Start. Thank you. So good morning everyone. Not so many people this morning, but maybe on Sunday morning normal. So welcome, our first speaker of today will be Claire Giordano, who is working in Microsoft team on the progress things, and she is from Citus Data. Can you say that all again with a much louder voice? Stephanie is going crazy back there. All right. I have to scream a little bit more. So, Claire Giordano from Microsoft team, from Citus Data, working on Postgres and amazing speakers. So give her a warm welcome. Thank you. So how many of you have been to the Postgres Dev Room before at Fosdam here? Okay. And for how many of you is it your first time? All right. So more first timers. What I will tell you is last year, the first talk of the day did have fewer people just like this. I don't know what the problem is with 10 o'clock in the morning, but apparently there's a problem at Fosdam. And then by the second or third talk, the room which fit 300 people was full. So if you're here and you're interested in staying, I recommend you keep your seat because it should fill up as the day progresses. So my name is Claire Giordano and I'm here to talk to you today about Fibonacci spirals and 21 ways to contribute to Postgres beyond code. So before we start, I want to put a face to the name. And this man had lots of names. Leonardo Pisano Bigelow, Leonardo of Pisa, Leonardo Bonacci. And it turns out that Fibonacci was actually his nickname. And it means literally son of Bonacci. And oh my gosh, did I pronounce all those names properly? Fibonacci. Fibonacci, Fibonacci. Okay, I should have asked for your help on this first slide. Thank you. We have a real Italian sitting here in the front row. So he was, as most of you know, a 12th century Italian mathematician. Now, the sequence you're probably also familiar with, but what most people don't know is that Fibonacci did not discover the Fibonacci sequence. It actually first appeared in writings in India hundreds of years before Fibonacci's time. And he traveled extensively in the Middle East and when he came back, he wrote a book called Lider Abachi. Did I say that right? Close enough. And that book was all about the mathematical methods of commerce. And it had two major impacts on the world. The first is that it really popularized the Hindu and Arabic number systems because at that point in time, they were still using Roman numerals where Fibonacci was from. And the second impact was the Fibonacci sequence. And in the book, he posed this question and I have to read it to make sure I get it right. And the question was about, does anyone know what the question was about? Somebody tell me. Okay, it was about rabbits. So if a pair of rabbits is placed in an enclosed area, how many rabbits will be born if we assume that every month, a pair of rabbits will produce another pair and that rabbits begin to bear young two months after birth? That seemingly innocuous rabbit question leads to this very powerful Fibonacci sequence. So the title of this talk, though, has to do with Fibonacci spirals. So I figured I'd better show you all how to create a Fibonacci spiral. So if you create a tile for each number in the sequence, that's a square, so a one by one, two by two, three by three, five by five, eight by eight, and so on, you see that the tiles all connect together really elegantly. And then if you put a quarter turn of a circle inside each of those squares, you create this beautiful green Fibonacci spiral that you see on the screen. And it is closely related to the golden spiral, but I'm not gonna talk about the golden spiral in this talk or the differences between them. So let's not go there. All right, so what do Fibonacci spirals have to do with contributing to Postgres? Well, as I was conceiving this talk, I started to think about all the different types of contributions that can help drive the adoption of Postgres on the planet. So if we're looking to increase the number of users, the number of developers, the number of pull requests, the number of consultants that work in this space, the number of applications that are running on top of Postgres, well, I had to figure out what kind, how much adoption we wanted to drive. Did we wanna drive exponential adoption? Did we wanna drive Fibonacci adoption? And see a Fibonacci curve, which is what you see here, right? This is the Fibonacci sequence plotted with a linear y-axis. And so that's where the idea for Fibonacci connecting in with this talk might have come from. Or it might have come from the fact that I just always wanted to put a Romanesco cauliflower in one of my talks. Now, how many of you have seen, touched, or eaten one of these? Okay, so less than half the room. These things are super cool. I think they're mathematically beautiful. They are Fibonacci spirals. And in fact, they're also fractals. So they're kind of a double whammy of mathematical beauty in one vegetable. And it turns out that there are Fibonacci spirals all over in nature, in snail shells, for example, in artichokes, underneath pine cones in the arrangement of the bracts on the bottom of pine cones. Those are all Fibonacci spirals. And sunflowers in the arrangement of the seeds on the top of the sunflower flower. Those are Fibonacci spirals too. And I'm even told that you can see Fibonacci in the arrangement of pigeons on rooftops and how they line up on the rooftops. Now, this part's not true. And you can thank Dimitri Fontaine for having me add it to the talk. And last time I did this, a lot more people laughed. So thank you for the people in the front row who chuckled at that. Okay, but this part's not true. Don't remember this part. All right, so 21 ways to contribute to Postgres. This is why we're here. We're here to talk about Postgres. And really quickly, why do I have anything to contribute or say on this topic? I started my career as a developer at Sun Microsystems in the Developer Tools Group. And over the course of my career, I've worn lots of different hats. I've contributed in many different ways. I spent the bulk of my career as an engineering manager in the Kernel Group at Sun Microsystems back when there was a Sun Microsystems. And I've also, just over 10 years ago, moved into product management and product marketing roles. So I've seen these contributions come from different angles. And in fact, when I moved from engineering over to product marketing, there were people, friends of mine, who frankly questioned me and my choices. And they felt like the work I was doing was somehow less important now. And so let me ask you this. Those of you in the room, have any of you ever worked in a small software company? A small startup or a small firm? Raise of hands, please. Wow, more than half of you. Okay, so one of my lessons working in a small company is that it's like you're all in the boat, you're out in the middle of the ocean and you're all pulling on the oars and doing whatever it is your role is and we all need each other. Every role matters. Whether it's the person ordering toilet paper for the bathroom, so you have toilet paper when customers come to visit or the developers, the people in finance, making sure all the numbers work, salespeople matter a lot if you're trying to make money. And if our goal is to delight our customers, we all have to work together. So that's why there's this emphasis on beyond code, which is what the next slide goes ahead to pose. I've already answered this question. The other thing I should point out is that I joined Citus Data three years ago. And Citus has claimed to fame as we've created an open source extension to Postgres called Citus that scales out Postgres horizontally. And the reason the Microsoft logo is there, we got acquired a year ago. And so I now work for Microsoft, which 10 years ago, I don't know how I would have exactly felt about that, but these days I'm actually quite happy with a company that Microsoft is growing up to become. So I'm pleased and I'm happy there and I'm still there. All right, so we talked about why beyond code. And now I just wanna tell you that when I was submitting my talk proposal for the CFP, I did a quick search at the very last minute. I had it all ready to go. And then I had this little paranoid thought of, uh-oh, what if someone just did this? What if someone just did this earlier this year? I better check. So I did a few Google searches and sure enough, Josh Bergus delivered a talk back in 2013 called 50 ways to love your project. So those of you who don't know Josh, he was on the core team for Postgres for many years. Now he has emeritus status. I always mispronounce that word. And so I just wanted to give a shout out to him because I definitely, once I discovered his talk, I went and studied his slides and made sure to incorporate it. And I wanted to say thank you. And it's been seven years. So it seemed time to have the conversation again and make more people aware of all the types of ways you can contribute to Postgres to make it successful. And now we're just gonna dive in 21 ways. The first way is obviously let's start with the brain dead obvious, attend conferences. You guys are all here at Fosdome, so you get that. What some people don't get though is that when you go to a conference, of course you're focused on what you can learn, what you can get out of it. And what you don't always realize is that you're impacting the people that you're talking to in the hallway track. Let's say the two of you meet for the first time and you have a conversation and you share some tip that changes your work when you go back to whatever your project is next week. That happens all the time and it's super powerful. So that participation matters a lot. That sharing matters a lot. The second way is just an extension if you will or a smaller local example of sharing at conferences. There are lots of ways to participate in local meetups. Does anybody recognize this picture? Did anyone? You do. Where is that? I'm wearing the blue shirt. Got it. So you're in the picture. You're now famous. Got it. So this is a PostgreSQL meetup in the Netherlands. Thank you to Boris and the people at Optima Data for helping me track down the photo. I particularly like the green floor because I've never worked in an office space that has a football field that you can play around in. Where I work in California, we have ping pong tables in the office but we've never quite had the turf to play football. And of course we don't even call it football in the States but let's not go there and use the other term. So there's obvious ways to participate in meetups, attend, give talks, give feedback to speakers. Speakers love feedback. We want to get better. We want to add value. And so if you ever have an idea about something that somebody didn't mention or a related point, give them that feedback. But there's some non-obvious ways to contribute to meetups too. So if you or your company are in a position to host a meetup like the folks here were, that is a great and valuable thing to do. The other thing, the organizers always appreciate are when people chip in to help pay for food and drink for the evening because their attendees tend to appreciate food and drink. So that's another way. All right, number three. You can share your expertise by giving a conference talk just like so many people are doing here at FOSDOM. I had to put this picture up here because their CFP just opened a couple of days ago. So this is Postgres Ibiza, which this year will happen in June and it will be the second year that it happens. It's called Postgres on the Beach. And I've had a few debates with people about whether Postgres on the Beach is a real conference or whether it's what we call in English a boondoggle.  It's kind of like a business trip that where there's not so much business and it's really more play. It turns out this is a very serious conference and I was talking to one of my teammates, Dimitri Fontaine, and he went last year and he said it's absolutely one of the best conferences that he's ever been to. So heads up about that CFP. I think there's also a CFP, you went also last year. So Mabub was there last year and you can vouch for it as well. Okay. They're expecting to grow this year and have an even bigger following. I think there are other CFPs that are open right now for Postgres, if that's something you've ever considered, sharing your expertise and your lessons matters. You do not have to be a developer who works on Postgres. You do not have to be a contributor or a committer to have something valuable to share. In fact, user stories can make some of the best presentations. So whether you're an app developer or a DBA, your experience using Postgres is also worth sharing. I think PG Day Austria's CFP is also open right now. Am I missing any other ones? Oh, PG Day IT is open. So there are... Germany. Germany, that's right. And is Belgium open yet? Yes. Okay. All right. So you can go to the Postgresql.org website. They have a list of upcoming community events and from there you can track down what's opening up. All right. And Debra, I have to keep looking at my slides because they're not displaying here. So just apologizing to you. I know that's your pet peeve. You don't like people to turn back. Number four, post your slides online. If you do give a talk at a meetup, maybe something with your team and it's not confidential and it can be shared, I cannot emphasize enough the value of posting your slides online. By the way, those of you who are on the edges, squish into the middle if you see some seats next to you because people are filling in here. So please just get up, squish in, make space. Move right, yeah, move towards the brick wall over here. Thank you very much for accommodating. This room is going to be full. Thank you, Joe. All right. The number of digital views that you get for posting your slides online will often exceed the number of people in the room. Even if you have 300 people in the room, you'll still get more digital views online in almost all cases. This is a picture of a talk I gave last year in Switzerland and this is on SpeakerDeck, which happens to be my favorite, but there's lots of other slide sharing services that you can share your slides on. And of course the conference sites will always ask you, will often will ask you for it and they'll post it on their websites too. Most of us do that, but some people don't do it. Absolutely, get those digital views, share your expertise with people who couldn't afford to, in this case, make the trip to Fosdom and come here to Brussels. All right, so then the other way you could contribute is to start a local PG Day. I put this picture of PG Day Paris's logo up here because it is happening in March and it's happening two days after a wonderful PG Day in the Nordics, which this year is in Helsinki, Finland. So I went to Nordic last year, it was in Copenhagen and I felt privileged to be able to give a different talk there. But Paris has a warm place in my heart. I went to school in France many years ago and so I had to mention that. The thing about PG Days that's so special is their single track, one day events. And so that has a couple of interesting benefits. One is that they're just easier to get to. Typically you don't have to travel as far to get to them and you don't have to miss as much work because it's only a day and it's also less expensive because you don't have to travel as far and you don't have to miss as much work. And then it's intimate, like unlike today where some of you will change rooms throughout the day and maybe be sitting next to a stranger the entire day, you can walk through a whole day at Fosdham and not meet anybody. I know from experience that that's possible and it can be lonely. When you're in an intimate kind of one room, one day conference, you're with the same people all day and you're way more likely to meet people and build contacts that you stay in touch with afterwards. So for me at least, that's been my experience and other friends of mine have said that too. I wanted to highlight PG Day Santiago because Boris Mejies, who was in the room a while ago and left, he's not here to watch my talk, but he first told me about PG Day Santiago and it was a brand new PG Day that happened last fall in Chile and what I thought was so cool about it is it's the only PG Day I know of that was completely 100% in the local language. So it was all in Spanish, catering to the language and the interests of that local Postgres community and I thought that was pretty awesome. And then PG Day SF is something much closer to home. I'm from California, I live outside of San Francisco and I actually helped to create PG Day SF working with an awesome team of people across different companies and it just happened two weeks ago. So it's still fresh, we'll be doing the Postmortem excuse me, the retrospective. We don't say Postmortem anymore. We'll be doing the retrospective in about a week's time once I'm back in the States and it's a ton of work to create one of these PG days. I gotta tell you, I was on the talk selection committee for it, which was quite a privilege, but it's also very rewarding when you're there and you see people meeting for the first time and exchanging email addresses and phone numbers and talking about job opportunities or walking away with something from a talk that they didn't know about before. So it's pretty cool as an organizer to see that happen. All right, another way, number six. You can write a blog or post an article. I know, how many of you write blogs about using Postgres or working on Postgres? Raise of hands. Okay, just a few of you. All right, thank you. Well, it's, and I don't know why that's not showing it pisses me off quite frankly. Well, that's okay, those words don't matter. I took a picture of something, Laetitia Avro, who's one of the bouncers outside. She's volunteering today. So she's standing right outside that door, but she wrote an article for the Programe magazine in France and actually made the cover, which I thought was pretty darn cool. So that's why I used an article instead of a blog, but it's cool because you can reach so many more people digitally when you do that. All right, let's go forward. So if you do write blogs, then I absolutely recommend that you syndicate to Planet Postgres. Now, how many of you have syndicated blog posts you've written to Planet Postgres? Please raise your hands. Okay, I know Joe wants to raise his hands. Steven did in the back. Okay, awesome. Thank you, Debra. This is really powerful. I have published blogs. My team writes a lot of blogs about Postgres and open source and Citus. And when we syndicate to Planet Postgres, and there's a policy for doing this, has to be about Postgres. It has to be relevant. No spam, of course. But we reach a lot of people. Planet Postgres has a nice Twitter following. And if you don't follow it yet, 20,000 people and me all follow it, and you should definitely join in. I learn all sorts of interesting things that are going on across the various companies that work in this space. And if you don't use Twitter, you can always go to the postgresql.org website and you scroll down a bit. And there's a section on there called Planet Postgres, which has, you can, at the bottom of it, you can click to the archives and that's how you can get to the RSS feed that exists for it. And you can also get to, on the right hand column, the policies and how to get started. If you are writing about Postgres and you want to syndicate, all those instructions are available there. All right, number eight, you could write a book. So I talked to Dimitri about how he wrote this book, The Art of Postgres. And he said that if you find yourself in the Postgres world constantly answering the same question over and over, or that people are constantly asking the same questions over and over, that maybe there's a book there. Maybe there's a series of questions you could collate together into some structure and publish it and reach even more people. And how many of you have read or bought The Art of Postgres? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Okay, that's awesome. I have not read it yet. It is in English, but I've heard from people that it's awesome. And when he found out I was gonna be putting a big graphic of his book here today, he agreed to give me a discount code. So those of you who do wanna get it, you can use Claire 15 to get 15% off on any edition of the book. He has paper editions, what he calls the dead tree editions as well as digital versions. And you can just go to The Art of Postgresql.com in order to track that down. So, and the slides are already published. So if you forgot, you can look it up later. Here's another book by Marcus Winand. This is the German edition, sequel performance explained. How many of you have used or read or consulted with this book? All right, so about another almost 10 people. One of my colleagues said that in her first year as a developer working on Postgres, this was her Bible. It was incredibly valuable to help her understand how to optimize her queries for performance reasons. So she highly recommended it and I just thought I would feature it and you can find it at sequel-performance-explained.com. And again, these slides are already public. Okay, so the next thing you can do is to create user stories. Now, you don't have to work for a Postgres company like I do to wanna create customer stories or case studies. Plenty of users will write blog posts on their own engineering blogs about their experience. Migrating their app to Postgres or improving the performance running on Postgres. And those stories are valuable too. I suspect a lot of you in this room probably have insights into how people are using Postgres. And for people who are considering it, that stuff is gold. It's pure gold, so it's worth the effort. Now, the reason I put a picture here of a man holding a big light up high above a stage where people are getting ready to do a performance is because I feel like when you're creating a user story, you have that same kind of power.  Where he shines the light is what their attention is gonna be focused on. And the order in which he moves the light from this corner to that corner to the middle affects the audience experience. And so when I've created user stories, that's how I often perceive of it is I'm that lighting technician that's figuring out what matters and what people considering Postgres want to know about and wanna learn about. If you do this, I have two tips for you. Whether you work on your own open source project or for a company, don't ever, ever outsource the interview with the end user because then you have people just reading off of standard templates of questions and they don't necessarily get to the interesting meet. And frankly, sometimes they're bored because they can tell the person interviewing them doesn't know anything about the topic. The other tip I have is a lot of writers that you might hire freelancers to help you write the story. Their tendency is to take something really colorful, maybe something politically incorrect or idiomatic that these words that people have used and they try to make it generic and vanilla and standard and reaching everybody. And that makes the stories really boring. So don't do that either. Try to keep your stories as authentic as possible to the way actual users talk about it. All right, number 10. You can use video to help show what Postgres can do. And the reason for that is some people just learn better with video, right? Some of us are great with books. We're book smart, right? And we're great reading articles, reading documentation to figure out what we need to do. But other people need to see a demo. They need to see a screencast. I need to increase my voice. All right, is that better, Stephanie? Okay, we're good. This is just a picture of a video I helped to produce with Marco Slott in the Netherlands last year. So I just wanted to put an example up there as a way of leading you to the next topic, which is if you do create these small, bite-sized videos, like not longer than five minutes, please, because nobody wants to watch videos that are longer than five minutes, just making sure you have really good video metadata matters. It matters for people's discoverability of it. And so don't just include your title and your abstract, but also try to put a couple video bookmarks in there that will link to that special spot in the middle, which you think people are really gonna care about. And just think, if somebody's watched your entire screencast, and then they read the entire description and they're hungry for more, be sure to put some other links at the bottom, which I don't know if you can see in the back there, but just put a little green check mark next to them, link to whatever they can get to next so they can keep learning more about whatever your open source project is or whatever your product is. All right, number 11. If you build it, they will not come. But boy, oh boy, am I so happy for the word of mouth that surrounds FOSDOM because all of you are here today. So thank you for coming. And by the way, if you do see an empty spot next to you, please, after he's done, squish over so you make more space. You have to promote what you've created. So whether you create videos or blog posts or new extensions, maybe you've created a new repo on GitHub, you do have to make people aware of it. What I've found is that people in my inner circle, you know, the people I work with every day, maybe who sit next to me, some of them are super helpful to also help me spread the word and some of them don't wanna help. Some of them just aren't comfortable doing that. They feel like it's too self-promotional when they work really closely with me. And so what I've experienced is it's my secondary network, like friends of friends or acquaintances who are even more generous and help spread the word and create word of mouth around whatever projects I'm working on, which I think is fabulous. All right, so now promote on Twitter. How many of you use Twitter? Okay, so about half of you. I think it's an incredibly great place to learn about Postgres.  This is a picture of the at Postgres QL Twitter feed, which is the community Twitter feed that went live, I think sometime about a year, a year and a half ago. And so I think there's almost 16,000 followers here now. If you're not following it yet, this is a great place to hear about the latest announcements of Postgres. But if you work with Postgres, one way to contribute is to share some of your learnings and your epiphanies and your perspectives and your lessons on Twitter. If you just read a great article that you're recommending to the person next to you on your project, why not tweet about it and include that link and let people know.  And I think you all know that Postgres is growing. This is a small room this year. Last year we had a room that sat 300 and we filled it by the second and third talks of the day. So, and what, DB engines, database of the year, two years in a row, but not this year, unfortunately. But there's lots of evidence of some significant growth in this space. This might be, number 13, the most important thing you can do to help contribute to the growth of Postgres, which is that when you're working in this space, say thank you. I don't think I do this enough. I think lots of us don't do this enough. If you like somebody's work, praise it. And especially if they're junior, especially if they're new, especially if they're stumbling along and making the mistakes that we all make, especially when we were new. I put this example of a tweet up there from a Postgres engineer named Louise Grangeanc, who lives in Paris, and she had gone to a meetup in New York City and saw Sam Bale's talk and really, really liked it on foreign data wrappers. And so instead of, it would have been wonderful if she had just gone up to Sam and said that was great. I really appreciated this part and this part and I'm gonna use them in my job this week. But she went even further and tweeted about it and kind of raised awareness, probably drove a bunch more followers for Sam on Twitter and recommended that people go to Sam's talk at the next conference where Sam was presenting. And I thought that was a very generous gift. And I think we just need to help each other. And one of the benefits is that when that person, in this case, Sam, is having a bad day or running into obstacles, well, they have this and all these positive experiences to fall back on. All right, number 14. How many of you know that the messages to Postgres are translated? Okay, a small number. I felt like seven hands, eight hands went up. I didn't know that either in the beginning. I think it's awesome. There's a whole bunch of people who are actively working on translating the Postgres messages into all sorts of languages. And this is a screenshot of a website called, called, get this, bobble.postgresql.org. I put the URL right over there on the right. It's of the current status. I took the screenshot last night. And if any of you speak multiple languages, which I'm guessing, let's just ask that question. How many of you speak more than English? Okay, there you go. I knew I was in the right place. That is absolutely a way that you can contribute. And if you're just getting started with Postgres and you want to make a contribution now, but maybe you're not ready to do it in some other areas, this is a great way to get started. So there are instructions in the Postgres documentation about how translators can do it. And there's no code involved. It's weird. On the wiki it's called national language support. And on the documentation it's called native language support. So I don't know, just it's native language support in the documentation. You can Google for that there and find it. But this is an awesome way to help. Now another way to help is to report bugs with Postgres. This is super valuable. I know there's a tendency among human beings to sometimes feel like someone's already reported this bug. I can't be the first one to run into this. This is so obvious that probably hundreds of people have already reported it. I don't need to report it. But absolutely you should because you don't know that and oftentimes other people haven't reported it. The turnaround time in the Postgres QL team for fixing things is pretty impressive. I have been told of instances where bugs were literally fixed within an hour of having been reported. More likely it'll be considered as a candidate for the next patch release. Patch releases are every quarter. And then the major releases for Postgres are every year. So if it's something sizable and impact, maybe it would be a candidate for a major release. But people feel in the core team and in the contributor community that these bug reports are gold and we absolutely want people to do it. So how do you submit bug reports? Where do you submit them? Well, you could just send an email to the mailing list and it's pgsql-bugs on the mailing list. That's one option. You can also fill out a form that I think I don't show a picture of. But you can fill out a form that you can find on the webpage and it will in turn mail the mailing list. Now there is a very important caveat and Joe is looking at me. He's got his eyes looking at me right now. So I think he's hoping that I'm gonna say this. If the bug has security implications of any kind then you probably don't wanna report it using that process. Don't use the mailing list and don't use the form because that effectively makes it public. If there are security implications you can check the documentation and you'll find that you should mail it more privately to security at pgsql.org. Got it, is that good? Give a thumbs up on that one. All right, very important. All right, number 16, submit corrections to documentation. I have talked to some pretty serious post-gress engineers where this is the very first way that they participated and contributed to the community. And it can be as simple as a typo. That's worth fixing. Cause you know, when there are typos people think maybe the rest of the technology might have mistakes in it. And so we like to fix those. My thing that I tend to notice is a lot of times people will use language that seems super clear, can only be understood in one way but in fact it's ambiguous and there are multiple interpretations for it. So if you see any ambiguities by all means submit corrections to them so that we can get those things fixed. And of course if there's anything in the documentation that makes you hit your head against the wall at one in the morning when you're trying to figure something out and you just can't find the answer that's absolutely worthwhile to submit to. Now at the bottom of every documentation page you'll see something that looks like this. So just scroll down to the bottom it says submit correction and it welcomes you to submit it and there's a form that you link to and I tried to make it in a narrow mobile mode so you could see the whole thing. But then you could just fill in that form provide your comment and take it from there. All right, number 17. Stickers are a thing. Okay, so I can see that Federico has lots of stickers on his laptop. I don't know if you guys can see mine. I'm just gonna lift it up and show you that it's got a ton of stickers on it. How many of you have pristine laptops that are untouched by stickers? Oh my goodness, so about 15 maybe 20 of you and how many of you have lots of stickers? Come on. All right, so slightly fewer. I will tell you that where I work in California stickers are absolutely a thing and one of the things that I think so you can see the Postgres sticker down at the bottom I actually just picked that up at the PG Day on Friday that happened here in Brussels at the Hilton and that's an event that precedes FOSDOM every year and if you're interested in Postgres I recommend you go next year. There were about 125 people there if I remember correctly and I'm just single day, single track, all about Postgres. Anyway, so that's where I picked that sticker up but I was on a train coming home a while ago and somebody saw my laptop because I work on the train. I hotspot my phone and I was just cranking along all in my own little world and this man leaned over and he said, do you work at Citus Data? So this must have been right before the acquisition and so it led to this wonderful 45 minute conversation all about Citus and scaling out Postgres and the extension and it was a pretty fabulous experience and I've heard that echoed by other people. They'll be in coffee shops and they'll have a Postgres sticker and somebody will come up and start talking to them about it. So if you don't like people and you don't wanna talk to people maybe it's not for you but I think it's fabulous and in fact at the end of my talk I do have some of our cool Alicorn stickers that link to our open source repo if you're interested in that. Okay, so number 18, use your design skills. Oh my gosh, I gotta speed up. Graphics and visuals pull people in. So this is that Alicorn that I mentioned that we make stickers of. We use an Alicorn because Postgres of course the beloved symbol is the elephant and at Citus we felt like we made the elephant magic by scaling it out horizontally so we combined the elephant with the unicorn and that's its history. Another example of using design is in Louise Grand-Jean's Crocodile. So she gave a fabulous talk at a bunch of Postgres conferences over a year ago about a deep, deep talk about Postgres indexes, very heavy hitting but she used the notion of cleaning crocodile's teeth as a theme to kinda connect the dots on all of her conversations about Postgres indexes and it got people in the room. She had a crowded jam-packed room. It also kept them awake. They weren't bored, like the storyline and her connections were very creative. And then here's another example of using design to help grow the Postgres community. I just gave one of you a Postgres activity book. He's holding it here. I have about 10 more with me that I can share but it's a book full of coloring pages and puzzles geared at kids, although adults like it too and it's just about promoting Postgres. So there's a page on multi-tenancy and there's a page on analytics and there's a page on discovery and they're all kid-friendly but they might foster a conversation between you and your kids about, well, what is Postgres and what is a database? And mom, dad, what do you actually do at work anyway? So they're pretty fun and they've been very popular and they're not heavily branded at all. I think on the back we put with love from our team at Microsoft but that's it. So those are examples of using your design skills. Now, the other thing that I've seen more and more is people at conferences, people who maybe don't like to write are not gonna publish blogs. They're more like bullets people. That's how they like to communicate. They'll create these things called sketch notes where they'll put together a few bullets of the few main takeaways of a talk. They'll put little doodles on it and use some color and it's very effective. So this is from an engineer at Okta, the security company named David Neal or Reverend Geek on Twitter and I'm just waiting for him to come to one of my talks and create a cool sketch notes of one of my presentations. The thing that's interesting is there's a designer I know named Christina Wadke in the San Francisco Bay Area and she teaches a user experience class for interaction designers and just general user experience and she did a small A-B test. It's not statistically significant but where she gave one set of students the assignment of creating a sketch note at the end of each chapter of learning in that course. It was a semester long course I believe and the other set of students did not have to create a sketch note and the students who had to create the sketch notes performed better significantly on their grades for that semester which I thought was kind of interesting and it might connect to the fact that using paper and pencil helps people retain information or in this case paper and marker. All right, so number 20, evangelize at your local university. Now this picture was actually the room at Fosdome last year. As you can see it was bigger and Devereux Gondous standing over here is actually the photographer and he posted this on Twitter, thank you very much for sharing. So I didn't have a good picture of people giving a talk at their local university about post-grats or maybe going back to their alma mater talking about how they use post-grats or what they're working on with it but if you are, this is a fabulous way to contribute and in fact it probably will change the trajectory of some of those students' careers because it's the things that people get exposed to in college that often influence that first project that they join or that first job that they take. So thank you Devereux for the wonderful photograph. And then the 21st way you can contribute is just once you are part of the post-grats community which you've come to my talk, you're now all part of the post-grats community, make people feel welcome. I often feel like being welcome is one step, one more positive step further along than just being open. So if you have an open door, anybody can walk in, right? That's open. But if they have the courage to walk in, if they know they can walk in. And when you're welcoming, when you make sure people know that, hey, we're in here, come on in, we want you to join. When you invite people to join, when you make sure they got the invitation, well that's just a much more positive feeling and I have to say that everybody that I've met and I work with in the post-grats community does a good job at this already, I just think we need to keep doing it. All right, so that's the summary of 21 ways to contribute to post-grats beyond code. I hope I've given you some good ideas of things that you can do if you're just getting started with post-grats, ways that you can share your lessons learned, your pain points, your expertise. And I also hope I've given you some understanding of let's say you are a developer, let's say the way you want to contribute to post-grats is in code. I hope I've given you some understanding and appreciation for the other types of skills that we need in order to keep growing this community and raising awareness of how awesome post-grats is. And before I end, I had to put up one more amazingly awesome Fibonacci spiral, obviously of a snail shell and this actually had two Fibonacci spirals in it, so I tried to draw them in in pink and white. And I want to say thank you very much. Merci. And I don't know how to say the Dutch though or the Flemish, is it donku? Danku. Danku. Danku? Okay, I tried. Those are my Twitter handles if any of you are going to tweet anything and I just wanted to point out that I will stand over there by the door or I can come to you if you don't want to give up your seat.  I also have, like I said, some cool Citus Alicorn stickers and I have about 10 of those Postgres activity books. So those of you with young kids might get a kick out of those. So. You have seven more minutes. I have seven more minutes, so I have time for questions if any of you have questions. So I can put that up again. All right. Why did I choose 21? Why did I choose 21? Because 21 is part of the Fibonacci sequence. That's exactly why I picked 21. And I also wanted to go a little bit deeper than Josh did. He had 50, which meant he went really, really, really fast in covering them and he did cover more ground but I wanted to talk a little bit more about each of them. Otherwise, it would have picked the next number in the sequence. Question? Okay. Let me answer the question. The question is, I'm gonna repeat it for the video. Do I feel like Citus data has slowed down in shipping new releases of our open source software since we were acquired? And I suspect if you asked me that question in the first three, four months last year, I would have wholeheartedly said, yes, we slowed down a little bit. We were a bit distracted. We had a lot of transitional things that we had to quickly figure out. We have been continuing to ship new releases though. So I think 9.0, 9.1, 8.5, what? 9.12. 9.12, soon there will be a 9.2. What we haven't been doing is publishing the release notes so the blogs is effectively. So I was just in Amsterdam a couple of days ago talking with the engineers, the lead engineer for our Citus open source offering and we agreed on a plan to get more of those release notes published. So you'll see more of them. You'll even see some retroactively if I have my way because there's lots of great stuff in there. And then we'll go deep into some of those new features that are in Citus open source too. Move that big band. What? Move that big band. All right, and any other questions? How much data it has? What is the biggest Citus cluster in production and how much data does it have? That's a really good question. I'm not sure I know the exact biggest. I do know of a customer that I just wrote a blog post about myself where there's one and a half petabytes of data in the cluster. And I think it's about 44 nodes. I know of another open source customer, again, more than a petabyte of data, probably about 40 nodes. If you give me your email address at the very end or something, I'd be happy to send you a link to some of those blog posts. Debra? I know, I mean, I heard something from science people more than a hundred nodes. Or more than a hundred nodes, you mean? I know the actual number, but I don't want to tell you right now. Okay, yeah. So I'm telling you about some of the biggest ones that I know of, size-wise. Oh, I do know of another one more than a petabyte and that's more than 80 nodes in the cluster. So I've now talked about Heap, I've talked about Pex, I've talked about Microsoft. Interestingly, there's a customer at Microsoft who was our user of Citus Open Source before we were even acquired. And he runs it on Azure. Our Pex customer runs Citus on Google Cloud. Obviously, we have now integrated Citus into Azure Database for Postgres. So it's a fully integrated built-in deployment option. So some people do it that way too. And Heap has a published customer story. There's a sizable deployment and they manage it themselves on AWS. Other questions? Well, no question, I see the NLS for Italian is very bad so I think I will pick up. That is wonderful. Okay, so he just made my day. Those of you who didn't hear what he said, he sees that the native language support for Italian is very bad and so he's gonna roll up his sleeves and start contributing. That is awesome. You made my trip to Brussels worthwhile. Thank you. And we all know Italian is a really wonderful magical language. It's crazy. Or crazy, as Federico says. It's the common language but we speak any sort of language in any part of Italy. So I'm quite fortunate because I live in Tuscany, which is the place where Italian is supposed to be born and is still spoken in the way of Dante. So I don't know if you guys could hear Federico but he's talking about all the different dialects and all the different crazy ways people speak Italian in Italy and he lives in Tuscany. So if you're ever in Tuscany and you wanna talk Postgres, now you know who to reach out to. Any other questions? If you're interested in more of the kind of stuff that I blog about or tweet about, I do tweet a bunch about the Postgres community. I'm at Claire Giordano on Twitter and thank you all very, very much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you.


This is Ilavan, a robot plant hybrid driven with the plant's natural signals. Plants are naturally occurring circuits in nature. The cells and tissues of plants become excited under the influence of environmental factors. This can be change of flights, change of gravity, soil conditions and more. Much like individual capabilities we program for in our electrical circuits. Ilavan is a hybrid that merges these two worlds. We attach silver electrodes to a plant, read and amplify its natural signals and route them to a robot under a plant. We put lamps on either direction of the robot to trigger its natural signals, thus driving the robot underneath our magnet. The robot goes left and right by itself and the agency of such movements rests with the plant. Interfacing plants with robots or circuits this way can pave a way to power our future electronics naturally. Such bi-hybrids can impart their best properties to what the artificial world hasn't been able to realize, new self-pairing, self-powered and self-growing symbiotic organisms.


a very good evening aspirants i welcome you all to the hindu daily news analysis brought to you by shankarize academy aspirants many of you are watching our videos without subscribing to our youtube channel so please subscribe and hit the bell icon button to get regular updates about our content videos today i'm going to cover important news articles from the hindu newspaper dated 25th of october 2023 displayed here is a list of news articles that we will be discussing today at the end of the video we will also have problems practice question discussions so try to watch the entire video now let's get into our first news article discussion look at this news article yesterday an expert committee appointed by the national dam safety authority has conducted a field investigation at the medigatta barrage of the kaalishwaram lift irrigation project this project is located in telanganas jaya shankar boopalappalli district this is all about the news now in this discussion let us learn some points about the national dam safety authority the national dam safety authority which is in short called as n dsa was set up in april 2022 by the central government the authority was established under the dam safety act 2021 as n dsa was established based on the parliamentary act it is a statutory body the n dsa is functioning under the ministry of jalsakthi note that the n dsa is headquartered at new delhi it is also having four regional officers at chandi hirk gaohati pune and chennai okay here some of you may have a doubt water is under the state list right then how the central government can constitute an authority to regulate water dams see water is placed under the state list in the south schedule of union constitution so the states are having exclusive right to legislate any matters related to water but note that the central government can also has certain powers to make legislations on matters listed in the state list this is as per article 246 of the indian constitution article 246 imports the parliament to legislate any matters listed in the state list under certain conditions based on this constitutional provision only the central government enacted the dam safety act 2021 this act was aimed to establish an institutional mechanism for ensuring dam safety in india as per the provisions of this act the n dsa was constituted in april 2022 okay this is how the national dam safety authority came into existence now coming to the objectives of the national dam safety authority the main mandate of the n dsa is to maintain standards related to dam safety it also aims to prevent dam related disasters in addition to this the authority also aims to address interstate concerns related to dam safety okay now talking about the composition the national dam safety authority consists of a chairman and other five members the chairman is basically a government officer who is not below the rank of additional secretary the chairman should have adequate qualification knowledge experience and capacity in dealing with problems related to dam engineering and dam safety management then the five members should have prior working experience in policy and research technical regulation disaster and resilience and administration and finance that are related to dams note that both the chairman and the members are appointed by the central government okay now finally let us see the important functions of the n dsa firstly the n dsa resolves any issue between the state dam safety organizations of the states apart from this the n dsa will also resolve the disputes between a state dam safety organization and any owner of a specified dam in a state secondly the n dsa carries out surveillance inspection operation and maintenance of all large dams across the country this is in order to prevent dam failure related disasters thirdly as per the dam safety act 2021 the national dam safety authority can penalize the concerned parties for not complying with the provisions of dam safety act 2021 okay this is all about the important functions performed by national dam safety authority and note that every decision of the n dsa taken under the dam safety act 2021 shall be final and it is binding upon all the parties to the issue okay and that's all regarding this discussion in this discussion we saw about the formation of national dam safety authority then we saw about the composition of national dam safety authority and finally we saw some points about the important functions performed by national dam safety authority now with these points in mind let us move on to the next news article discussion look at this news article yesterday the purchasing manager's index that is PMA survey was released by s&p global for the eurozone according to the survey the eurozone's business activities have fallen down this month the survey also highlighted that if this scenario continues then the eurozone block will fall into recession okay this is the crux of the news article given here now in this context let us understand some points about eurozone the eurozone is nothing but a group of countries within the european union that have adopted the euro as their currency the eurozone currently consists of 20 countries of the european union now to have a better understanding about eurozone let us learn some points about european union the european union is a political and economic union that currently compresses 27 member states the member states are primarily from the european continent the european union was established in 1922 by the signing of mass tish treaty during the formation the european union consists of only 12 countries who are referred to as the founding members of the european union the countries include belgium denmark france germany greece ireland italy luxembourg the netherlands portugal spain and the united kingdom later some other countries also joined the european union but note that the united kingdom left the european union on 31st january 2020 so currently the european union consists of 27 member countries from euro the member states of the european union are displayed here you can go through it the main purpose for the creation of european union is to promote greater coordination and cooperation in economic policy among its member states the mass tish treaty that led to the formation of european union also aimed to create a common economic and monetary union for the member states the treaty proposed to establish a common central banking system named the european central bank and a common currency named the euro apart from this the mass tish treaty also called for the free movement of capital between the member states this is in order to increase cooperation between national central banks and to increase the alignment of economic policies among its member states see as per this mass tish treaty 20 countries out of 27 countries within the european union have accepted the euro as their authorized currency these countries form part of the eurozone know that the eurozone is otherwise called as the euro area in eurozone currencies the euro is used as a common currency for all the transactions without any discrimination know that kroyasha is the recent and 20th member to join the eurozone the 20 eurozone countries are displayed here you can go through it see the seven countries within the european union such as belgaria the ches republic denmark hungary poland romanian sweden they didn't adopt the euro as their common currency except these seven countries all other countries of the european union form part of the eurozone see these seven countries of the european union have their own separate currency and that's all regarding this discussion and this discussion is about the basics of eurozone then we saw about the history of formation of eurozone now with these points in mind let us move on to the next news article discussion look at this news article according to the news article natya param para utsav 2023 is going to be held in bangalore the utsav will be presented by the kuchupudi param para foundation in that utsav some of the dancers will perform kuchupudi dance this is all about the news now in this discussion let us learn some points about kuchupudi dance from pulm's perspective first of all know that kuchupudi is one of the eight classical dances of india it originated in andhra pradesh in fact kuchupudi is the name of a village in the krishna district of andhra pradesh the kuchupudi was introduced by the vaishnava poet siddhendra yogi in the 17th century initially only men were allowed to practice kuchupudi also in the initial days kuchupudi was performed only in groups and there was no solo dance component it was laxmi narayanan shastri who introduced many new elements to the kuchupudi dance which includes solo dancing and training of female dancers in kuchupudi dance tale note that kuchupudi as an art form derived from the exhagana tradition here exhagana is a traditional theater form that involves both dance and drama note that exhagana originated in karnataka as kuchupudi is derived from exhagana kuchupudi involves both dance and drama format now with this basic information let us see the important features of kuchupudi since kuchupudi is a dance drama format there is an emphasis on footwork expressive eye movements and characterization see kuchupudi is the only classical dance that involves both dance and singing so kuchupudi dancers must be talented in both dancing and singing also note that kuchupudi is a combination of thandava and lasya that is the kuchupudi dance form has both masculine and feminine grace in it now come into the musical instruments some of the musical instruments like mridangam symbols vena flute and the tambura are used while performing kuchupudi dance okay now come into the kuchupudi dance form kuchupudi form involves nirtha nirthiya and natya see nirtha nirthiya and natya are mentioned in the natya sastra here nirtha refers to the pure dance steps which are performed rhythmically nirtha the women's of body do not convey any mood or meaning nirthiya on the other hand is the expressional component in the case of nirthiya the hand gestures and facial expressions convey some meaning and finally there is natya see natya is the dramatic element of the dance it is a combination of el isai and nadaka that is literature music and drama okay in case of kuchupudi the dancers first perform pure dance or nirtha then they perform nirthiya during which they convey emotions through dance and finally the natya which involves drama okay so these are all some of the important features of kuchupudi dance know that raja ratha reddy vedantam satyanarayana sarma swappan asundhari shobhan aidu and manju bargavi are some of the famous kuchupudi dancers okay and that's all regarding this discussion in this discussion is about the origin of kuchupudi dance then we saw about the important features of kuchupudi dance now with these points in mind let us move on to the next news article discussion look at this editorial article recently the ruling party in the union government launched the vishistha barat sankar pyatara roadshow through this roadshow the ruling party is using the government missionary that is the bureaucracy to showcase its achievements the roadshow is scheduled from november 20 2023 to january 26 2024 the government also issued guidelines to the bureaucrats about how to promote the work of the union government that have done in past nine years in addition to this the ministry of defense is also planning to set up 822 selfie points at these selfie points citizens can click themselves with a picture of prime minister narendra mudi apart from this the ministry of defense has also sent directions to the soldiers who are an annual leave to promote government schemes see this move of the union government has sparked criticism particularly from the opposition party the opposition party has criticized that the ruling party is attempting to politicize the bureaucracy it also mentioned that the ruling party is using the civil servants and the army in government propaganda ahead of elections so based on this issue only this editorial here is written this editorial article highlights the ill effects of politicization of bureaucracy so in our discussion today we'll see about the issue of politicization of bureaucracy in detail as per our current practice we'll pick a mains question about politicization of bureaucracy and we'll try to approach it the question is india's constitutional framework distinctly delineates a boundary segregating the bureaucracy and the military from the sway of partisan politics despite this there has been increasing efforts to politicize these institutions in this context what are the factors that contribute to this politicization and what are the ramifications of this phenomenon provides some suggestions to reverse this trend 250 words 15 marks now coming to the syllabus see this question can be asked in general studies paper 2 this discussion will come under separation of powers between various organs dispute reversal mechanisms and institutions see this syllabus topic forms part of general studies paper 2 okay this is all about the syllabus now how to approach the question see it is a pretty straightforward question we have to write about the facts that leading to the politicization of bureaucracy the number of the impacts of politicization of bureaucracy and finally we have to provide some steps that can be taken to stop politicization since it is a 15 mark question some five to six points under each subheading would be sufficient now let us start with introduction since the question is about politicization of bureaucracy in the introduction part we can write the definition of politicization of bureaucracy here the definition is politicization of bureaucracy is broadly defined as the substitution of impersonality for personal criteria and the functioning of bureaucracy see this is the standard definition of politicization of bureaucracy now let me simplify this definition see when you talk about bureaucracy we mean the people who help the government to run smoothly so the bureaucracy should be fair and they should not take any sides but when bureaucracy start taking sides and helping one political party more than others that is not good and we call this phenomenon as politicization of bureaucracy so politicization of bureaucracy means the bureaucracy is not following the rules and it is helping a political party or the bureaucracy is forced to favor a particular political party okay so this is the definition of politicization of bureaucracy like this you can define the politicization of bureaucracy in the introduction part moving to the body part of the answer the body part first we have to write the factors leading to the politicization of bureaucracy now let us see the factors one by one first we can mention about institutional weakness here institutional weakness is nothing but the loopholes in the system that the politicians use to politicize the bureaucracy for example if there is no transparency in appointment or in the promotion process then the politician will appoint and promote bureaucrats who are loyal to them this return results in politicization of bureaucracy okay this is the first factor then we can mention about lack of autonomy see when the bureaucracy is operating without sufficient autonomy and independence then there is a possibility of politicians influencing them and this leads to politicization of bureaucracy okay this is the second factor thirdly we can mention about lack of accountability see the bureaucracy must be held accountable for their actions accountability will only ensure that the bureaucracy serves for the welfare of the people in case if there is no proper accountability mechanism then the bureaucrats will start working for their own good by being loyal to a political party this might result in politicization of bureaucracy okay this is the third factor fourthly we can mention about the fear of political retaliation see in some cases the bureaucrats in fear of political retaliation they might start serving the needs of present day government and this also leads to politicization of bureaucracy okay this is the fourth factor and lastly we can also mention the issue of eroding integrity among the bureaucrats see integrity means to be honest even in the face of challenges or temptations to act otherwise this quality has been slowly eroding in the bureaucrats due to this the bureaucrats are being easily manipulated by the politicians and this has also resulted in politicization of bureaucracy okay so these are some of the facts that lead to politicization of bureaucracy see in the examination i feel you can avoid the last point that is eroding integrity this is because your answer paper will most probably be evaluated by someone who is in the system so criticizing them harshly in your answer might anger them so better avoid harsh points see i added this point here to just give you some clarity okay so please avoid these points while writing your main censor now having addressed the first part of the cushion let us move to the second part which is nothing but the impacts of politicization of bureaucracy now let us see the impacts one by one the first impact you can mention is the undermining of neutrality see the primary role of the bureaucracy is to serve the government elected by the people regardless of their personal ideological inclination when the bureaucrats start supporting one political party over the other due to politicization it will affect this neutrality this will result in lossing of trust by the people in the bureaucracy system this in turn will impact democracy as a whole okay this is the first impact then the second impact is reduction in efficiency when the bureaucracy starts serving political interests rather than people's interest it will result in reduction of efficiency and another reason for reduction in efficiency is that due to politicization of bureaucracy when appointments and promotions are made due to political affiliations rather than merit it will negatively affect the efficiency of entire system okay this is the second impact then the third impact is increase in corruption politicization of bureaucracy creates an environment favorable to corruption and this will lead to misallocation of public resources okay this is the third important impact of politicization of bureaucracy and the last impact is lack of continuity see when a particular bureaucrat serves a particular political party and if that political party losses the next election then the new party comes in power will most probably transfer that particular bureaucrat and this will lead to discontinuity in the developmental process okay so these are all some of the impacts of politicization of bureaucracy now finally let us see the steps that can be taken to reverse the politicization of bureaucracy here we can mention about providing ethical training to bureaucrats then insulating appointment and promotion from political pressures then plugging the loopholes in the institutional functionality then providing autonomy in functioning of bureaucrats then increasing accountability decentralization and empowering civil society see here the first five points are basically about addressing the cause of politicization that I have discussed earlier so I feel there is no need to elaborate here I will just elaborate the last two points now first let's take decentralization see through decentralization the public can be directly involved in the decision-making process decentralization coupled with social audit will increase the accountability of bureaucrats this in turn reduces the politicization process now moving on to empowering civil society see a strong civil society will hold both the politicians and bureaucrats accountable for example in Tamil Nadu there is civil society by the name the sole purpose of this civil society is to ensure transparency and accountability in governance so a strong civil society like this can weed out the issue of politicization of bureaucracy okay so these are all some of the steps that can be taken to reverse the trend of politicization of bureaucracy having addressed all the three sections of the question let us move on to the conclusion part in the conclusion part you can mention that our bureaucracy survives because of the people's trust in it if this trust is lost there will be social upheaval like the ones that happen during the times of british raj so politicization of bureaucracy is one of the main reasons for the erosion of trust so all efforts must be taken to address the issue of politicization of bureaucracy and this will help our Indian democracy in the long term so like this you can write the need of weeding out of politicization of bureaucracy in the conclusion part okay and that's all regarding this discussion in this discussion we saw about what is politicization of bureaucracy then we saw about the factors leading to politicization of bureaucracy then we saw about the impacts of politicization of bureaucracy and finally we saw some points about the steps that can be taken to weed out politicization of bureaucracy now with these points in mind let us move on to the next news article discussion look at this news article according to the news article the food safety and standards authority of India that is the FSS AI has recommended the use of quick response codes that is the QR codes on food products the QR code should have comprehensive details about the product which includes information on ingredients nutritional content and allergens the FSS AI has recommended this to provide accessibility and to the promotion of health for persons with visual disabilities this is all about the news now in this discussion let us learn some points about FSS AI the food safety and standards authority of India that is FSS AI is an autonomous statutory body it was established under the food safety and standards act 2006 the FSS AI functions under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare it is equated at New Delhi the FSS AI also has six regional offices at Delhi, Guwahati, Mumbai, Kolkata, Cochin and Chennai okay now coming to the composition of FSS AI the FSS AI comprises of a chairperson and 22 other members note that out of 22 members one third should be women the chairperson and the members are appointed by the central government apart from this the FSS AI is assisted by the scientific committees and panels in setting food standards in addition to this the FSS AI also has the central advisory committee this committee helps the FSS AI to frame policies and guidelines relating to food safety okay this is all about the composition of FSS AI now coming to the functions of FSS AI see the FSS AI performs various functions now let us see them one by one firstly FSS AI lays down the standards and guidelines related to food safety secondly it grants FSS AI food safety license and certification for food businesses thirdly the FSS AI lays down procedure and guidelines for laboratories that are related to food businesses fourthly FSS AI provides suggestions to the government in framing food related policies fifthly FSS AI collects data regarding contaminants in food products then it identifies emerging risks and it introduces rapid alert system sixthly the FSS AI creates an information network across the country about food safety and lastly the FSS AI promotes general awareness about food safety and food standards okay these are all important functions performed by the FSS AI and that's all regarding this discussion and this discussion is about the formation of FSS AI then you saw about the composition of FSS AI and finally we saw some points about the functions performed by FSS AI now with these points in mind let us move on to the next part of the video that is to discuss preliminary practice questions as friends today we are having three questions let us solve them one by one look at the first question this question is regarding food safety and standards authority of India that is FSS AI here three statements are given we have to find how many of the statements are correct look at the first statement it is a statutory body established under the national food security act 2013 see this statement is incorrect the FSS AI is a statutory body but it was established under the food safety and standards act 2006 and not under national food security act 2013 so first statement is incorrect now commit to the second statement it functions under the ministry of food processing industries see this statement is also incorrect because the FSS AI functions under the ministry of health and family welfare so second statement is also incorrect commit to the third statement it grants food safety license and certification for food businesses in India see this statement is correct it is one of the functions of FSS AI here only one statement is correct so the correct answer for the question is option A only one moving on let's take up the second question this question is regarding national dam safety authority that is the NDSCA look at the first statement it is a statutory body established under the dam safety act 2021 see this statement is correct as we saw in the discussion the NDSCA was established in April 2022 under the dam safety act 2021 and it is also a statutory body so first statement is correct now coming to the second statement it resolves disputes between the state dam safety organizations of two states see this statement is correct it is one of the functions of NDSCA now commit to the third statement it conducts regular inspection of dams and monitor the dam safety across the country see it is also one of the functions of NDSCA so third statement is also correct here all the given three statements are correct so the correct answer for the question is option C all three now let's take up the final question here four statements are given we have to find these four statements is associated with which of the given four classical dance forms I alluded the statements first statement the dance was originated in Kerala second statement the dance is performed mostly by women in honor of the Hindu god Vishnu third statement the dance projects the essence of feminine grace that is the Lassia fourth statement the most characteristic element of the dance is the circular or spiral movement of the all limbs of the body they were mentioned the statements are associated with which of the following classical dance form option A Kathakali option B Kuchupudi option C Mohiniatam option D Satria see among the options only Kathakali and Mohiniatam all originated in Kerala among these two dance forms Kathakali is performed mostly by men and not by women so by the process of elimination we can arrive at the correct answer which is option C Mohiniatam see Mohiniatam is originated in Kerala and it is performed mostly by women in the honor of Hindu god Vishnu and it projects the essence of feminine grace okay so the correct answer once again is option C Mohiniatam with this we have come to the end of the video if you found our video to be useful do like comment and share it with your friends and don't forget to subscribe Shankara's Academy YouTube channel thank you for listening