Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMworld and its ecosystem sponsors. Now your host, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. And we're back. Here with SiliconANGLE TVs live continuous wall-to-wall coverage from the Moscone North here in San Francisco for VMworld 2015. I'm Stu Miniman and joined with me. My co-host on the director set is Brian Gracely. And we're talking about the intersection of cloud virtualization, networking and storage. Excited to have with us, Benny Schneider, co-founder, chairman and president of Revello. Thank you for joining us. First time on theCUBE. And Dave, nice to be here. All right, so Benny, that's a lot of topics. We talk VMworld is really, you know, that the ecosystem for virtualization touches on a lot of environments. A lot of storage people here, a lot of people looking at how cloud is transforming what they're doing, trying to sort out what this whole hybrid cloud thing means. And Revello has an interesting place in kind of the hybrid cloud discussion. So maybe bring up for our audience that aren't familiar with Revello.  Okay, so we are coming from a very rich virtualization background, networking background and some storage. And in our previous company, KumaNet, we did KVM. It's not keyboard, video mouse. It's kernel-based virtual machine. It's the famous hypervisor that many of the new upstarts that you see here in the Moscone Center are using. Google is using it based on the experience that we have in networking and the success that we have with KVM. We have built a new vision on how the future data center should look like. And the new vision is basically based on isolation of the application and the infrastructure that the application is running on top. And when I say the application itself, it's everything that's related to running this application. It's the VMs themselves. It's the networking. It's the storage. Some dynamic rules and some operational aspects on how the application should behave dynamically when it's running. So for us, the hybrid is a very natural use case for our vision because we are not talking about migration. Migration is a singular event where you're running it one time here and then you're running it on another place. Our vision is that you will be able to run your application anywhere you want. You can run it today here. Tomorrow you can run it there. And the way to do it is in a very elegant and very sophisticated way based on our nested virtualization technology. Basically, you can think about it. We have a compiler that takes and map the application itself into the target cloud. So all this magic is done without changing the application. It's done automatically by Ravello with some key knobs that you as a user can play with and adjust your needs. Yeah, I tell you, Benny, in many ways, I've looked at it that infrastructure is held back the way that we handle our applications. One of the first times I talked to Docker, Ben, the CEO said to me, what we're going to do is we're going to separate the application management from my infrastructure management. I listened to the keynote this morning from VMware and they said their unified hybrid cloud message is their cloud with any app anywhere. So the high-level messaging from some of these pretty big companies, that sounds a lot like what they're saying. So can you talk a little? You said it's not a migration tool, but what are you doing? How are you doing? And how do you interrelate with the VMware and the cloud guys out there? Right, so I think we have a complementary solution. VMware is focusing right now the hybrid solution on the private cloud and VCA VCloud Air. We can run on VCloud Air. There is no reason that we cannot. We are right now focusing on the public clouds, mainly Google and Amazon. And we have the ability basically to take any workload and run it, as I explained before, with the new concept that we have created. We are doing it with the nested virtualization technology. So if you wanna think about the vision and how it's being implemented, let's compare what we are doing with nested virtualization to what we have done in the past and what VMware has done in the past with virtualization itself. So virtualization is basically a layer that's sitting between the VM and the infrastructure itself. Virtualization is doing three things to the operating system. It's detaching the operating system from the hardware. It's making the operating system the VM monolithic, which means in one file you have the binary, the executable, the configuration and the data. Once you have the two things, the separation and the monolithic notion of the application, you can move the application from one physical machine to another physical machine. What we are doing in Rovello is exactly the same thing one level up. Rather than dealing with a single VM, we are dealing with an application. Rather than dealing with a physical machine, we are dealing with the cloud. So we are making the application monolithic. We are detaching it from the cloud and then we can move it around from one cloud to another cloud. We are cloud independent, so to speak. The other thing that's unique about the Rovello vision, we deliver our technology as a service. So you can look at us like a virtual cloud provider, you know, like over the top cloud provider. We are running over the top of existing cloud providers.  There is a tool that compiles the overlay network for you, the overlay storage for you. You can of course go and edit it. Once you're ready, you can deploy it based on parameters that you provide or based on optimization that we can choose for you. So you have a way either to choose performance optimized, in which case you will choose where you wanna run it. There will be of course a higher price for it. If you choose to run it in a cost optimized, we'll choose for you the most cost effective infrastructure to run on top of it. Now we, so first off, when we had sent out some messages out to our community, we said, who do you guys wanna hear from? Who do you, and overwhelmingly, especially the Vexpert community, which is really sort of more the top-level technical people, they really dig into it. They said, we wanna hear from Rovello, we want you guys to talk to Rovello. As we talk about hybrid cloud, and you talked about, you know, you're sort of targeting the public cloud, it's interesting to me that more and more people aren't saying, aren't realizing this. Our research is showing Amazon and Azure and Google to a certain extent are far away from anybody else in terms of what there's there. How much do you hear from your customers that you have to be able to work with, with these other clouds, whether they're AWS, or OpenStack, or anything else, as opposed to just this, you know, hypervisor to hypervisor makes a hybrid cloud? We are not, to be honest with you, we are not hearing direct requests to run the workload on some specific clouds. We just hear from them that they want to have some solution to the problem that they are facing. And they, some of the problems are to run it in certain locality. So if they are running, let's say, training in Australia, they want the data to rule and the old workload to run in Sydney because they want the user experience to be local. We hear performance issues, we hear some regulation that they care about. All these things play together in part of the cues that they are providing to the optimizer that we have, we call it cloud map, that basically maps the application into the cloud itself. The VExpert community has been great to us, both in terms of being early adopters of our technology and in terms of providing guidance to our roadmap. You know, always when you have such set of engineers like we do, coming with a product or with the technology, it's relatively easy, it's all about, how do you make a technology and a solution that people can use, need it and can consume it? And that's what VExpert are helping us in achieving. So right now we are focusing with the VExpert on some specific use cases. These are virtual labs, virtual training. So rather than keeping their own infrastructure on site or in the basement or having some favors that people have to bring to them, they're using Revello. And Revello, we have a program for 1,000 hours per month that people can use it for free if you belong to the VExpert community. And if not, it's relatively cost effective solution relative to the alternatives. What we have done with the VExpert community, we have graduated from the beta program that we have and now we are going into the next step, we call it infinity data center. So I would like to explain what it is that we are doing with the new program. So first of all, the one that we graduated from and we announced GA just for this show is the ability to run the ESX hypervisor on the public cloud. And some of the cool things that people have done the VExpert community were when we got it just out of the box like three, four months ago, they were able to take and do the motion, life migration from the private data center to Amazon public cloud, then to Google public cloud and back to Amazon public cloud. Kind of a real hybrid VMotion solution. Yeah, so Benny, I'm wondering if you can unpack that a little for us because those of us that have been using looking at cloud for a while, there was always this discussion of like, oh, we're going to do cloud bursting. Cloud bursting really doesn't work. It's not easy if you have something with storage. I can't move it fast. It's not follow the sun. Right. Many of these things, can I spin up instances in various places? Sure. Can I have an application? Sure. Do I maybe need to move some of the compute to the storage? Absolutely. Analytics is a great use case for that. So I think I understand you want to have flexibility and sometimes you will need to move, but we're saying it's not migration. So can you help us kind of understand the use case and where and why they're doing that? That's a great question. There are two ways to look at it. One way is like we're discussing so far and that's the ability to run the application as a monolithic entity. You can run it one time here. You can run it one time there. We have customers that are actually doing that. One good example is a checkpoint that have done training for 1000 SES. And each one of them got is on, if you want capsule or is on application, private one, it was really bursting because you couldn't run it on any public cloud, even the big guys. So we started from one location. We moved it to another location. Once we exhausted the resources on each one of this cloud, we moved it to another cloud. So this was a typical use case where the bursting to the cloud using the cloud economics is based on the application level. What we are talking about now is a different view or different way to look at the bursting. So think about in the past, when you were running out of capacity, you would typically buy a server from Dell or from HP. You will install ESX on it and you will use vCenter or vSphere to manage those resources. With a new product that we are coming in beta right now, we have the ability basically to allow customer to rent the hardware from Rovello. So you are renting the server. You are using the cloud economics. You are installing ESX on it and then you can manage it from the same glass. So from VMware perspective, from the management system of VMware, you are still managing VMware resources. The only difference is running on a virtual hardware, virtual silver, rather than it's running on a physical silver in your data center. So to me, this is one great way to do bursting because let's say that you have now a need to run some over the weekend test and dev for a release that's coming next week. You don't have servers. You don't have IT resources to run them. You cannot wait for the hardware to be shipped and install it. You're coming to Rovello. You are renting the hardware. We are installing it to you and nothing changes. You are managing it the same way. Same methodologies that you use for your agile development continue to serve you exactly the same way. And in this case, we are actually walking together with IT guys to be able to use the very same tools, methodologies that they used before. So in essence, you offer people the opportunity that says, look, if I look at a typical application lifecycle, development, QA, product, test, staging, a lot of those are sort of temporary in some cases. Now you may update them, but other than production, that's a long term type of thing. You're basically telling people, let me rent a lot of that workflow that for a period of time, you can buy the production. And then for things like DR, I'm assuming that really is probably more economical to be a rental model as well. Is that the way to think about where Rovello fits into somebody's application lifecycle? Absolutely. So I would view it in the following way. The cloud makes sense economically in certain use cases. For example, I'm coming from Israel when I'm lending in SFO, I'm renting a car. I'm not buying a car, even though for a day it will be cheaper for me to buy a car, but I'm not going to use it for the whole year. So if I have the same logic and the cloud economics works for me, I want to leverage it, then I would better off rent a car or rent a machine if the workload is bursty, like the ones that you mentioned, the DR, the entire lifecycle. I can see this going also into production use cases. It's not only for non-production. I can think about bursty workloads. We have some gaming companies which have tournaments that are running on a periodic basis. There are some broadcast events that make a lot of sense to run them, even in production, using the cloud economics. This is where we are going. So if you look at the overall roadmap where we started, we started from running VMs in the cloud. Then we went and moved the entire thing, the entire application, everything that's related to your application, the way that we are looking at the application. Now we are doing it with the hypervisor, so we are doing less than two. We can run the entire hypervisor. One good example is OpenStack. We can run private cloud OpenStack with all the KVM or Zen hypervisors on top of any public cloud. Reddit is using this extensively for training. And we are moving now into the Infinity Data Center, which is focusing more and more in production use cases. All right, so, Benning, I mentioned Docker before. I'm curious how containers fit in, even to talk about LXD coming out, giving us some kind of the V-motion-like capabilities in container. I'm just curious how the container mindset and technologies fit into what Ravel is doing. So I think it's a complementary technologies. I don't think that they are competing technologies. There are cases where containers make sense, and there are cases where virtualization makes sense. Typical use cases today for application that are not so-called born in the cloud are a variety of operating systems that cannot run on container as is. They cannot run on the same host. There are some issues related to security and so forth. So we are today to approach it, even that VMware is proposing to deal with container. One is native architecture, and the other one is just enough OS where the containers are running within a VM. In our case, we are agnostic. You can use Ravel to run both of those architectures. I think the part that people are missing on containers and virtualization is that virtualization is really the best way for IT guys to operate their data centers. It's not so much for the developer and the devop guys. It's more about the IT guys of having the infrastructure uniform. So all the components that the virtualization is managing are the same elements. These are virtual machines. It can be any virtual machine. It's much easier to a IT guy, IT shop, to manage infrastructure from the virtualization perspective where everything is the same rather than having an host for Windows and host for BSD or another host. Now, that being said, we are using containers in Ravel as well, and we actually have a really good way to combine between the two concepts together. Yeah, all right. So, Benny, I guess the last question I want to have for you is, the company's been out for about four years now. Yeah, a little bit over four years, yes. You know, what would you say to people that have seen Revello, as I said, when initially I ran across it, it was mostly for migration type technologies. What do you want people coming away from VMworld to understand about Revello technology and the company as a whole? I think the important thing is that they have to think about infrastructure, independent application life cycle. So you develop your application once. If you're comfortable with containers and you can afford to do containers only, go ahead and do containers. If you want to do it with virtualization, go ahead and do it with virtualization because you have different VMs. The other part is that we don't require you to rewrite your application. You just take the VM as is and you can run it without any modification. You don't have to rewrite your application. It's not that we are forcing you to write in a certain way. The other thing is we allow you a good way to consume the IT in a way that's the cloud intended to. Because the cloud at the end of the day is about cost saving. Not all the application today can use the cloud as is because they have different assumptions when they were created. We allow you, without any modification, to use the application as is. The last thing I want to say here is that when I started my career, I did some chip design and I did some compilation work. And to me, it reminds me of the old days of people writing in assembly. This is really old. And then compilers came on and people said, look, there is a better way to find somebody else to take care of matching your code to the underlying hardware. And by the way, if you use compiler, then you can match it to any architecture. That's actually our vision. We are the compiler of taking application, new, old application, and making the best fit into any infrastructure, private, public, any public. All right, well, Benny Schneider, thank you so much for joining us for this segment. Thank you, a great example of working with the Vexpert community. Thank you very much. And thank you for all your support. All right, thank you so much. So we'll be right back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2015 for Brian Graceley and Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching.


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Hello everyone, I am Sira Satish Kumar, consultant clinical psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry in Manipal Hospital, Spangler. Stress can be in any form, in any situation, it can be an event that makes a person feel unpleasant, where a person is not able to adapt or habituate to a situation can be considered to be a stress. What causes it? There are many reasons that causes stress, it could be from family, it could be from workplace, even traffic, travelling in the busiest traffic can also be stressful.


We are officially one day away from the U.S. Army's best SWAT competition. Tomorrow the teams will start off with a physical fitness test followed by day and night land navigation. This will set the tone on how each team performs during the competition as they will be tested both mentally and physically. Be sure to follow along on our official website at army.mil slash best SWAT and engage with us on social media using the hashtag army best SWAT to root for your favorite team.


The event, I think, is very timely. As a society, we are increasingly relying on the internet and online services to conduct everyday business. The internet offers opportunities for business efficiency, growth, and seamless cost-effective communications that could not even have been dreamt of a short few years ago. For this reason, across the world, in Europe and here in Ireland, we are working to increase connectivity, provide better systems to interact across borders, and encourage digital adoption by business and citizens. As we work to reap the full benefits of a digitally engaged society, one of our key challenges is to ensure that these citizens and businesses have confidence in the security of our internet systems. That means that their personal, financial, and business information is safely stored and that the critical infrastructures which digital services support are not vulnerable to attack. It's not surprising, therefore, that cyber security is one of the key pillars of the digital agenda for Europe, and why it is so high on the agenda of national governments. We are increasingly dependent on well-functioning, resilient, and secure network and information systems. As consumers, we use the internet for banking, education, entertainment, social interaction, and travel, just to name a few. And this are the not-so-obvious services which support economic development in society. These include energy, financial services, telecoms, health, transport, e-commerce. Critical infrastructures such as these are increasingly dependent on the seamless operation of digital technologies and internet communication channels. An open and stable cyberspace throughout the world is critically important if we are to maintain the momentum of growth in this sector. Cyber protection is a global concern. It requires all state and private actors work together to protect our critical infrastructures. Ireland's geographical position on the North Atlantic Transcontinental Corridor, connecting Europe and North America, has created considerable opportunities. It has allowed us to benefit from a high degree of interconnectivity, to benefit from the ability to host domestic and international data and call centres, and to attract top international digital service and ICT companies. For example, nine of the top 10 US ICT companies and the top 10 born on the internet companies are all based or represented here in Ireland. Companies and services such as these require resilient and secure infrastructure, as do the thousands of indigenous companies of all sizes that use the internet to transact efficiently. At a national level, cyber security is therefore critically important to underpin growth, prosperity and general economic development. Policy makers, regulators, service providers, industry partners and citizens each have their own responsibility to ensure that we are protecting infrastructure and services from cyber attacks. Keeping pace with the ever-increasing sophistication of cyber attacks is a challenge for us all and I am pleased therefore that the IIA is hosting this important conference with such a high calibre of speakers lined up to address this topic as the morning goes on. Indeed yesterday, officials from my own department and a range of other departments and agencies hosted a roundtable discussion with one of your key speakers here later this morning, Michael Daniels. Michael is a special assistant, is special assistant to President Obama and the US cybersecurity coordinator. I am delighted to see that he is speaking at this event, offering insights and learnings from the US experience in this area. It is clear that the cyber security challenge needs to be addressed at a number of levels. At the highest level, governments need to put the appropriate governance arrangements in place including appropriate emergency response procedures. Industry manufacturers and users of ICT also need to make the appropriate investments and end users need to remain aware of the risks and interact responsibly online. As citizens, we are expected to use antivirus software technology when communicating on the internet. We expect in turn that commercial online services will protect data encompassing both corporate information, intellectual property and our personal data. We expect that as a society, we can effectively hold criminals and other malicious actors to account through appropriate and proportionate laws and regulations that are fit for purpose. At the policy level, new EU and national structures have been established to address these challenges. These include the computer emergency response community, the European Centre for Cyber Crime in Europe, cyber crime centres of excellence such as, for example, UCD and the extension of mandate for the European network and information security agency, NISA, which was negotiated as part of the Irish presidency of the European Union. During the Irish presidency earlier this year, the European Commission published proposals for a new strategy on an open, safe and secure cyber space. This cyber security strategy aims to protect the same norms, principles and offline values that we hold in the online environment. The strategy included a proposal for a directive on network and information security. The directive aims to increase the level of preparedness in all EU member states. It also addresses secure information sharing between member states and the requirement for critical infrastructure stakeholders to report cyber security breaches. While there is further detailed negotiation required, I believe this is an important further step in the formation of a robust European response on cyber protection. The role and importance of structured exercises in improving cyber security has also been an important aspect of EU policy. Ireland has organised and participated in national and international structured exercises in cyber security. These exercises are very useful in that they bring key stakeholders together to address common problems and challenges. These exercises, along with conferences like today, provide essential networking opportunities and help build a community of allies to call on when cyber incidents do occur. The European initiative aims to address a key pillar of the vision for a digitally engaged Europe as envisaged in the digital agenda for Europe. In Ireland, my own department, in conjunction with critical infrastructure partners and international peers, is developing a cyber security capability. This encompasses the creation of a National Cyber Security Centre, which includes a computer emergency response function, building partnerships with industry partners, and the delivery of public awareness activities. In tandem with this initiative, the Make It Secure campaign, which was part-sponsored by industry and supported by my department, aims to inform small and medium-sized businesses and citizens on steps they can take to improve their own cyber security. The various government departments and agencies work closely together, co-operating to develop robust responses to cyber crime, to data protection and protection of government networks. Finally, I hope that this conference will help guide us on steps that we will be taking to improve our security, recognising that each of us is ultimately responsible for our own online security. Government will continue to play a key role in establishing an appropriate environment that facilitates an open, safe and resilient cyber space for the digital economy and for the digital society. Many of your expert speakers, I appreciate, Chairman, have travelled far to be with us here today. I expect the debate will be interesting and informative and will explore many new ideas for tackling our common challenges associated with the cyber space. I wish the conference well and look forward to learning from the outputs. Thank you very much, Chairman.


Hey everybody, what's going on? I am Greg Sussman joined today by JJ Zacharyson from Fandle to help us find out who we should buy and who we should sell. What's happening, JJ? Not too much, man. I'm glad that Mike Evans came through last week. That was good to see. Hopefully we have some more good ones moving forward. Absolutely. So let's start with Thursday night football. Let's start with the Green Bay Packers. You had Devonte Adams shut down by Chris Harris this past Sunday. Yet you're still buying the Packers' number one wide receiver. No fear after what we saw this past week? I think there's some fear. I think there's some concern because it is a new offense and whatnot. But at the same time, he faced Chicago in week one. That's a tough matchup. Faced Minnesota in week two. That's a tough matchup. And then you just noted he faced the Broncos and Chris Harris in week three. Another tough matchup. If you look at the peripherals, he still has 23.6% of the team's targets. He still has about 31% of the team's receiving yards. And he gets Philadelphia this week, a team that's given up four top 15 performances and three top 10 performances to start the year to wide receivers. So I think he's in a good spot. I think this is a bounce back spot. So right now is the time to buy. With his week as that Philly secondary is Devonte Adams should be in a good spot. As should Marques Valdes-Scantling who finally showed up this past week against Denver. Green Bay Thursday night football against Philly. You're also buying the old veteran Devonte Freeman who finally really had a good game this past Sunday. Wasn't able to get in the end zone. But Freeman looked good with Ido Smith out with a concussion. Freeman should get all the work that he can handle. Yeah. And you know what? Through these three games, he's seen 76% of Atlanta's running back touches. He has about a 10% target share. So the volume side is there. You know, we're not seeing the 2015 version of Devonte Freeman by any means, but he's still seeing volume. And in weeks one and two, they faced Minnesota and Philadelphia, two really tough rush defenses. Like you said, he looked good in week three. So I think right now, given the fact that he hasn't found the end zone, that's why he's a buy candidate. People may not realize just how good he has looked. Like you said, it's not the same guy from four years ago, but he's moving all right. He does seem to be healthy. Without Ido Smith, touches are going to continue to be there. Numbers are down because of no touchdowns. That's going to change soon. Devonte Freeman, clearly somebody you should buy. What next? We move to Baltimore where Hollywood Brown hasn't been as good as his week one breakout, but you're still believing in him. Why is that? I am. So Hollywood Brown coming off a two catch 49 yard performance against Kansas City, definitely underperformed there. But he still has 26% of the team's targets, 31% of the team's receiving yards and only Keenan Allen and Mike Evans have more air yards than Marquis Brown does. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that Lamar Jackson is throwing it deep at the highest rate in the NFL. Hollywood Brown is a big play waiting to happen. If you didn't draft him, if you weren't buying him as a late round flyer, now is the time to buy him after this down performance against Kansas City. The offense is still moving and Marquis Brown still seems to be one of Lamar Jackson's two favorite targets. We know what that upside is. Maybe take this opportunity to buy him a little bit lower than he could have just a couple of weeks back. We did the good. Now let's get to the bad. We did all the buying. Now let's sell. We begin our selling with Derek Henry, who seemed alright, I thought, against Jacksonville. He's found the end zone every game. Why are you selling him? Yeah, you know, that's the main reason why you sell him right now is because he has found the end zone every game. And this isn't a Tennessee offense that really isn't that good. Now Derek Henry always has the risk of not playing as many snaps as his counterpart, Dionne Lewis, if there's a negative game script. That's exactly what happened against Jacksonville in week three. Dionne Lewis actually out snapped Derek Henry. So far this season, Derek Henry has scored a rushing touchdown on every 70 rushing yards. Over the last five years, running backs have scored a rushing touchdown on about every 145 rushing yards. And obviously yards do correlate to touchdowns because more yards leads to more touchdowns. So Derek Henry, just from the standpoint of touchdown regression, that's the main reason why he's a sell right now. And it makes sense. You need more touches and more yards to theoretically have more touchdowns. Obviously, he's bucked that trend thus far. Can it continue all season long? I don't know. But Derek Henry, according to JJ, is someone you should sell right now. Just like using the big game from this past weekend to sell Adam Thielen. We've talked about the Vikings before. Diggs and Thielen just don't run enough routes in order to be productive. This is a team that wants to run the football as much as humanly possible. Adam Thielen, well, he made the most of his small opportunities last week. But counting on him to do it week in and week out, it's a scary proposition. Yeah, I think that we're going to see inconsistency from both of those wide receivers throughout the year. That's something that we talked about earlier this season. Adam Thielen has 173 yards receiving so far, but he has two scores. So that's just a reason to sell because that's overproduction in the touchdown column. He had a fluky rushing touchdown last week. In Minnesota, like you said, they've been the most run heavy team in football to start the year. Some of that has to do with game script, but upcoming they get teams like Chicago, the Giants, they get Washington, they get these teams that they can see positive game scripts against or they could be lower scoring games. So I think that's a reason to sell Adam Thielen after that two touchdown performance that he had on Sunday. I'm just waiting for Stefan Diggs to do the same thing so I could sell him. But right now I want nothing to do with his Vikings offense unless his name is Dalvin Cook. Adam Thielen with a fluky touchdown and a real one, not something you can count on week in and week out. I'm certainly selling Thielen if I can. As we talk about, I don't want to say fluky touchdowns, but just touchdown reliability. That brings us to Aaron Jones, who split time evenly with Jamal Williams, but did have two one yard plunges to get him in the end zone twice and to save his fantasy day. But through the first couple of weeks outside of 127 touch game, it's been a little bit nerve wracking to own Aaron Jones. Where do you fall on him? Yeah, exactly. Matt LaFleur entering last week, he said he wanted to even out the touches between Aaron Jones and Jamal Williams. And that's exactly what happened. Through the first two weeks, Aaron Jones had about a 58% snap chair in that backfield. On Sunday, it was 39%. Jamal Williams was getting more run than Aaron Jones was. The fact that Aaron Jones found the end zone a couple of times, it's just an easy time to sell Jones, despite the fact that I think that he's the superior talent between those two running backs. The fantasy community has been saying this for years. Aaron Jones is so much more talented. Maybe they should give him the ball more. But every coach, whether it's Michael McCarthy or Matt LaFleur, they don't necessarily seem to agree. I don't know why, but all we can do is just take coach LaFleur at face value. He wants to split these touches evenly. And thus far, he mostly has. That's going to do it for us here on the Fandal Hurry Up. JJ, good luck this week. We'll talk to you next week. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. Tomorrow, Jim Sonice will join me as we look toward week four from a DFS perspective. Have a great night. We'll see you tomorrow.


European Union countries are introducing new competence-based curricula. The key role of assessment practice is to support competence acquisition was acknowledged by the 2022 Council Recommendation on Pathways to School Success. The emphasis of competence-based teaching and learning is on the application of knowledge in real-life situations. So this way it represents a significant departure from content-only based education and therefore requires new approaches to assessment. It was agreed and assumed that multiple types of assessment and new assessment methods are all essential over time in order to get a full picture of learners' performance and progress as they capture a broader range of learning games that are needed. These assessment practices intend to ensure that all learners can develop their full potential irrespective of personal circumstances and social economic background. Bearing these assumptions in mind, during the first semester 2023, the European Education Area Working Group on Schools explored the question how can an effective alignment of formative and summative assessments of learners' key competencies be ensured and supported and be more effectively integrated in teaching and learning. The key messages drawn from this work have been published in a thematic report. Balancing summative and formative assessment is the way to include everybody. All students can be included effectively into the classroom through several assessment methods. Summative assessment methods are useful for assessing contents. In particular, summative assessment can tell the students you are arrived up to this point or maybe you remember these notions but summative assessment cannot say you are skilled in this field. Instead, formative assessment is crucial for helping the students in reflecting on their own learning strategies. So formative assessment can tell the students how can you improve your learning styles or rather in what ways you might face these situations so in the end summative and formative assessment can easily connect contents given by the theory and the practical situations given by the real world. Policymakers should sustain the creation of programs to educate both in-service and pre-service teachers in using several assessment methods mixing summative and formative ones in order to create open and critical environments. With regards to assessment for learning, we have established a team within the education assessment unit to support educators and school leaders by offering direction and guidance to enrich teaching and learning experiences through formative assessment practices aiming to sustain an ongoing dialogue with schools and communities to embrace such opportunities. Curricular support is a key feature of the support given by the team and this is done through a learning team approach providing support to educators during curriculum time and subject meetings. Apart from the formative element, the education assessment unit is also responsible for summative assessments and therefore is entrusted with the provision of annual examination papers. Quality is ensured by subject experts. The team strives to constantly provide training and resources that are valid, reliable and fit for purpose. I'm going to highlight a long-term strategy to integrate new approaches of assessment across systems. To address this, make sure that these long-term plans have a clear vision a way of executing the changes and it's very important to foresee a way to measure the results and effects. Use a strategic approach, do it gradually, experimenting and improving in some schools before making changes across the entire system. For example, in Portugal, after a pilot program, a reform was gradually introduced with a competence-based curriculum giving schools autonomy and curricular flexibility and with a focus on inclusive education. Finally, it is vital to ensure that teacher training is included in a strategic approach. In Portugal, a national capacity building program on pedagogical assessment was implemented in the last three years in collaboration with teacher training centers. It provided updating and clarification of concepts and it showed the importance of giving teachers the freedom to use different methods and making sure they have access to relevant learning opportunities as well as guidelines, tools and examples of good practice including practical ways to combine assessment methods in the classroom. Involving teachers and school leaders in changing processes and supporting them are the key to a long-term change.


Welcome back to the Toddy Korba show presented by Buffalo Wild Wings. I'm Sam Murray joined now with Stevenson Women's Soccer head coach Toddy Korba and coach. A little bit of a rough start to start the year. All six year losses by just one goal. Talk about the resilience of your team and how they've never given up in any of the games yet. Yeah, definitely a rough start to the season in terms of results. Not where we want to be, just a lot of close games. And honestly, we've just been struggling to find the back of the net early on. So, fortunately, you know, this is a group that they've stayed focused. They know that we're inches away from kind of being right where we want to be. We've played some good teams and in large part we're happy with, you know, for the most part how we're playing. So I think that we really feel like as soon as we can kind of catch fire, we think we'll be in pretty good shape and we all feel like that can happen. Do you think that Marymount win will kind of spark that catching that fire? You put three goals in the back of the net in that game. Is that a game that maybe can get the team going? I hope so. Certainly, you know, that's our hope. And yeah, I think so. You know, again, I mean, we got three goals in that game, which was just about equal to what we'd scored all season. We got numbers in the box, something we've really been working at. So with this team, you know, I think that instead of pushing harder, we've actually found we need to let go a little bit with this group. So I think they started to take some risks and they started to make some rungs and we hope and think that that should carry over. And as we head into conference, that's the most important time. Yeah. Senior Elena Reisner, she's matched her career best in goals, assists, points. You also had three freshmen who have found the back of the net this season.  Elena has been really strong for us this season and we can count on her work rate and her intensity and, you know, she's great at doubling down behind the ball. And she's, she and Marissa and Lisa have been finding each other well. So really happy with how they're playing and we expect that of our seniors. And I think they've done a good job coming together and those nine of them. And so, you know, I think they're bringing that extra little something that we need. And our freshman class is a really strong class. And some of them have been going through the ups and downs of, you know, sort of a freshman season. And, you know, but a lot of them are starting to find their stride and find their confidence, which is good. Yeah. And then another steady present for you has been your goalkeeper, Junior Keegan-Cafrey. She's already has three games with at least 10 saves in those games. So talk about her play so far. We'd like to limit the amount of shots, certainly the Keegan's getting, but she's had a great season so far. She's just really, really strong. She's been more vocal. She's more confident. She's just, she's a big presence and she makes the standard saves and then she has the ability to make the outstanding saves. So, you know, hopefully we don't lean on her too heavily, but she's someone we have a tremendous amount of faith in. Yeah.  You start conference play on Saturday. So give us a little preview of what you expect your team entering conference. Yeah. Again, I mean, I think, you know, with losses, it's learning opportunities and we've had certainly enough of those to really pick everything apart and examine ourselves. And we've not, you know, floated through the month of September. So, you know, we feel like this could be where we start to really come together and we're playing good soccer and, you know, the team is certainly invested and they're doing so many of the right things. So it's certainly our goal. We want to make the playoffs. We think these home games are important, you know, conference wins. It's tough to go on the road. So, you know, the way our conference schedule kind of lays out this year, I think it's important that hopefully we have things, you know, locked up as we move along and end with Arcadia, you know, Messiah. So we're optimistic about where we are. And I think that hopefully we've turned a corner and good things to come. Well, Coach, we wish you the best of luck moving forward and we'll see you back here soon. Thank you. For head coach, Tadi Corba, I'm Sam Murray and this has been the Tadi Corba Show.


Putin ally suggests nuclear strikes on France, Germany and US. An ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested launching nuclear strikes on three members of the NATO Military Alliance, France, Germany and the United States according to Newsweek. State TV host Vladimir Solovyov, one of the most prominent figures in Kremlin-backed media, floated the idea on his show Evening with Vladimir Solovyov. Daily Beasts Julia Davis shared an excerpt of the broadcast on Friday on X. Pundits on Vladimir Solovyov's show pontificated which Western cities should be the first to be targeted with nuclear strikes, some of their top choices Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Hamburg, Munich or Garmitch, Parton-Kirchen and the United States in general wrote Davis. Solovyov began by railing against France shortly after French President Emmanuel Macron said there are no limits to Paris' support for Kiev. The goal of France is not just getting free resources from the territory of Russia but the destruction of Russia, the final solution of the Russian question he said. Why do I think that we should carry out a strike against the West? Because I can see right through them. They say Russia can't tell us how to help Ukraine. It's not for you to dictate how Russia can respond. Another guest on the show, Andrey Sidorov, Deputy Dean of World Politics at the Moscow State University, told Solovyov that the issue is not whether or not to use nuclear weapons. The issue is against whom to use them. You often talk about France or Great Britain, said Sidorov. Solovyov responded, that's right, France, Germany, Poland, Great Britain. Solovyov said he was undecided on where exactly Russia should attack with nuclear weapons. I just can't decide. Paris or Marseille? What should we destroy in Germany for their tourists? Maybe Munich? Maybe we should have an audience vote. See which cities are they willing to spare, said Solovyov. The Putin ally added, the level of humanity's madness has reached its limits. The West won't stop at anything. We should harshly fight against it with all the forces and means at our disposal. Senior Russian officer warned conflict in Ukraine could turn into a large-scale war in Europe. A senior Russian military officer has warned that the conflict in Ukraine could escalate into a full-scale war in Europe and said the probability of Moscow's forces becoming involved in a new conflict is increasing significantly according to Reuters. Colonel General Vladimir Zarodnitsky, head of the Russian Army's Military Academy of the General Staff, made the comments in an article for Military Thought, a defence ministry publication the state RIA News Agency reported. The possibility of an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine from the expansion of participants in proxy forces used for military confrontation with Russia to a large-scale war in Europe cannot be ruled out. Rearsighted him as saying, the main source of military threats to our state is the anti-Russian policy of the United States and its allies who are conducting a new type of hybrid war in order to weaken Russia in every possible way, limit its sovereignty and destroy its territorial integrity. He was quoted as saying, the likelihood of our state being purposefully drawn into new military conflicts is significantly increasing. Reuters recalls that the war in Ukraine has triggered the deepest crisis in Russia's relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and President Vladimir Putin has warned that the West risks provoking a nuclear war if it sends troops to fight in Ukraine. Putin has cast his decision to send tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022 as a special military operation designed to secure Russia's own security against an increasingly hostile US-backed Ukrainian leadership. Kiev says it is defending itself against an imperial-style war of conquest designed to erase its national identity. Zarodnitsky's comments come at a time when the West is scrambling to help Ukraine with more arms and financing after Kiev's failed counter-offensive last summer and after Russian forces regained the initiative on the battlefield. Zarodnitsky advocated a number of changes in the way Russia organizes its military and security rear-added, including placing greater emphasis on replying on what he called friendly countries to ensure Russia's own security and consolidating the whole of Russian society around its defence needs.


I know that we need to get going here. So good morning, everybody, or I know we have some international participants that are from around the world. And so it might be evening for you. I'm Bob Trug. I'm the director of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. And I'm so pleased that I'm able to introduce Professor Alondra Nelson. And Alondra, I know that you are at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and I had a very nice introduction all lined up for you. I know that you were at Columbia University before that, where you were the dean for social science, and before that, you were at Yale. You've been a national commentator on issues about how science interacts with social policy, covering many, many areas around science and technology, including artificial intelligence, gene editing, and the like. And of course, what we're going to be talking about here today is DNA sequencing and its influence on race and reparations and reconciliation. I was going to say a word, and I think you may have a slide about it on your earlier book about the Black Panthers. I had some really nice emails from people about how they have been influenced by your work, and in particular about the book on the Black Panthers. Because I think for many of us in the common culture, we identified the Black Panthers as really a radical and militarized group. And the book that you wrote that really showed the profound focus that they had upon social justice and health care and free clinics, and making health care available to poor Black Americans that otherwise would not have it. And so I wanted to mention that. I think several people had commented on the impact that that book had on them. Of course, today we're going to be talking about your most recent book, The Social Life of DNA. And I also want to mention a little bit about the technical aspects. Ashley, do you have that slide? OK, so I hope you can see that now. So our event is being recorded and live streamed. And it will be posted on our Facebook, the Center for Biowethics Facebook site. You have both the chat box and the Q&A. So the chat box is for all of the participants to communicate with each other. The Q&A will be for after Professor Nelson finishes her formal presentation. I will be selecting questions out of the Q&A box for her to answer. You can also follow the conversation on Twitter. You see the hashtag there. And check out our website for future issues. So again, my apologies that I had some technical issues here. But Professor Nelson, I think it's time for you to take it away. Thank you very much, Bob. I'm delighted to be here. And I must say, that's one of the more generous introductions I've ever had with no notes or anything. So thank you so much for that. Thank you for the invitation to be here. I was looking at the list of folks who had spoken in this series in recent years and saw my friend and mentor, Carla Holloway, so always delighted to follow in her footsteps. And I also want to thank the Stafford Center for Ethics directed by my friend and colleague, Danielle Allen, for cosponsoring my virtual visit with you today. We've been at the Social Science Research Council. One of the other hats I wear, delighted to collaborate with the Stafford Center. And I had a little exchange with Amy Marcus, who is I think an alum of your program. And I hope if Amy's here, I can't see all the participants. I just want to say a special reading to her. I think that her reporting on direct-to-consumer genetics is just quite extraordinary and is some of the rare reporting that really gets at all the complexities and nuances. So hi, Amy, if you're there. And always a pleasure to be in dialogue and conversation with you. So I'm going to share my screen now and get started. Oops, let me move this. OK, so as Dr. Trug mentioned, I'm a sociologist of science and technology and medicine and also inequality. I have been writing for, you look up and all of a sudden you've been writing for things for 20 years or 25 years or something about these topics focusing and particularly on African-American communities, although not exclusively. And my first major work in these areas was on the Black Panther Party and their health politics. And it's been my great pleasure and honor to spend a great deal of time in both nursing, medical school, medical practitioner, public health communities talking about this work. Certainly true that there is a more complicated facet to the Black Panther Party than what is typically represented. But I think people that I interviewed who were in the party would want you to know that they were militarized as well. And so I think that part of what, on the one hand, I wanted to tell a part of the story of the Black Panther Party that's not told about their health activism and indeed their pioneering work around genetic disease, sickle celledemia disease in particular, but also to understand as we sit in this moment and which we're living with both a pandemic and a necessary, critical reckoning around issues of race, that this was an organization that saw those things linked together, that issues of police brutality and health and equality had everything to do together with each other. And so I think that they wouldn't want us to forget that. And we certainly shouldn't forget it. In more recent years, I've written about direct to consumer genetics and its impact, kind of social and political impact. And as I try to sort of think back across my work and what holds these work, all these projects together, certainly genetics is a kind of long abiding sort of bridge in the work. But it really, I think, is this question. Why and how do communities that have been the objects of scientific scrutiny, technological surveillance, and what my friend and yours, the wonderful science writer Harriet Washington, calls a medical apartheid, how do they become subjects and agents of science and medicine and at what cost? And so that's been that sort of question that's been occupying me for many years now. And it was the question that, in part, I had in mind when I began to see in the early a series of news articles. There was one in the New York Times, another in the Los Angeles Times, and other smaller venues as well. Reporting on the possibility that sort of genetic techniques coming out of the human genome project might offer the opportunity or the ability to do genetic testing and use genetics for ways that had not been anticipated by the human genome project, for example. And moreover, to use them to help African-Americans sort of trace their roots this long and seeking endeavor and many black communities, but also an endeavor that we can talk about that's really central to a settler colony nation like the United States. There's always a kind of yearning for the mother country, one might say. So my work took me lots of different places. I started doing this research early on in the industry. And really part of what my book, The Social Life of DNA, is about is the kind of the first 10 years of this new startup industry. And I initially had planned to do surveys and interviews with people who, particularly African-Americans, engaged in this industry. But it became clear very early on that it was still really burgeoning and that there wasn't really, the N was too small. There wasn't a significantly large pool of people who I could sort of interview significantly. Wendy Roth at the University of Pennsylvania, a sociologist there, has now in the sort of 15 years, almost 20 years since this industry has gotten underway, the N is big enough. And so she's doing survey data with folks that it wasn't possible for me. And the project that I imagined as a survey project became an ethnographic project. And a project in which I spent time with really the early adopters and some of the pioneering kind of consumers and users of direct-to-consumer genetics who were, surprise, surprise, African-American senior citizens. Many of them, certainly middle class because these tests were and remain for people who are working class expensive and also often highly educated. So almost everyone that I interviewed had bachelor's degrees. Many of the master's degrees and PhDs, they also had the leisure kind of time and income that initially conventional genealogy and then the income that genetic genealogy would require. So this is from my fieldwork from 2006 at an annual meeting of the African-American Historical and Genealogical Society, one of the types of communities in which I did my research. Here you see the genealogists, people who have been for many decades, in some cases, conventional genealogists becoming engaged in the work of genetic genealogy. But first, actually being convinced, having to be convinced that these new DNA technologies could be efficacious for the questions and answering the questions that they had about their families and the like. So this is from a DNA kind of 101 presentation. One in here is holding a double helix. And this slide here from that same conference or convention is the people here are holding up the nucleotide, nitrogen bases that are found in the nucleotides that comprise DNA. So it literally was, was literally quite literally DNA 101. So these are, this is a fascinating kind of bridge cohort of people who are really the sort of trailblazers as the sort of American obsession with genealogy is moving from kind of brick and mortar genetics, genealogy to this growing industry and genetics. My work also took me to other places. This is a photograph of the Latter-day Saints Library and Salt Lake City, Utah. I traveled there with members of the African-American Historical and Genealogical Society for one of their annual meetings, which took place there. It was absolutely fascinating. We were, you know, genealogy is very important to Mormon cosmology. We were as a community of many hundreds of African-Americans in Salt Lake City, which those of you who know Salt Lake City know that that represented a kind of significant demographic shift for the few days that we were there for our meeting. And it was a kind of quite extraordinary experience of, you know, people across communities organized around the pursuit of genealogy. I also joined a local chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society. This was our president for a time, a wonderful woman named Sharon Wilkins. And we, in this small chapter, this Harlem chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, also called OGS, was invited on several occasions to make presentations at the Harlem Latter-day Saint Church, which is on 128th Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard and Harlem in New York City. Again, galvanizing around a kind of sort of aphorism and a spirit of sort of sensibility that in a phrasing also you often use that says one can't know where one's going unless one knows where one's been. More specifically for the Mormon Church, many of you probably know that cosmology, the kind of ideation around heaven, you know, sort of suggests that the people that you find genealogically related to you, they can then kind of go to heaven with you, which is why it's such a driving force and the Mormon religion and why Mormon women in particular have been so important in the digitization of vital records and other documents that are so important for the work of genealogy. So I went in thinking I was gonna do some interviews. I was very interested in the question of before and after and how did you feel before? How did you feel after you've done the test? And so in that regard, my kind of early thinking about this project was not terribly different from another cottage industry that rose up alongside direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry testing, which is an industry and genealogical reality television shows, which began also in the early aughts. They began in the UK and are also then a merchant in the United States. Most famous of these in the US, of course, are the series done by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., initially African-American lives now finding your roots. I think there's a new season started actually just last week. And so some of the encounters that I had with people that I spent time with reflected some of the emotion and affect that you saw in these presentations, surprise, delight, vulnerability around getting information that many had wanted for a very long time. And I would publish about this work initially in 2008 and the social studies of science journal and an article called Bio Science. But even as I was sort of writing about this transition from conventional to genetic genealogy, this really pioneering cohort and generation of African-Americans who were doing that work, I was also watching as the market, which I wanna really underscore was a startup in the same way that we think of any kind of Silicon Valley startup that a lot of these companies were startups. And there was no, it was not a foregone conclusion in the beginning that they were going to succeed. So part of the question for me besides the before and after and how people are reckoning and dealing with the tests were why did the industry stick around? Like it was not a foregone conclusion that some two decades later that genetic ancestry testing direct to consumer genetics would still be around, that it would be that people would find it useful, that the kind of wouldn't crash and burn and go the way of another kind of moment of genealogical, you know, fatism. So those of you who are, you know, my age or older, I was born in 1968 will recall a prior moment in which genealogy was very important in American culture and very important and sort of linking the sort of history of racial slavery and its violences including the loss of identity to contemporary culture. So you'll remember Alex Haley's roots, the book and then the many series in 1976 and 1977 respectively, you know, I think it's important to remember also that Alex Haley's book Roots and the Saga of an American Family was published during the US bicentennial year. So it was really like trying to lay claim to the American story and the centrality of slavery and the history of racial slavery to that and black people to this story. But, you know, by the time we get to, you know, the Reagan era, we don't really, we're not thinking about genealogy in the same way. So I wanna suggest just in brief that the Alex Haley moment kind of, you know, has a moment, almost a fetish moment. It's everywhere, you know, myself as a child had, you know, there were Roots coloring books and, you know, lunchboxes and it was just kind of epiphenomenal in our world. And then it sort of kind of dies down and we know from the people that I early encounter in my research that many people continue to do genealogy. The Augs organization that I mentioned earlier starts in 1977. So it is the start of something, but it's not at this kind of fever pitch that it is in the late 1970s. By the time we get to the early odds in which these companies are emerging. So the question for me as a social scientist became, you know, why is it sticking around? What is it doing for us 10 years out, 15 years out, now nearly 20 years out? You know, what is the social practice doing in the world that makes it stick around? And so I began to think about another as I already sort of foreshadowed another methodology and doing my work and find, trying to figure out what people were doing with these tests. So I really switched from a kind of interview format to a really wholesale ethnographic approach where I was going to just spend time with people not just, I was going to be less sort of attached to their test results and a bit more attached to what they thought the results could do for them or do in the world. And so conceptually and methodologically, I took up what's called a kind of social life approach. After the anthropologist, Arjuna Pottawai who in his important 1988 book, The Social Life of Things, which is a book about material culture and its circulation in the world, tells us that if we wanna understand what something means in the world, it's that you follow things in motion. And it's through that following that you're able to illuminate their human and social context. So the social life approach I take from a Pottawai, it's not distinctive to me. And one of the fields in which I work, science and technology studies, it's very commonplace. Sarah Franklin, the sociologist in the UK has written about the social life of PGT, of pre-implantation diagnosis. So there's other ways in which other social scientists have taken this approach to, especially follow things that are emergent, in which the sort of question of what they will mean and whether they will stick around is an open one that we're trying to answer. So I use the social life of DNA in two different ways. One is to think about the sort of circulation and spillover of genetic analysis from genealogical uses to uses in other domains, forensic, medical, familial and the like, and back again. And to the extent that a phenomenon that Abby Littman, the anthropologist called geneticization is taking effect and society, our society, other societies, I think it's the spillover. I think it's the fact that we are turning to genetics we think it can answer lots of different questions and lots of different domains that gives it its power rather than its use in one domain, clinical research, forensics and the like. I'm also use the social life of DNA to refer to the multiple uses to which one type of genetic analysis is put. So in this case, genetic ancestry testing and most of my talk today will be about the use of genetic ancestry testing and endeavors that I call reconciliation projects. But I will say in the end, a little about the spillover about the second use. So reconciliation projects are is one of the larger, the concepts coming out of my ethnography in the book. And I mean it to refer to sites and practices in which genetic analysis is put to the task of resolving controversies or answering questions about the past. So I'm particularly interested in this particular book, is about genetics used to try to answer questions about the history of racial slavery in particular. But I'm also, I think it's really important to sort of like to sort of paint the wider picture, which is that genetics is being used in lots of different ways in different societies to answer questions about the past. So an early instantiation of this is the case of the grandmothers of the May Plaza who and Argentina after during the sort of junta there and then late 1970s and early 1980s had their children and their grandchildren disappeared murdered by the authoritarian state. And we're convicted that their grandchildren were probably still living. We now know that there were effectively camps where pregnant women who were critical of the authoritarian regime were brought allowed to give birth to their children before they were killed. And these children were often placed in the families of their parents, kind of mortal enemies. And so these grandmothers were looking certainly for their children, but for their grandchildren having an intonation that this was the case. They turned to a hero of mine and probably a hero too many of you, Mary Claire King of the geneticist who initially works with HLA blood antigens to try to identify whether children suspected of being the grandchildren of these grandmother activists were related to them and ultimately early DNA analysis to do this. We might also think of the A and C widows in South Africa they're whose brothers, whose husbands but also sometimes brothers, uncles in the like were murders and political violence often buried and collective graves. And so it was important for families to be able to have the remains of their loved ones to be able to do burial rights on an individual for an individual for the closure for the family for religious reasons DNA analysis has been used there as well. And I know that there are many instances that many of you could claim as well. So I wanna shift us out of the, I love the ancestry.com commercials about Kyle and for Kyle is my favorite who switches from he thinks he should be wearing leader hose and then switches to the kilt. And there's a kind of kind of whimsy around that and around the sort of what's called symbolic ethnicity and sociology or the sort of putting on or eating of foods or things that allow a kind of performance of ethnicity. I wanna suggest to you that the use of genetics to answer questions about the past have can do that but also has potentially kind of higher and deeper stakes as well. So as I said in my work, I'm looking at a particular one might say kind of pillar of a larger phenomenon of reconciliation projects which are about the resolution of injuries produced by racial slavery and the use of genetics to resolve those. And we see this in the United States in some very important early papers, right? So as early as 1998, so this is a, you know paper in nature, Jefferson fathered slaves last child. So this is the early use of Y chromosome DNA. So patrilineal DNA or Y chromosome DNA which passes from fathers to sons and the patrilineal gene of family given though our naming conventions in the U.S. and it must have much of the quote unquote West. The Y chromosome also is often aligned with surnames. And so in this instance, there was an endeavor to try to answer what remained a mystery to some but I'll remind you that at this point the Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed had already written one of her Pulitzer Prize winning or books suggesting demonstrating with evidence that Thomas Jefferson likely fathered one or more children of the woman he enslaved Sally Hemings. But here we have this sort of turn to DNA evidence to suggest that this is further true. This creates a bit of controversy which some of you might recall with the sort of Jefferson descendants who now accept this as true as well but it also creates a little controversy on technological grounds because, you know where the Y chromosome could be from anyone in the Jefferson line, you know it could be from Thomas Jefferson and his brothers and his sons and the like. And so there was that controversy as well. So I'm gonna talk and the rest of my time about a series of reconciliation projects and this slide just as a kind of cluster of them that have to do with endeavoring to kind of put in scare quotes restore citizenship to get restitution for racial slavery through a class action suit for slavery reparations and to kind of build kind of community and new ways of thinking about kinship. And all of the stories that I'm going to excuse me, I'm having a little trouble with the slide here present to you really come through in this instance, the African ancestry company one of the very first direct to consumer genetic testing companies in the United States started in 2003 by a black geneticist named Rick Kittles who is a cancer geneticist research on prostate cancer in particular. And he has been on the faculty of the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Arizona state most recently he is at the city of Hope and Southern California and is the director of their kind of health equity program also doing his work on cancer genetics. So he starts this company in 2003. This is a screenshot that this image here is from 2006 from their homepage. You can already see that in the first three years of the company, he's been on African-American lives. There's press coverage on Good Morning America and USA Day. There's a sort of co-sponsorship with American Airlines, just to give you a sense of the early success of the organization. Kittles starts African ancestry with Gina Page, business woman who'd studied economics at Stanford before starting the company with him and they both understand themselves variously to be civil rights activists or advocates. This for them is a business enterprise and it also is a political enterprise. Now, connecting to my earlier point about the pioneering role of African-Americans in this space, I want you to understand that African ancestry begins five years before 23 and me. So in the same way that Band-Aid stands the kind of name that stands for bandages and Kleenex for face tissue, 23 and me has come to be the kind of monster in the space and the kind of brand that we identify with direct to consumer genetics, but there were earlier companies, FamilyTreeDNA, Ancestry.com, which some of you might be familiar with and one of the earliest in the U.S. was this black-owned company, African Ancestry, which remains one of the very two. So there were, in 2003 when African ancestry emerges, there's four companies and it is one of the two from that time that still remain. So this black-owned company that particularly wanted to niche market its services to African-Americans and understood it to be for the benefit of African-Americans begins, is still existing as a pioneering and now kind of legacy company and the sector of the economy. So Rick Kittles is an important figure because some of the sort of his idea to start African ancestry comes out of a research project in which he's engaged in lower Manhattan called the African Burial Ground Project, which is now a national monument that some of you might be familiar with. But before it was a monument, it was suspected to be a cemetery and then it became an excavation site and now it is a site of remembrance of folks who were lost and slaved Africans from the colonial era and New York City. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about this story because I want you to understand, going back to the question with which I began, how and why do communities who have that have been the literal objects of scientific scrutiny, who have been quite frankly sort of scrutinized but also damaged, abused by science, technology and medicine somehow find possibilities for liberatory politics and for other ways of seeing the world and their lives. And this little detour that we're going to go through the African Burial Ground, I think offers some answer to that. So as I mentioned, in 1991, there was an endeavor to put up a building. This was gonna be a general services administration, federal building in Lower Manhattan. And initially there were some historical maps that suggested that it either sat next to or on top of the construction site what was a historical cemetery, formerly called the Negro's Burying Ground. But those in charge of the project suggested that it wasn't compelling enough that they shouldn't proceed with the construction. So no surprises that the construction site quickly becomes an excavation site because there are human remains buried there. And indeed where they wanted to put the building was the site of the Negro's Burying Ground. So initially the Metropolitan Forensic Anthropology Team at Lehman College in the Bronx in New York City is brought in to do this work, very fine scientists, but who really are more kind of CSI forensic scientists than they were sort of academic, biological anthropologists and archeologists. Moreover, there's a lot of political controversy about this site when it comes to be known that remains are buried there. So the local black community in particular, members of them, many members of them want the site to just be covered and the souls left to rest there. Others find it, want it to be, suspect think that it's, understand that it's an opportunity to know more information about enslaved Africans. Ultimately the sort of control of the research would move from Lehman College to a research project led by Michael Blakey, a distinguished biological anthropologist who at the time was at Howard University and the Ashley Monogue lab there. So part of the controversy meant that Blakey was put in place as the African Burial Ground Research Director. And Blakey prior to getting this appointment was very critical of the Lehman College technique. He said that, you know, this kind of CSI technique reduced the individuals and the burials to quote unquote, narrow typologies and thinly descriptive variables that thereby disassociated them from their particular culture and history. So Blakey had another process or another approach in mind. He thought that the, excuse me, before I go to that, let me say that moreover some of the activists pictured here that I mentioned also took Blakey's line. Like they understood that what the Lehman College it kind of again, in shorthand, a kind of CSI approach amounted to was what they called the biological racing of their ancestors bodies. At the same time, many of these same activists wanted research to be carried out that could provide some information about who they understood to be their ancestors, which is a political claim about kinship and about therefore about who could be in control of the disposition of these remains. The activists opposed merely descriptive frameworks that they argued would quote, reduce their ancestors social identity to skin color. So the strategy that Michael Blakey comes up with is a interdisciplinary research strategy that includes forms of, you know, sort of history, archeology, dental morphology that I think would be familiar to many of us, but more controversially, the analysis of phenotypic traits of craniometry, craniomic traits, and also molecular genetics. And the implication here going back to Blakey's critique is that there was a way to do genetic, biological, morphological examination of these remains that could yield not narrow typologies, not a biological racing of the remains, but a full story because it's a multidisciplinary project that's not taking one of these epistemologies as what the answer is to who these people are, but putting them all in conversation together. So it's not the genetics that, if you don't do genetics alone or craniometry alone, one reduces the risk of the sort of violence and racism and essentialism of quote, unquote, biological racing. So Rick Kittles would take this approach and create the African Ancestry Company. What this company offers is a certificate of ancestry that gives an inference to both an ethnic group and a nation state along with other documentation that's a lot more nuanced. But in this instance, Albert Sampson as being inferred to be related to the contemporary Temne people of Sierra Leone. So I wrote several years ago with colleagues, a policy paper in science that goes to the limitations of all of ancestry testing and of claims about identity, the fact that they're a historical, the fact that genetic markers and statistical assumptions are made to stand in for identity and identity processes, so I can say more about that in the Q&A, but I would also point you to that paper for more on that line of conversation. So what I wanna talk about now is the fact that, that the sort of genetically inferred identity is not the endpoint and that these reconciliation projects that the genetically inferred information becomes a catalyst for social action. And to go to my earlier question, why do we still have these tests is that I would suggest that allow people to do things in the world that are important and that reconciliation projects are one of these. So I mentioned that there were activists at the African Burial Ground Project who wanted the souls to be laid to rest. And so there was, in some instances, 24-hour candlelighting, drumming ritual and the like, there were people who just did not want even the research to be done. One of these cultural activists at the African Burial Ground Project is a woman named Deidre Farmer Palman. Farmer Palman is quoted around this time in the New York Times as saying that she was there on one of these vigils watching over the souls of people who are understood to be, deceased people enslaved Africans understood to be her ancestors and the ancestors of others there. And that she saw before it became an excavation site and it was a construction site. Skulls and bodies sort of pulled up with backhoes. And she said that she felt that her ancestors were telling her that she had to do something not only to stop the excavation process but to also restore and I've repaired restitution for the descendants of formerly enslaved people. So they take up a great deal of her life and continues, I think, to occupy her life. If she would put her through Brooklyn Law School to try to figure out a legal strategy that one might use to advance a case for slavery reparations. Some of you will recall that at the same time at Harvard University, Randall Robinson and Charles Obaltree and others had the restitution study group. And so you had some of the most elite legal minds in the country trying to come up with a strategy for how to advance a legal case for slavery reparations. And then you had this African-American woman working in a tradition of reparations activists that had been very important figures who were black women, Cali House and Queen Mother Jalois Blakey among others who had been sort of leading the charge of reparations. But she was considered, I think, by the more elite lawyers, a kind of upstart and looked at with some amusement and wonder. So it was surprising and historic when she became the lead plaintiff in 2002, a legal case called Farmer-Pailman v. Fleet Boston. A historic case for slavery reparations filed by eight plaintiffs against 21 multinational corporations in the Eastern District Court of New York. And these corporations included Lloyds of London, Fleet Boston, CSX, multinational corporations said to exist today because of the proceeds that they and the wealth that these companies had accumulated during the era of slavery. So an insurance company like Lloyds of London ensured enslaved Africans as property on behalf of their owners. CSX trafficked enslaved Africans and train routes across the United States and the like. So a little press coverage here. This is the New York Times. Companies are sued for slave reparations. The suit was filed in a federal court in Brooklyn on behalf of all living descendants of slaves in this country. It seeks unspecified damages. This is in 2002 spring. By 2004, the winter, you won't be surprised to hear that the lawsuit had been dismissed. They had gone to an appellate court in Chicago and it was dismissed for a couple of different reasons. But in part because of the standing doctrine. So this is from that 2004 dismissal. The plaintiffs cannot establish a personal injury sufficient to confer standing by merely alleging some genealogical relationship to African-Americans held in slavery over 100, 200 or 300 years ago. So again, this is 2004, this dismissal. This is Deidre Farmer-Pillman, pictured with one of her attorneys. This is not her attorney, Edward Fagan, but one of her attorneys was Edward Fagan, who a couple of years prior had succeeded and successfully suing Swiss banks on behalf of Holocaust survivors for reparations. And so that's a different court system, but they were taking a similar strategy here and going after existing sort of capitalist organizations to make the case for reparations. So they were left with this sort of conundrum. How do we argue that we're not, how do we get around the standing doctrine and this accusation, this allegation that we're merely alleging a genealogical relationship to African-Americans held in slavery? How do we, is there a way to demonstrate this further? So it's 2004, as I mentioned previously, the African ancestry companies established in 2003. So within the first year of that company's existence, Deidre Farmer-Pillman and another of the plaintiffs in the case go to the company and seek and in purchase African ancestry test kits to offer as a kind of evidentiary retort to the court's claim, the Chicago appellate court's claim that they were merely alleging a genealogical relationship to their former enslaved ancestors. So this is the first time that I've been able to find that direct to consumer genetic testing appears in the court in this way. Certainly forms of this testing has appeared in family court, we can think back to 15 years ago or something in the Maury-Povet show and these kind of gotcha paternity tests. But this is a civil court case and these are not submitted as evidence per se because it's not that kind of proceeding but they write in the legal brief in a response to the 2004 dismissal, the results that they had received and that they make the claim that they do have standing and they're not merely alleging a relationship to enslaved ancestors. So by 2006, the same court again rejects the claims and it wasn't an evident, they formally submit the DNA test as evidence but the court does weigh in on those and effectively says that genetic mapping or DNA testing alone is insufficient to provide a decisive link to homeland. And so this is a reconciliation project, it's an endeavor that doesn't succeed I think in a kind of cut and dry way but it certainly succeeds in keeping the kind of drumbeat for reparations going. It will be in less than 10 years that it's the case that Ta-Nehisi Coates writes his case for reparations on the pages of the Atlantic Magazine and now you know that we're as a society well engaged in a conversation around reparations. I also wanna suggest that part of what was at stake here is my read, which I think Alvin Weinberg might not totally agree with the late chemist physicist about the trans-scientific. So he proposed writing in 1972 kind of in the sort of wake of the 60s movements and the wake of, you know, as Vietnam is the Vietnam war is kind of starting to wind down he was very invested in distinguishing between kind of science and politics. And so this quote comes out of him writing in that tradition but I think that he speaks to something bigger here. So this is quoting Weinberg questions which can be asked of science and yet which cannot be answered by science. I propose the term trans-scientific for these questions since though they are epistemologically speaking questions of fact and can be stated in the language of science they are unanswerable by science they transcend science. For me, these are questions of morality, of justice and indeed of ethics are the trans-scientific questions and that, you know but I also think these are questions of kind of will to transformation and political will. You know, there, I think one can, you know arguably there's no kind of evidentiary barrier or sort of threshold that one can meet that will provide reparations for an aggrieved community that deserves repair and any society unless the society wants to do it. So that's one reconciliation project. Let me tell you briefly about another. This is the actor Isaiah Washington pictured here. You'll remember from his time on a Grey's Anatomy and his sort of infamous departure from Grey's Anatomy. And this is in South Carolina. I in North South Carolina, I followed him and others there for a ceremony called a Sara. Isaiah Washington had done African ancestry testing and he had been through that testing inferred to be related to the ethnic group in Sierra Leone through matrilineage. And this was a reconciliation project a sort of ceremony of remembrance on the shores of the Ashley River where important slave large slave auctions took place during the era of plantation slavery. And everyone, so three of the people pictured here lay claim to Sierra Leone through different bases of affiliation. Isaiah Washington sent through genetic ancestry testing. This is a woman named Tamalyn Colite who has traced her ancestry to contemporary Sierra Leone using the manifests and other documents from the slave trade. And this gentleman here, Amadou Masali who I believe has now immigrated back to Sierra Leone but flew in from Texas that day to sort of be the grio and efficient of this ceremony. So the ceremony took place, as I said, on the shore of the bank of the Ashley River where the Ashley Ferry landing where many enslaved Africans were brought for sale. This is Amadou Masali here. He claimed to have soiled with him that day from Sierra Leone that he cast into the Ashley River and gave prayers that were intended to rest the souls of people who had been trafficked from contemporary Sierra Leone to the Carolina low countries. So Isaiah Washington appears here in part as a member of, is a DNA Sierra Leonean with given access to this relationship to Sierra Leone via genetic ancestry testing. He would succeed in being one of the few people to get dual citizenship in Sierra Leone. This is his Sierra Leonean passport that I took at an event in about 2009 and which he and Rick Kittles were overseeing the sort of reveal ceremonies for people who had used African ancestry's genetic ancestry test including myself. That evening, the son of Marcus Garvey learned that he had Y chromosome DNA that traced to the continent of Africa to West Africa and the son of Martin Luther King, Jr. pictured here learned that he had Y chromosome DNA that was inferred to be from Europe and they both sort of gave remarks variously about that. So I'm gonna move forward now to talk about another facet of social life of DNA to wrap up the spillover that I mentioned between sites of genetic analysis from one use to another. To begin, I wanna quote Sarah, so when I interviewed who said, we think breast cancer runs in our family now that I understand my African ancestry test, the difference between the mother's line and the father's line and all that, I have a better sense of what the genetic counselor, excuse me, and the genetic counselor at my doctor's office was telling me. So that spillover there between the medical genetics and the forensic genetics. I also wanna offer you a quote from someone else I interviewed who I call Pat, who worked in a criminal forensics lab. I've seen people let off DNA sentences based on DNA. I'm not questioning about that, given my experiences, there's no reason to doubt the technology. So Pat, of course, suggests for us a kind of halo effect around genetic testing in some African-American communities that's really given a voice in the work of the Innocence Project. This is from 2016, but there's many other instances of people exonerated using forms of genetic analysis. More close to the story of direct to consumer genetics are a series of cases, some of which will be familiar to you and which the criminal justice system begins to use. Really citizen science databases and the like to access DNA information to endeavor to resolve cold cases. So this is from several years ago, filmmaker named Michael Usredi and uses the fact that he was a horror filmmaker to talk about the horror that entered his life, vis-a-vis being caught up in a cold case and he turned out not to be related to this aspect in this cases at all. More recently, we know that the JED match, also all kind of citizen science third party database was used to apprehend the Golden State Killer. I would offer here, yes, we want to find serial killers, but we need to think about the sort of ethical and legal implications of really trawling through lots of people's DNA profiles and the course of trying to find, obviously the killer that we wanna catch. I would point to also the use of DNA as part of the spillover, the proposed use of it. 23andMe offered its services to reunite immigrant families that were separated at the US-Mexico border. We now know from recent reporting this week that nearly 500 children have been separated from their families, we cannot find the parents. And the complexity of using genetic ancestry testing for that, I mean, some of these families might not be bio-ken, but they are certainly families and DNA testing can only get us so far with that. And then there's issues about where the data goes who gets to disposition of the disposition of the data and the like. I will remind you that these thorny issues around direct to consumer genetics come up when the state wants them to come up. This is from last December, just before the holidays the US, the Secretary of Defense, the DOD sent a memo to members of the services of the branches of services as well, telling them effectively that they should be careful and not use direct to consumer genetic ancestry testing that it offers or health testing because it poses an operational risk to service members, to their privacy it might be used by foreign actors to gain information about them and their families and the like. So, and lastly of course, the direct to consumer genetics is turning up and conversations about how to mitigate and better understand COVID-19. So the social life of DNA continues apace. So I know that I've run long and with that I will stop sharing my screen and hope that we can take some time for conversation. Oh, Professor Nelson, thank you very much. Can you hear me? I can hear you well. Okay, we have so many questions and we just have a couple of minutes. So I'm gonna try to be very selective here. One of the lessons from the Farmer-Pillman case, it seemed could be the conclusion that genetic genealogy testing is not going to be an effective strategy for reconciliation projects. Do you think in retrospect that it was perhaps a mistake to try to base reconciliation upon the brutality of slavery per se rather than sort of the entire history of structural racism that has followed? What sort of the bottom line lesson that you would take from that case and from the efforts to use this genetic testing as a basis for reconciliation and reparations? Yes, I think I've spent a lot of my career studying activists and spending time with activist community. So I think that they're always trying to gain advantage in the court of public opinion. And so I suspect that Farmer-Pillman knew that they might not need the standing doctrine. That's a kind of basic, I think, insight of law school. So, but it was very important for this case to be in the New York Times, to be in the Chicago Tribune, to keep the conversation going about the case for reparations. So I think it is, you know, it's into what, you know, I think that reparations activists have been making a structural racism case for a very long time. But I think that approaches to the court in particular were often in the narrow lane of the sort of damage and injury.  It's an injury claim. So I guess, you know, Bob, there's probably, I think there's two ways to answer that question. As an activist tactic, I think it was actually quite brilliant. As an actual tactic in which the genetic science could work, you know, it was a weak strategy and that, you know, direct to consumer genetics up until fairly recently was really comes out of human population genetics. It's really a kind of population lens on the world. It's not about the individual. So I think part of the sort of weakness of the strategy was that one was trying to use a technology of population to say something about eight individuals and about their kind of, you know, genealogy. And then I think, you know, of course, one can make a larger, you know, sort of argument. But we also in the courts, I mean, it also sort of who, you know, to whom is one seeking, from whom is one seeking restitution? It's very hard as we know from our colleagues who work on discrimination law to make a kind of structural discrimination case in the law. You know, one has to show intent and have, you know, all sorts of other evidence as well. And it's getting increasingly hard to demonstrate that. So I think I wouldn't call it a mistake. I would call it quite ingenious. And, you know, and probably in some ways knowing about the limitations of what was possible and not possible as well. All right. I think maybe the question I have is just too big for the minute or so that we have left. But one of the parts of your book is that many Africans look with some amusement at the desire of African-Americans to establish this homeland. And like, you know, if it's so important to have a homeland, why don't you just move here? What do you see as some of the motivations there that you might respond to somebody who says, gee, you know, why do you care so much about this? I think there's mixed responses. So I write a little bit in my book about a series of engagements in social media between African-Americans who are kind of performing their genetic inference results and, you know, people who claim to be either expats or people on the African continent. And some of them say, you know, so glad for you, we feel like the problems with African-Americans is that people don't have their identity.  I will say, even with I think the critique, I mean, it's clear that, you know, part of what these, this is the symbolic ethnicity, part of what these tests actualize or activate is consumption, you know, through tourism, through, you know, heritage trips and these sorts of things. And so I think even in some communities on the African continent that are critical, there is also an understanding that there's a, you know, it's not quite a remittance, but they're, but creating a kind of diaspora identity and African-Americans, you know, does also sort of catalyze the flow of resources through tourism and other things. So, you know, so it's, you know, I wouldn't want to speak for, you know, 54 countries, but it's, you know, it's a bit complicated and a little bit across the map, but there is, you know, there's consumption and the use of direct to consumer genetics by African-Americans, it's a kind of bourgeois pursuit. And, you know, potentially consumption in one of the ways that people sort of use this genetically inferred identity to do things in the world. And that is through traveling and trying to make connections. All right, well, thank you so much for really a wonderful talk. And thanks to everyone who participated in all of this and we'll continue with some of our students in a few minutes, Professor Nelson. So thanks everyone for being here, goodbye. Thank you.