you're going to decide if that statement has a high probability of being true. You do that by comparing it to what they call the null hypothesis, which is, and if you're actually a statistician, I apologize right now. I'm in a hand wave vigorously, and the null hypothesis is a fancy way of saying nothing interesting is happening here. So that is your stats lesson. I will put stats aside for now. So some examples of some hypotheses that I could test. The gem with the most downloads is Rails. Seems like a totally reasonable hypothesis. Many test is more popular than RSpec. I know these are frightened words. Gems released in the last year require Ruby 2.0. We've been on the 2.0 series for a little while now. I would imagine that there's a fair number of gems released in the last year that are requiring Ruby 2.0. Hypothesis. Rails 3 is still more popular than Rails 4. And another hypothesis, partly because I was writing these slides and writing this talk while it was beautiful outside, fewer gems are released during the summer. So I want to make it clear that this data set is not large. By a lot of people's standards, this is not actually a big data data set, but it's large-ish. And it's relevant to the audience, so I'm going with it. So I'm going to use a tool called Big Query to do my data analysis. The Big Query is designed for doing big data sets. What is it? It's a non-relational, non-indexed database tool, database-looking tool, data analysis tool. It was built by Google, and it's part of Google Cloud Platform. Why was it built? It was built to search and analyze logs at very, very large scale. And that's part of why it's non-indexed. How does it work? I don't know. I actually don't know. I know a little bit about it. I know that you can parallelize some stuff, and I have a hypothesis that if there's stuff that's parallelized, there's probably a MapReduce step in there somewhere. But I know it's more complicated than just that. I know it involves specialized data structures. And it turns out I don't need to know how it works to know that I like it. I love Big Query. And why do I love it? Because it supports standard SQL. So I don't have to learn some crazy query language to get my queries done. Standard SQL, and there's some tool-specific extensions. Most databases I've used, they have, here is your ANSI SQL, and here's the other really cool stuff that we wanted to build on top of it. And Big Query is just the same way. It's freakishly fast, freakishly fast. Querying hundreds of millions of rows, it takes seconds. And that includes aggregation, cross-table to queries, with joins, all sorts of crazy stuff. Cross database queries. And it scales. It scales to handle super large data sets. I've personally used it with data sets on the orders of hundreds of gigabytes. I think I'm going to demo that shortly. But I know folks who've queried several terabytes with it. And it also turns out that it's just complex enough to do things like sliding window analysis, running totals, multiple levels of aggregation, nested queries. And it can also gracefully handle data that isn't consistently well-formed. And part of that's because of its heritage. Because it came from log data, and log data tends to be messy at times. The fact that it can handle data that's not consistently well-formed, missing fields, that kind of thing is really nice. So no one believes me until I do this.  And those are always slightly terrifying. So I happen to have, and they shipped in the half an hour since I brought this demo up. We're going to just leave it as it is. This is the Hacker News data set from 2015 October. This is all of the stories on Hacker News. So if someone gave me a word that you think is going to be in a title of a Hacker News story, please remember the code of conduct before you start shouting out. What? Bitcoin. That's a great one. So we're going to run the query. We'll try to figure out which site it's on. There it is. Awesome. So we processed 3.91 gigabytes to do that. There were 760 records that it found. And you can actually see what the score of those was. And that's the second most interesting part. So I'm going to do an aggregation and figure out the average score of all stories that had Bitcoin in the title was. And that took a second and a half. The average score of all those stories with Bitcoin was 9.4. The average score of all stories that had hiring in the title was not that high. So that's my demo. I'm going to hit Control P and good things happen. So a quick vocabulary lesson so that you can search for stuff and figure out answers. A data set in BigQuery is what you would call a database. It's a collection of tables. A table is a bunch of records that are structured in some sort of regular way. So now I need to get the data into BigQuery. And I'm going to do that in two different ways to show you that two different ways are possible. The first one is streaming. And this is just pushing records into BigQuery and having them added to your data set in close to real time. You might use this for clickstream analysis. Are people still doing clickstream analysis? And log data or anything else that you need available pretty quickly. I'm going to use the G-Cloud gem to connect to Google Cloud in BigQuery. This is written by Rubyists, for Rubyists. Mike Moore and Chris, whose last name I'm forgetting, who are in Salt Lake right there, work on this. It's great. It's hand-coded. It's not an auto-generated gem, so it feels natural. And the PG gem for Postgres, some basic requires, require PG, require G-Cloud, set some environment variables so I can connect to my account. If you've used a web service, this should look familiar. I'm creating a new G-Cloud object. I am accessing BigQuery from that. And then I am grabbing my RubyGems data set and a quick point of syntax. Because I'm dealing with two different databases and moving data between them, it got confusing. So anything that's prefixed with BQ underscore is BigQuery. Connect to Postgres, connect to my database named RubyGems. So now I need to make a table in BigQuery. And I'm using or equal in case the table was already there.  And then I pass in a block. And that block is specifying the schema. And if you look, it looks an awful lot like a Rails migration. And that's because this was written by Rubyists for Rubyists. What can we do to specify a schema that you already know, this? And this creates the table. That's all I need. There's only four fields on the gems table that I'm interested in, so that works out. I need this later. This is the list of the columns that I'm going to pull, the ID, name, and created at. And then here's the fun part. That's the entirety of the code that does the import. First line, select star from RubyGems from Postgres, gives me the data set back and runs a block on them. Go through each row in that data set, the PG table. And then here is the actual cool part. I make a hashed row, and I insert that into BigQuery.  So quick digression into zip and hash. Say you have two arrays, one of keys, one of values. You can use the wonderful enumerable method zip to make an array of pairs by taking elements pairwise from both of those arrays. And if those words didn't make sense, it's OK. I have an animation. So it takes key one, value one, key two, value two, and adds them up. And that gives you something like this. So that's great. But why did you do that is the next question. And the answer is because hash has the square bracket class method that creates a new hash from an object that's hashable, a flat array with an even number of elements, or an array of key value pairs, like the one I just made. So if you take this and you run that, you end up with this. So if you happen to have an array of keys and an array of values, you can turn them into a hash with this trick. And that's what I'm doing on that first line. I'm taking that columns array that had the keys, and I'm taking the values from Postgres, and I'm hashing them together, because BigQuery wants a hash, a dictionary, of key value pairs. So that's streaming. Batch turns out to be easier. This is for stuff that isn't time sensitive. I know some folks who pull their log files in once a week or once a day for this. Maybe from a recent outage. You can also pull in maybe customer data. It doesn't need to be in real time. There's a list of formats. CSV, JSON, and Avro. I'm going to use CSV because I like it and it's straightforward. And I'm actually going to use the CSV gem or the package that's built into Ruby because the CSV spec is actually surprisingly complicated if you go read it. So requires. I'm requiring gcloud because I'm going to upload the file to Google Cloud. You have to put the file someplace that BigQuery can read it, and that was the easiest one for me to do. Connect to Postgres. I've got a columns thing again. I'm doing the dependencies table this time. I'm going to make my query using that columns array, just because I'm not using all of them. And so it's easier to do that than to do the select star. And then I have CSV open, big Postgres exec. Go through every row. Shove it into the CSV file. It's that simple. And then I'm just going to create a new storage object, pull a bucket, and write a file. If you've worked with any sort of cloud storage thing, buckets and files should be things you're already familiar with. It's really not that complicated. So I have the file uploaded. Now I need to import it. You can do this through the UI. You can do this from the gem. You can do this at the command line. There's a command line tool. Or you can just do it through the UI, which is what I do, because I really hope I'm not doing this more than once or twice. So it's not worth automating for me. So it's kind of hard to see, but I'm picking the source file location, telling you where to pull the file from. I'm saying what table it should put the data in. And then I'm specifying a schema again. Same thing. An ID is an integer, and it's not nullable, and so forth, all the way down. And there's also some options about how many header rows to exclude. So if your CSV has a header or whatever, you can exclude those. You can say what your field delimiter is. And you can also say how many errors are allowed. If you know that your data is noisy or messy or gross, you can say, eh, there's 10 million rows in here. I'm OK if I lose 1,000 of them. And you can also say if you should allow jagged rows. So if you have optional fields at the end, it supports that. And note that it takes care of things like parsing dates and stuff for timestep columns automatically. So what now? Now the fun part. Let's play with the actual data. So simple. I stated that Rails has the most downloads. You can also say which gem has the most downloads. Anyone want to hazard a guess? I was on my list, too. So here's the query. This is straight up SQL. Select name and count. From, table name, joining with gem so I can get the gem name. Order by count descending so the highest downloads are first. Limit to the top five. Rake, rack, multi-json, json, and bundler. And if I had been thinking, I would have at least thought of bundler and rake. But the downloads table is tracked by versions. So maybe Rails has had a lot of versions and the downloads are getting distributed. It's okay, I can take care of that, too. So we're gonna do a sum. Same query as before, but I just added a sum on the count. And I'm grouping by the name. So all the gems of the same name are gonna get counted together. And it's the same list again with slightly bigger numbers. But you can look and see that rake has 214 million downloads. So, numbers. So how many downloads does Rails have? Okay, same query again, but I'm adding a wear clause to limit it to Rails. And it's up there. It's probably in the top 20, but it's not in the top five. So, I made another slightly fighting words statement earlier. Mini test is more popular than RSpec. Same type of query. I'm doing a having clause this time. Again, all standard SQL. And I'm gonna say if the name is mini test or RSpec included. Mini test is winning right now. And just so you know, all the queries I've shown thus far took five seconds or less. So, gems released in the last year require Ruby greater than two. So this is kind of a crazy one. Again, it's a standard select and a standard count star. The wear clause is a little crazy. I am saying that I'm gonna take the current timestamp and add negative one years to it. And say that the created at needs to be greater than that. Greater than that. So that is kind of backwards logic of saying created in the last year. But it means that the query is gonna, I saved it off and my coworkers can use it. Which means it will always be up to date because I didn't hard code the year. So I get this back. So most of the gems released in the last year say that they require any version of Ruby greater than or equal to zero. I'm gonna say right now, I'm a bit suspicious of that. And then one, nine, three, and then a variety of versions of two, oh. And this isn't exactly answering my question because I was talking about greater than two. But we're gonna come back to that. It's first we need to go into some more complex queries. So I said Rails 3 is more popular than Rails 4. This is a different way of saying that. I think Rails 3 has more downloads than any other Rails major version. And that mess is the query that figures that out. But it's mostly standard SQL. There's two joins now because I'm having to join on versions and downloads and the actual gem table. I'm doing aware to figure out that the gem is Rails. But there's a cool line right there. That line is super neat. So I'm gonna impigot it. And I'm taking the number from the versions table which is the version number and I'm running it against this regex that grabs the first digit of the version. And I'm calling that major and then I'm grouping by it which gives me this. So there's some very, very large numbers there. And this is across all versions. And this query took about 12 seconds. I find it hard to read so did some division. That ended up there. So three is still more popular than any version than all the versions of four. Let's come back to this last question. Gems released in the last year require RubyGrader than two. So I'm gonna, this is the original version and I'm gonna use the same regex be extract thing here where I'm gonna pull out, the regex got a little more complicated because I need to match some combination of greater thens and the squiggle or in equals or things like that in front of a digit. I'm gonna call that version and I'm gonna do the same timestamp trick and that gives me this. So still most gems are requiring version in the zero range, greater than zero which seems suspect but at least I was able to collapse two, 2.0.0, 2.0, 2.0.1 all down into some variants of two. So I have greater than equals two or squiggly or greater than and I could probably write a better regex that would collapse all of those as well but this is a good start. So I'm pretty sure I'm almost out of time so I wanted to say thank you and I have large quantities of dinosaur stickers and styling Google Cloud Platform sunglasses that might be helpful on our boat later today and a giant pile of Google Cloud Platform stickers as well so please come get free stuff from me so I don't have to take it back to Seattle. Thank you all.


Hello, I'm Ken Kelly, a regional farm and agribusiness agent with Alabama Cooperative Extension System. This video will cover strategies 4 through 6 for reducing cost to production in your cattle operation. The fourth cost to production reduction strategy we want to talk about is having a controlled breeding season. While many producers have a breeding season, there are still a lot of producers in Alabama that can have year-round. January 1st to December 31st is not an acceptable breeding season. There's one big reason to have a cabin season or to tighten your cabin season if you already have one, and that is that it will make you money to do so. Cabin season makes you money in three ways, feeding, health and marketing. The nutrient requirements of cattle vary greatly between dry pregnant cows and lactating cows. The National Research Council in its publication, Nutrient Requirements of Beef Cattle, shows the difference in nutrient requirements for a 1,200 pound brood cow producing a 600 pound calf, varies from 6% crude protein and 44% energy requirements for dry cattle to a 12% crude protein and 63% energy requirement for lactating cattle. That's a difference of right at 50% for protein levels and 30% for energy levels. Most feedstuffs will contain 6% crude protein and 44% energy, while few will contain 12% crude protein and 63% energy. That means that only by having your herd in the same production phase can you really feed efficiently. Otherwise, you're either overfeeding or underfeeding and will be costing yourself money. Health protocols also become much more feasible when all animals are in the same stage of production. Many vaccinations need to be given at certain points in the production cycle, and if all of your animals aren't at the same cycle, it becomes cumbersome to administer vaccinations, and many producers in this situation will opt not to give them. Lastly, having a cabin season directly affects how you can market your animals. If you have a group of animals that are similar in age, weight and kind, you can offer them as a group in a graded sale or as part of a whole or parcel truckload in a board sale, or sell them as a group in the local sale barn. In general, buyers are much more willing to pay a premium for a group of like animals than they are for singles. The fifth strategy we have to reduce production costs would be the soil test. There's an old joke that whatever question you ask an extension agent, he'll tell you the first thing you need to do is the soil test. There is a reason for that. In just about everything we do in agriculture, including livestock, it begins with the soil. Livestock production is most profitable and sustainable when producers rely primarily on forages and grazing as their feed source. The most expensive part of producing forages, particularly hay, is adding the nutrients to your soil that it needs to produce the forage. The thing to keep in mind is that no two soils are exactly the same. That includes on your farm. One field might have a totally different soil and nutrient profile than does another field right down the road. It's impossible to know what your soil needs unless you sample. You can't look at your soil and tell what fertilizer it needs. Your extension agent can't, and the local fertilizer salesman can't either. Fertilized costs can range from as little as $25 per acre to literally hundreds of dollars per acre. Sometimes you can actually do more harm than good if you supply the wrong nutrients or wrong amounts of the nutrients to your soil. For example, if your pH is already low and you don't lime, but you do apply nitrogen-type fertilizer, you more than likely drive the pH even lower and the plants won't be able to utilize either the nitrogen nor the other nutrients currently in your soil. Soil samples are extremely cheap relative to the cost of fertilizer. They can be done at various university soil labs, including Auburn, as well as numerous private labs. No matter where you send your soil samples, if you will use the information obtained from them, it'll make you money in the cattle business. Our last strategy we will discuss as we try to reduce our cost of production is the use of enterprise budgets. Enterprise budgets provide an excellent planning tool for producers when evaluating or adjusting their current operation when considering a different livestock enterprise or as a way to compare their particular operation with the average Alabama farm. Enterprise budgets contain suggested costs, returns, and depreciation for cow-calf, stalker, and even niche market producers. Enterprise budgets are an easy-to-use Excel format that allows producers to customize inputs to reflect their particular operation. Enterprise budgets prepared by the Alabama Cooperative Extension System Farm and Agriculture Business Team utilize expertise of specialists in livestock, agronomy, and economics to prepare a budget that is both realistic and current. But using your numbers will provide a more accurate picture of your operation. ACES budgets also contain sensitivity charts that producers can use to compare how different prices, costs, and production efficiencies affect profitability. Enterprise budgets are routinely updated and available on the ACES website. Thank you for watching as we discussed a few of the ways producers might reduce their cost of production and increase both profitability and sustainability. These are only a few of the things that producers might consider. Remember that every farmer, and every farm is unique in situation, and therefore not all strategies will be equally successful for all producers. I would encourage you to consult with your regional farm and agribusiness agent for additional information that might have benefited you and your operation.


The Army now more than ever is very focused on modernization for our future multi-domain operations and so we've spent a number of years focused on small scale contingency operations and now we're looking at large-scale combat operations. As part of one of our primary modernization focus areas it's really about the network and how do we enable the future fight of you know speed range and convergence. It was a great opportunity for our brigade. We learned a lot. We're piloting the next generation of communications so we're taking it from where we've typically in the past had to operate our headquarters at the halt and looking at ways that we can do that on the move and much more expeditiously. Our soldiers have been all over this equipment, different types of equipment. Our squadron is exercising one set of this equipment. Two other battalions went out and exercise two different sets of equipment so our soldiers, their soldiers coming back together really giving that honest feedback about what's inside these platforms and then what the Army can do with that for the future. We put some of these technologies in the hands of soldiers and they're able to help us inform you know a little bit about the technology, how we'd employ it and there are things that we have not even thought of when we initially looked at the technology of how that would be able to improve their ability to operate and fight and be ultimately successful on the future battlefield. So whenever we're building it we take less time setting up and trying to make sure that everything is good to go and we focus more on making you know the actual communication aspect of it instead of troubleshooting making sure it's all up running into issues. Calms are important and the more time that you can save which is what this is doing then the better the equipment is.


Give me that sauce. I should have been sleeping all of these, but holy back. Oh my god.  I am holding a ridiculously ridiculously expensive NFL trading card box This is panini impeccable $5,000 NFL trading card box which some of you have already seen one card of the opening if you watch the fooby Christmas vlog I gave everyone in there a surprise and I opened one card out of the eight and I won't reveal what that was if you didn't see it Now what's extra cool about this back when I bought this like a month ago. I thought the best pull was gonna be Mac Jones I thought that was offensive rookie of the year I think Jamar Chase is gonna get offensive rookie of the year now. So instead of Mac Jones I think the absolute most crack pull we could get in this is Jamar Chase. This thing is five grand Eight cards in here. So I hope that tells you just how rare and ridiculous these cards are going to be and once we finish that We will be opening this panini XR box. It's got two packs with seven cards each So this thing wasn't five grand. It's like 500 bucks, but still there's only 14 cards in here So everything we're about to open today is insanely rare And I finally think that now that the regular season is over and the voting is commenced This is the perfect time to open this holy shit Buckle in boys. Let's find ourselves in Jamar Chase If you didn't see any of my openings last year, they were crazy.  So here's what's in the box It features an 172 card set. So I'm hoping one out of 172 is Jamar Chase There's a hundred base cards numbered to 75 42 rookie helmet and patch autos and 30 rookie Autographs and there's a bunch of randomly inserted cards in there, too So as you guys know, I'm not like the biggest NFL trading card wizard turned out last year I would pull cards that were super expensive I didn't even know so please let me know in the comments if you guys are into this stuff But I do know that if I see Jamar Chase or Mack Jones or Michael Parsons that we are in business So here's this beautiful stack of cards right here. Oh shoot.  I am giving a little spoiler I will show you the card that I showed on the fooby Christmas vlog This is not news to me you guys have already seen this some of you and some of you have not it is an absolutely Gorgeous the Ami Brown so it's got an auto a piece of his helmet and a piece of his jersey on I actually don't know what this is called in the trading card world I'm used to a rookie patch auto She's like a piece of the jersey in the auto, but this is a rookie helmet patch auto rookie helmet patch auto. Is that a thing? Absolutely Stunning card. I'm not like that huge on the Ami Brown But hey if the Washington football team gets a super legitimate quarterback I'm sorry, and they start playing well the Ami Brown could be nasty. You never know So that concludes the part of this pack opening that I have already seen and some of you have already seen So there's seven cards left and literally nobody has seen yet.  I'm definitely seeing yellow I'm seeing a Steelers player. It is oh my god. Oh my god All right, so it's not an auto case not a patch or a helmet or anything, but this is a 49 of 50 tj What well, he's getting defensive player of the year this year. He absolutely has to get defense player of the year I know this one isn't crazy, but a 49 of 50 on his defensive player of the year.  He had 15 sacks. So in 2021 now 22 and a half He only played 15 games too. This guy is a god He would have the record and it wouldn't even be close if he was healthy all 17 Although if you really want to play that game regi white got 20. We don't care We don't care next one. I'm seeing purple. I believe it's a raven is that jk dobbins. It is 23 of 35 Jk dobbins. I love the rarity on it. I am bummed out that jk dobbins got hurt at the start of the season He was gearing up for really what would have been an incredible season I wish jk dobbins had stayed healthy this year, but you know what? It's not an auto or a patch or any of that either So i'm kind of okay with this jk dobbins. I see an auto on this one I'm really hoping this is jamar chase right here. I see a color that might be orange out of my peripherals Is it all it's red? Wait, who's that? Is that um, you know what dude? You know what? He's actually had a solid season. Is it joe try on try inka. I may be mispronouncing that I apologize if I am but this is the buccaneers rookie joe try on try inka The rarity is 49 of 99. I don't actually know what can be in this I don't know if I can get multiple rookie autos. I hope this isn't my only one. It's still a clean card This is so sick.  I have no idea if that's worth anything if it's worth a lot of it's worth literally nothing But it is super cool next up. This is a legend player I can tell by the picture, but I don't know who it is yet. It's for the bills. Take a guess It is a It's signed too Thurman Thomas indelible auto, I believe they call it indelible yet, bro. That's actually sick I don't personally know any big thurman thomas. That's an oaf. That is an o6 of 10 There are only 10 of these and this is the sixth.  No shot.    Dude. It's so crispy jersey Just like the diami brown. So we got diami brown and jamar chase. Dude even It's the jersey number on there. Oh my god. I can't believe that happened So a little bit of me knows that this it's not crazy rare. There's 75 of these But this is the this is the offensive rookie of the year who is shaping up to be one of the best wide receivers in the nfl Already is kind of like top five. Anyone wants to let me know what that's worth.   We actually doubled up I didn't actually know you could do this. We doubled up on jk dobbins. I got jamar chase.  That's so sick. It literally could have been anybody I'm keeping these in impeccable condition until I get like perfect There's like big like silver plastic cases you can get for these, right? I gotta get one of those I'm ordering them. Literally. I'm going on amazon right now. I'm ordering Dude, that's so exciting dude in last year.  So I have two really cool cards in my collection And as you guys should know, I still have my jaylon herds card in my collection That's how I got jaylon herds in wheel of mud So one of these days when I'm dirt poor my bank account is completely drained from only fans dots and my tier 18 sub to pokemane. I'm gonna start selling off my NFL trading cards And I think I should be good for another week or two Here's over opening next that I don't think I'm gonna be able to top that but this should still be really fun Benini XR I should find two autos and one memorabilia card per box on average So memorabilia is gonna be like a piece of a jersey or piece of a helmet seven cards per pack Two packs per box. So there's actually 14 cards in here as well. So this one's these ones are relatively rare as well So let's see what our first ones got baby only seven card. Damn. I didn't actually realize I'm gonna be totally honest I didn't realize there's only seven cards per pack I totally thought these are really gonna be like one more juice than the last one I really like the art on these First one is david johnson. What about pretty gnarly like four years ago when he was actually good at football We don't have to go there We get a digs and it has some form of rarity to it. It is 162 of 249 digs I'm not sure if you guys can see that but 245 of 249 nothing crazy still clean montey rice right here Oh What is this? This is kind of dude. I really like the art on these. This is a davante adams Not sure what type of card they're calling that but he is 06 of 149 It's honestly pretty dope extra extra the packers tried several tricks to free adams in 2021 was particularly effective Lining him up in the slot. He ran 30 of his routes from the slot.  Give me that. Give me that sauce. Oh, there's something thick in that. You can see it There's something thick in there. This could be good boys. I like this start a lot better josh jacob's I like that running by lot better than david jackson. We're not to something here. Oh, look at that I get another tj watt is facts looking good right now boys We're gonna get a miles jack 199 of 199 the final one made Peyton turner 109 of 199. He's got the houston jersey on in the pic. That's hard All right, so already there's a lot better packing the last one. We haven't got the thick card yet. I'm gonna get a It's flipped backwards. Which makes me think it's something really good It is a two of 25 philip rivers with I believe a piece of his jersey on there xr summit philip rivers Yo, I'll let you guys check this out. Dude. That's so dope. That is a dope card, dude.   What is going on here?  I got a nazi auto jamar chase philip rivers jersey Dude, that is so dope The final card is actually he's also had a solid season It's not a patch auto or anything But demedric felton has had a good season filling in for some of those bronze rainbags. That's sick I gotta do the same thing with these cards now. I gotta just hold them tightly until I get my card sleeves in This has been so much fun.   So it is a waste of money I'm proud of myself for not going overboard like I did last year, but I am so happy with how this opening went I actually don't want to open anymore because I don't think I can top that. All right. Hey boys I love you so much. Thank you for watching as always I hope you enjoyed and uh, you'll be back to your regularly scheduled madden content tomorrow and uh, I'll text you later. Peace