Hi Jane. Can you help me with the requirements for the assessments in the English class? I know we have to have references, but I'm not sure why we need to reference. Hi Jules, well, there are many reasons to reference. One is to distinguish your ideas from someone else's. By having references, it is clear what is your work and what is not. Okay, and I guess I can also cite different points of view. And the teacher also said that by referencing, the credibility of my writing will be improved. Yes, but make sure they are reliable references. So, don't use Wikipedia. Instead, journal articles will show you have done background reading and your writing will be trustworthy. Okay, and I should also integrate the references into my essay. I mean, I should not just summarize each article and then put it in a paragraph. Instead, I can compare and contrast. For sure, and comment, if you want a better grade. You can also use references to emphasize or highlight an important point. This is when you can quote a small part of an article. Okay, I understand. But will the teacher check my references? I mean I could just write any reference and it will be okay, right? No way! Your teachers see hundreds of essays and they know what is a good reference and what is a bad one.  Okay, I guess referencing also helps people find background information, as well as respecting the work of others. If you just take, it's the same as stealing. That's like a thief. I see you are learning fast. Yes, referencing prevents plagiarism. And there's one more thing, it's in requirement for the assessments. No citations equals a very low grade.


This is a button battery. These coin size batteries can increasingly be found in products used in and around the home. As button battery use increases, so does battery-related injuries and death. Injuries from button batteries have increased nearly sevenfold in recent years. When children swallow button batteries, the batteries often pass right through the gastrointestinal tract without any problem at all.   The external current is generating these small amounts of the alkali or cause erosion right through that child's esophagus. You can imagine if it goes into a blood vessel, you're going to have massive bleeding. So these are very, very serious cases. It's especially a problem in young children. Children four years of age or younger are the ones at most risk, although older children occasionally swallow batteries and have complications, too. The 20 millimeter lithium cell, almost 13% of the time, gets stuck in the esophagus and causes a serious complication. So that's why we're focusing on the problems associated with this 20 millimeter lithium cell. Look around your home to see if you have any button batteries. They can be found in remote controls, games, toys, electronic thermometers, talking books, bathroom scales, and hearing aids, just to name a few.  Here are a few safety tips to help keep your kids safe. Keep remotes and other electronics out of your child's reach if the battery compartments do not have a screw to secure them. Tape may be used to help secure the battery compartment. Keep button batteries out of your child's reach. Discard batteries carefully. Do not allow children to play with button batteries.  They are easily swallowed accidentally. Always check medications before ingesting them. Adults have swallowed batteries mistaken for pills or tablets.  You need to take your child to an emergency department for an x-ray right away. Don't wait. Go straight to the emergency department. You can call the battery ingestion hotline at<PHONE_NUMBER> for guidance, but get yourself on the way to the emergency department as you make that phone call.


Thanks for the opportunity and I guess the responsibility of this giving a talk in this session. I Hope I do a good job So We heard this morning from won't borion who laid a great foundation for me I'm gonna have to go over some of the same material, but I hope to to Minimize that overlap and and talk about some other issues That I think are important and some other Findings that we've made that I think are really new and important Components of say that that what we might call the toolbox for manipulating bioenergy species so There are many entire conferences That are held about biomass improvement, and I've got 25 minutes or 20 minutes to talk about what I think are some of the targets that we've been able to have an impact on and What are those what are the topics that come up when one considers what? How we might improve biomass because it's not just about the topic. I'm gonna be focusing which is on which is Elicit the bottom there biomass quality. How do we manipulate lignin? There are many other issues that are gonna that we need to consider If we're going to be successful and in founding a bioeconomy to address at least some components of the problems that we're facing Amongst those amongst those topics is yield if you ask an agronomist or a plant breeder What are the three most important things when breeding? Breeding crops they say yield yield and yield Other components that are of course are very important for sustainability include water and nutrient use efficiency and pathogen and pest resistance and of course those have an impact on on that yield equation But what I'm going to talk about today is how we can manipulate quality of biomass to hopefully enhance its value and The as you will have noticed the figures on the left is not a figure of about plants because you most people I Or the most of the people in this room probably don't have a particularly great affinity for plant breeding but you all know about dogs and Those two dogs. I think it's a what is it a great day in a Chihuahua or something like that all derived from a common ancestor that the wolf About it's debatable, but about 15,000 years ago So thanks and some of these species like these miniature dogs these lap dogs are only a few hundred years old so they are the product of domestication and They I think Clearly convey that the genetic diversity that's present in an individual organism in this case the wolf can be exploited and Lead to the sort of diversity that we see in in these species Of course time gone by these were very important attributes to have for the use of dogs now where there's more recreational if you will so When it comes to plant breeding if I've brought you along with that introduction I'd like you to introduce you to The cob if you will of the the species that was the progenitor of maize or corn That plant is called T. Ocente. You've got a ruler there to see How big that cob was you can see it's a single row of kernels and yet from that species humans were able to tap into the genetic diversity To of found in that in those plants and mutations that arose to develop a crop that feeds a huge amount of the world Now that process took about 5,000 years it continues today but the the genes that Contributed the bulk to the of the characteristics that allowed us allows us to domestic allowed us to domesticate maize Number in about half a dozen these are genes that affect Cobb size row number as well as the overall morphology of the plant and in fact the the The the increases in productivity over the last century in corn can largely be attributed to Changes in the body plan if you will of a corn plant that allows us to plant many many plants closer together in narrower rows And of course the fact that we don't have to have horses going down the rows. We have more sophisticated machinery So we've done a lot to improve maize but that most of that of course there's been there's been improvements in various traits including GMO herbicide tolerance and pest and pest tolerance But most of the effort there has been focused on yield. It's been focused on the cob and the point that I want to make is that the the actual quality of the biomass that's generated by corn or I Think looking forward at more reasonably Dedicated biomass crops the opportunity to improve that that biomass has really been almost entirely not exploited So as as won't pointed out in his talk we need to have access to genes In order to improve these crops we need we now have available to us CRISPR-Cas technology You know as I mentioned this was corn is five thousand years in the making Sally threw down the challenge of Fixing the problem in the next 24 so we have a big challenge ahead of us but we need to have access to the genes and understanding the regulatory machinery that affects the expression of those genes in order to move forward so Our work as what's does we are collaborators on a single g-sept grant focuses on lignin biosynthesis This is a very important polymer to the plant. It rigidifies the stem And and the water conducting tissue to allow these trees to stand upright But as as won't mentioned earlier. It has a very important impact on biomass Processing particularly for securification because it it slows down or reduces the efficiency by which we can extract useful fermentable sugars from that biomass To the plant. It's an enormous commitment of fixed carbon Something like 20 or so percent of the biomass is is lignin So that represents a lot of this amino acid phenylalanine being shunted being generated to begin with and then shunted into this pathway and and a point that I want to get to at the end of my talk though is That it does have compared to the polysaccharides of the wall a high energy density And that is something that looking forward and I think that's what partly what I'm supposed to be addressing today It's something that we need to be Looking for ways to exploit So here's another depiction of the lignin biosynthetic pathway in the top left You can see the processes that go on inside the inside the cell where the amino acid phenylalanine Is used to make three so-called mono lignals the building blocks of lignin The upper one is as won't mention is used in very small quantities that the G and S monomers Caniferal alcohol and cynical alcohol are much more abundantly used these monomers are synthesized in the cell and Then exported into the cell wall where they're activated to free radicals by peroxidases and lacases and then chemically combined to form a polymer now What's into what we have learned over the past 20 years and have furthered our understanding of through G sub funding is that? the type of lignin that is made is dependent upon the balance of those mono lignals that are being made and won't Mention that his CSE mutant develop deposits an H lignin and that is really quite remarkable in terms of our understanding of our typical biopolymers And it's something that again we can take advantage of so if we think about Biological polymers that we're familiar with nucleic acids proteins polysaccharides The synthesis of of nucleic acids DNA and RNA this this is template driven So to make a strand of DNA molecule you copy a strand of the others the opposing strand in order to make a molecule of RNA you read the template of of Excuse me of the DNA In order to make proteins you read the read the information off of the mRNA strand Polysaccharides are a little bit different, but still they're Architecture their chemical composition is strictly dictated by the enzymes that assemble them now if we compare that to lignin We find that Its composition is dictated solely By the amounts of the various monolignals that are being made and that provides us That's why lignin modification we consider to be the low-hanging fruit of biomass improvement It is the most it is the easiest thing to manipulate and in doing so we change the chemical Characteristics of the polymer and we change the architecture of the polymer and all of those both of those things We think play into the impact that we have on biomass Processing so there's there's I think a number of opportunities. We've seen that have come out in the literature Some of them like won't show to with CSE we can and I'll show another example of that include blocking lignin synthesis That would seem to be a pretty straightforward thing to do, but it is not without its consequences Particularly if we block it to a very very significant degree We can change lignin composition from We've we have made lignins that have only s units only g units and as I'll show you today only h units as well as other types And again those have consequences on the chemical of the chemistry and architecture of the polymer We can redirect lignin monomers into other other molecules, so Cj Luz group at Brookhaven National Lab Took advantage of or evolved basically an enzyme that would cap the hydroxyl on the aromatic ring That was required for activation to free radicals and in doing so they divert those molecules out of lignin synthesis So it's a different a different way to reduce lignin content and then as well presented We can we've developed control over where lignin should be deposited and not only do we know that in a sort of a directed strategy But we know that there is tremendous genetic diversity in in crops maize and sorghum that range from plants That are very very soft to plants that are more like a hard bamboo So there's all sorts of opportunities not only to to use our modern strategies including CRISPR-Cas or genetics to Sort biotechnological approaches to modify lignin, but also take advantages of inherent genetic variability Okay, so I know we've we've had some people talking about mutants, but I still think this this whole concept bears a little bit of Explanation because this is a broad audience So I just wanted a two-minute primer on on using mutants So if we take a normal plant we can mutagenize it with very radiation or chemicals to and Then Following a round of reproduction identify some mutant with a trait of interest and that could be a plant with low lignin for example that allows us to not only identify the gene Eventually that was mutated that led to this effect and thereby give us a gene that whose expression We can manipulate in order to Modify the traits of the plant so thereby understanding gene function But it also lets it's also informative with regard to What type of variation a plant will tolerate will a plant tolerate a reduction in lignin of this much if we mutate this gene Will it tolerate a production of only G subunits instead of a GS copolymer? So we learn a lot about the actual function of these molecules in planta Okay, so again, this is a way that we can get at these genes that will hopefully allow us to Improve biomass crops not in the 5,000 years that it took us to improve maize, but in in a 20-year time frame All right, so the first example I have To go back to this this slide Deals with basically one of those first arrows in that pathway a gene that is an enzyme That's required for the deposition of all lignin We were able to identify a mutant in this step and learn what that what that gene encoded But also what effect blocking that gene had on the plant viability Our lab also uses a rabbit-opsis and so what you see here is what's called an allelic series three mutant plants all of all of which have Increasingly severe mutations in a particular gene involved in lignin synthesis and you can see how The more severe that the mutation is and the lower the lignin is I haven't shown you that data But take my word for it. The plant on the right has the least lignin of all That you see this increasingly severe effect that we've called Lignin modification induced dwarfing. I don't want to leave I want to make sure I start start by saying This does not always happen via the same process in all plants So there are some dwarf lignin deficient plants that are dwarf for a particular reason others that are dwarf for another reason And we really have to have a comprehensive understanding of that in order to Really Be able to manipulate plants in the future The next example is I think an example a little bit further down the pathway that Where we were we eliminated the deposition of the production of these G and S monomers And in that case these the lignins and these plants were only made of H subunits But the plants didn't like that at all that you can see the plants on the left or what we were left with and Those plants are severely dwarfed and we thought well, it's probably due to a lack of ability to transport water normally But it turns out that the answer is a little bit more complicated than that and I'll get back to that in a moment the third example I want to just briefly mention is Not doesn't isn't represented by one of those arrows, but by all of them So what we identified was a protein that was required for the regulation of the entire lignin biosynthetic pathway And so when we mutated it this the the resulting plants had lower levels of lignin and we're also Dwarfed like the plant that this is the plant that's shown on the right This is a and I don't want to get too deep into the weeds if you'll pardon the pun on genetics, but This this plant called ref 4 3 on the far right was a very special mutation in that it didn't Inactivate the protein it actually if you will activated it it turned it into a Constitutive break on the pathway so To go back one of the students show used traffic lights earlier This this this mutation changed the protein. So it constitutively shut down the pathway when we knocked out that gene and It's paralog so there were two genes that perform the same function but in a rabidopsis What we found is that the we found the opposite the pathway was enhanced. We got more phenylpropanides So what we deduce from that is that the normal function of this protein is to modulate the pathway both up and down And so it's required for a pathway homeostasis So what is this protein? It wasn't as I said an enzyme of the pathway But is an instead a component of a large molecular machine that Directs gene expression. So what this? shows is this the line that runs around is DNA and This this molecular machine is called mediator It's made up of about 30 proteins and it makes contacts with DNA bound transcription factors shown at the top and the bottom the smaller proteins and When it does so it interprets the information of what where when how much? gene gene should be expressed and recruits the transcriptional machinery and directs a coordinated output of gene expression And I'll get back to those transcription factors a little bit later So we we started to get an Unexpected view of the of how lignin synthesis is regulated and then we got a real surprise when we generated some double mutants, so we crossed that Very sad sick lignin deficient mutant that we call ref 8. It's the plant more or less in the center there that very much dwarfed one with these mediator knockouts and We found that these plants grew normally again Which was not at all what we expected and told us that it perhaps wasn't just an architectural problem And a low lignin problem, but in fact a modification of gene expression that That occurred in the plant as a result of the interruption of this biosynthetic pathway so what we did was an User an approach called RNA seek which allows us it's basically It's an amazing time to be a biologist really it's it gives you a window into the nucleus it tells you what genes are being expressed and How they how they're being expressed differently as a result of a particular stimulus or a developmental stage or what have you in our case it was in response to a block and lignin biosynthesis and That so the gene the Venn diagrams on the left show up regulated genes the ones on the right show down regulated genes And what you can see is the gene that the mutant that low lignin mutant those numbers are shown are in that yellow section huge number of genes are misregulated, but when we bring in that Mediator knockout into the same background all that gene expression is restored to normal so The way I look at that or I tend to explain it Am I really running out of that out of time? Have a five minutes. Yeah, that's what I thought. Okay So the way we think of this is that so this this mediator complex and this one particular subunit that we're working on med 5 Is normally again a homeostatic mechanism. It's not there To rescue the growth of lignin deficient mutants. No, that's just something we've discovered What it what it does is that it's we think is measuring Metabolites that are accumulating in this lignin deficient mutant as a result of this metabolic block And when it is faced with this abundance because of this block it goes haywire So I think I like to explain it like Anaphylaxis so there's probably somebody in this room who has a peanut allergy And we but We all know that our immune system is there to protect us But in some individuals when that system is stimulated inappropriately They go into anaphylaxis that can kill them So what we think of here is that the this knocking out this mediator subunit is like the epi pen for the for the Lignin deficient mutants we can block that response and allow those plants to grow again okay, so What did we find when we looked at the lignin of these mutants like the plant that won't Describe well, we were actually even able to push it a little bit further We we found that these plants basically made a lignin that was only only in Derived from each subunits This is a lignin type that wasn't really even expected to polymerize So it was very exciting to see that with this genetic modification. We could we could achieve that Um, we also found that the secarification efficiency was dramatically increased Um Again without Pretreatment the figure on the left the dotted line is the this triple mutant that we've been working on Um, okay So that's and given the the expense of pretreatment We think this is a very interesting strategy and also want to to then transfer this into a real crop to see whether we can Get the same advantages So I want to just wrap up very quickly by talking taking this one step further and talking about Uh What are called suppressor screens? So if we've identified a mutant that's of interest Uh, and it has a particular trait Can we learn even more about this system by doing By trying to mutagenize those plants and asking can we convert the plant back to more like wild type? Can we suppress this mutant phenotype? So in this example The top left plant is a wild type plant The one to its right is this mutant of mediator that causes the dwarfism this plant That's there were the that protein is constitutionally putting the brakes on the pathway And then all the rest are plants that we where we had remutagenized the plants and looked for ones that regained the ability to grow like wild type What did we find we were able to use whole genome sequence analysis? Thanks to support from gsep to to very rapidly identify the mutations in all of these plants and identify What genes were responsible for restoring growth? And what we found was shown in the colored bars the black bars are a number of what are called intergenic mutations The colored bars are other mediator subunits. So we're using this approach to now tear apart How um how mediator functions? So I mentioned that we have these transcription factors that mediator makes contact with I really wanted to mention the work of my former postdoc and gsep funder fundee In our in our project who did a suppressor screen on that original lignin deficient mutant and found the plants in the middle Now he's got a plant that Grows normally that plant is Defective in a gene that is responsible for Bringing a transcription factor from its site of synthesis in the cytoplasm into the nucleus where it can act And so by doing so it rescues the growth somehow that transcription factor is really important And the plant on the right is one where he's knocked out that transcription factor And corroborated his results. So now we know that another player in this Dwarfism these transcription factors that interact with mediator So I want to conclude just by by by saying Giving a couple of examples where we need to think about lignin. Maybe not being all that bad It's a significant portion of biomass It is more highly reduced and it's then then the polysaccharides And we've now determined that it's amenable to catalytic degradation and conversion So through our I would say thanks to gsep funding We were able to leverage that into Funding from the DOE in the form of an EFRC our EFRC focuses on lignin modification and utilization And so that group the group of Madi Abu Omar has developed catalytic strategies for Move for converting lignin in biomass Into these substituted Propylphenols that could be used for downstream processing into Your choice of a fuel or other value-added Compound while leaving a carbohydrate residue that can still be secured and used for fermentation And if any of you had Looked in science a couple of weeks ago. You may have seen this this study which featured Contributions by John Ralph again funded by gsep and myself on another way of Converting lignin into value-added products With a pretreatment that involves formaldehyde stabilization and subsequent hydrogen allysis So i'll i'll i'll just leave it at that by saying that i think that we're Developing a better understanding of not only the catalyst but the regulatory machinery that's involved in the deposition of lignin And that mediators involved in that process We know that we have now a better understanding of how dwarfing comes about in at least some of these plants and I think that's going to be essential as we Move some of these technologies into real biomass crops We have this new type of lignin that could be valuable in a bio refinery context if you're going to be Catalogically converting lignin into products. Maybe you just want one product rather than two or three And that this may allow us to make more efficient use of biomass And with that I'll just acknowledge the people that did the work and candy now is here and some people thought she did a nice job on her poster Which I was very proud of And the other people that with whom we've worked including a lot My former postdoc sirius and john ralph and others So thank you very much for your attention so A little bit too long. Sorry Is Yes Clint you did a very good job of explaining the analogy between polymers of different composition of clay gases proteins and templates and We know a lot about secondary tertiary structure of those macromolecules Maybe i'm naive, but I always thought of lignin as lacking secondary and tertiary structure And I guess I don't fully understand Is that a known problem and is it the secondary structure of that? Polymer that's important for stability or is its association With cellulose the dictator of this mechanical advantage So how does that help us explain what we need to solve? So it's closer to the second We still really desperately need a better understanding of of lignin structure What referred to it is sort of filling in the gaps and that's really in in the wall and that's really our level of understanding at this point With regard to secondary structure, you know, we don't believe that there's any chirality to the molecule and we don't believe I don't think there's any evidence that points to a secondary structure per se when I was referring to architecture What I was referring to Although it didn't have time to explain is some of these some of these lignins like the pure s lignins Can only be beta o4 linked So they they nucleate and then they grow out in a linear structure And yet those lignins as despite Being not being cross linked in the way that normal lignins are thought to be Are perfectly functional Which is which has, you know left us scratching our head in in terms of what what the function or how the structure and function are related Good afternoon. My name is Kurt. I had a question in at the inception of your research. Are there Pure reviewed or agreed upon assessment of risk for extra genomic transfer of your work. I mean obviously there There are precautions, but could could you speak to that? So are you talking about the genetic modification in arabidopsis where we're Bound by you know, good live practice or are you talking about moving to Crop species Both Well, we certainly have to contain all of our transgenics Mutants are not governed by the are not regulated in the same way And But when we move to other species, so we've made transgenic Tobacco for example and certainly it has to be disposed of properly and when we move to poplar Uh, we have to follow those same protocols, but when they go out to the field then we fall under the jurisdiction of aphis So under Those regulations which are Extensive And which we take very seriously my colleague rick myelin Renews that permit every three to five years. I'm not sure which And under those circumstances we have to go to painstaking efforts to make sure that the The the plants that we're putting in the field do not flower so Poplar has a juvenile period of about five or six years perhaps seven and so we do we we have to prevent dispersion of Of the trans gene in the pollen And we do so by compassing the plants you can cut them to the ground and that resets their clock So they do not they will not flower for again and for another five years or whatever So I hope that I hope that answers your question. Thank you. Okay Evan Hughes, is there any chance you have you or others are on the track to some Form of lignin and being able to make it so it becomes a super high value product instead of a problem Well Instead of a problem. Well, yes, as they used to say or still do say you can make anything with lignin other than money If that's what you're referring to I think that these catalytic strategies are really what what are called for because we're making we can convert these into Low molecular weight building blocks in about 50 percent yield Uh, the the the work that I mentioned at the last with formaldehyde stabilization got yields with the high s lignins Which are which are characterized by the beta o4 linkages that are easiest to break over at over 70 percent Um, so we certainly see a bright future there But we've we've only really been working on that for the past few years But I would certainly hope to see that be part of a Bio refinery process Okay, I think we have to stop there. So let's go clean one more time. Thanks


So this person asked me Why relationships are always hard? They've had a number of relationships and not one of them has been what they would call easy. There's always been challenges It's been emotionally Turbulent ups and downs lots and lots of drama. So why is it not easy? So it's a good question and I'm sure a lot of people can relate to this question. Why are relationships difficult? Well really the answer for that is pretty simple And it's because relationships if they're going to work that is Require us to take 100% responsibility for our emotional projections on to the other person and To encourage or lead lead lead the way be an example to your partner for how that's done So that they too in turn will start to take responsibility for theirs So like ideally Okay, let me explain a little bit first. What do I mean by taking responsibility for your projections? well, it's kind of like you can have complaints about your partner, okay and some of it might be just something you observe and You verbalize that you tell them you give them that feedback and if you can do that in a calm way Where you're totally relaxed about it That's perfect. That's okay But you will notice more and more in relationship That if you notice something in your partner that bothers you and It really bothers you you have an emotional Reaction to the thing that they've done or the aspect of their personality or something that really bothers you It's highly probable That there's some aspect of that of what you're seeing that is a projection Some sort of a belief in yourself That you're not completely aware of and it's reflecting itself back to you in the relationship You'll know it's a projection if it's in highly emotionally charged Now this is this is not about what the person does that's right or wrong, etc It's just about taking responsibility for what you're projecting And that's a lot of work It requires a lot of work. It has to be a priority in the relationship so if you're blaming your partner for something and You're really upset about it You kind of have to look and say is there any aspect of this in myself that I've done now There's a process. There's actually a number of processes for how you can do that and how you can learn to do that so In a perfect world you'll be with someone in a relationship that will be willing to practice that with you to take on 100% percent I can talk 100% responsibility with you so they're taking responsibility for their stuff and you're taking responsibility for your stuff and you're talking about it together You've been really honest and open about it If you're not with someone like that it wasn't ready for that and you become aware that this is actually something we need The invitation here is for you to take the lead on this and to be the one to demonstrate this to start to say okay If I'm reacting with a huge emotional intensity, you know feelings of anger feelings of resentment Intense jealousy all those emotions I'm going to start taking responsibility for those in an open way with them and they will become Curious more than likely as to what's changed in you. What are you doing? This is interesting to me You're changing as a person and hopefully then they will start to do the same So to answer your question, I don't know if that's I hope that's a helpful answer But it's like why is it so difficult to have a happy peaceful relationship? Well, it's not easy to do this In fact, it's one of the last things in life We want to do is to to look at the aspects of ourselves that we don't like we don't want to admit to But on the other side of it on the other side of taking all this responsibility There's a lot of freedom and there's a huge amount of connection that comes in a relationship I love it a lot of peace a lot of peace to so You know kind of move away from the right and wrong game into the More understanding of each other game, which is a nice place to be in a relationship and it's very very rewarding So if you'd like to learn more about that you can you can contact me and I'll be happy to email you about it You can visit my website dr.DavidMiloney.com and Thanks for watching the video if you could like it and subscribe to the channel here. It would be a huge help I am a licensed therapist and psychologist So stay tuned for more of these videos Thanks for watching, and I'll see you again soon. Take care


I'd like to welcome all of you that have dedicated your lives to the climate change movement. In June 2013, 500 young leaders from 134 countries travelled to Istanbul, Turkey, for phase one of global power shift. We want climate justice. We have to defend our planet. I've heard about this amazing opportunity to talk about how we're building this movement together. For five days, we shared skills and told our stories. We come from diverse communities and each of us have a unique story to tell. Heard from movement leaders, unsharpened our strategies. This is a concrete option for coordinated global actions, centering around dirty energy. The spectrum of allies, it's a really important concept to understand when you're starting your campaign. I've been inspired by what you guys have been doing and I'll take that energy back to my home country. Now, we have returned home to launch phase two, creasing a national power shift in every country. If we're going to seriously address the climate crisis, this movement has to be at the global level. We have to hold our governments accountable. We have to take on the vested power. The fight against climate change will not be won until we win the fight against fossil fuels. We are building a diverse, collaborative network. All of us are connected. Together, we can meet this challenge. We are joining the round the world to say that time has come. Join us. Join us.


family raises puppy for two years until that sees it and gets authorities involved when she saw her two-year-old dog do something out of character it had forced her to consider that something wasn't right now there was no one seeing it but by the time she'd faced her denial and accepted the truth it was much too late Su Yan knew that she was in big trouble and soon the police would be knocking on her door Su Yan thought she knew what she was getting herself into she'd done the research rather reviews and familiarized herself with hypoallergenic dog breeds she had decided on a Zolia Kuzitli a hairless dog from Mexico she thought they were ready for the commitment but as he began to outgrow his bed and collar and lead she began to worry then the unimaginable happened it all began innocently enough Su Yan lived in Kunming City China with her two young children and her husband the hard-working mother was feeling the pressure of juggling family life and a full-time job so she decided that it was high time for a holiday but what Su Yan didn't know was that fate had a surprise waiting for her with bags packed and ready for their eagerly awaited Asian trip the yuns embarked on a vacation that would change their lives a few days after their arrival the family was just beginning to get into holiday mode when they came across a litter of Zoloitz Kuzitli puppies for sale they had expected to find what they were looking for a year of all places the man who sold the yuns their new puppy had said that the pup would reach around 45 pounds the yuns were ecstatic with their new family member and named him little black they had no idea that this particular little pup would become a pretty big problem the family felt their bond with new puppy growing day by day and soon it was time to return home to Kunmen City with their new family member the yuns decided that little black would be an inside dog but it wasn't long before the family began to notice something odd about it the only foods he would eat were noodles and food but being new to dog ownership Su Yan didn't think much of it and chalked it down to him being fussy every day little black would devour an entire box of mixed fruits and two buckets of noodles and even more surprisingly he'd grown a full coat of hair Su Yan was beginning to feel like she'd been lied to by the pup seller but by then it didn't matter the family had grown very attached to little black but at two years old he weighed 150 pounds then one day Su Yan saw little black do something in the kitchen that raised all the red flags Su Yan walked in to see little black standing on his hind legs Su had seen other dogs stand up like a human while doing tricks or begging for food but this was different shortly after little black constantly walked around on his hind legs it was becoming a little frightening to be around him but Su Yan was still in denial but he was now definitely too big to live in the house so the family built a Michelle to outside you would think that little black would have taken to guarding the house against intruders and barking at anything that moved but he never did the only sound he ever made was a low growl he just didn't add up Su Yan curious as to what dog breed little black really was hosted a photograph of him and a dog owners forum but a vet saw it and called the authorities on her the vet told her that little black wasn't a dog at all he was actually a son bear then he explained to her that laws in China prohibit owning a bear of any kind and it's an offense punishable by jail as much as Su Yan had grown to love little black she knew she couldn't keep him in desperation she called the local zoo fortunately the zoo wouldn't even consider taking little black in without the proper paperwork then she heard a knock on the door the police had arrived with a wildlife expert Su Yan tried to explain that they bought the bear well on holiday and had no way of contacting the man who had sold him she described the predicament she'd gotten into and cooperated with the officers trying to give them all the information they needed to find little black a safe new home the more little black grew the more like a bear he looked Su Yan explained then she admitted that she was a little scared of bears they checked her over for any injuries or signs of malnourishment found little black to be well fed and healthy now they would have to tranquilize him and transport him to the local wildlife center but how had this happened fortunately for Su Yan she was released when police understood that this had been a simple case of mistaken identity Sun bears are hairless when their cubs so it wasn't hard for someone to mistake a hairless bear cub for a hairless puppy soon after the story made headlines people began to share their own stories about adopting domestic animals only to find out that sometime later that they were another animal entirely national geographic stated that this is not the only case and that happens a lot more often than you think Su Yan avoided jail time spite sun bears protecting species status and although having little black moved to a sanctuary nearby was the best decision for the family and for his own sake they still missed the path they knew and looked after for two years the good news is that the story has a happy ending little black will continue to live out his days on the reserve and is in good hands


Hello Aditya. Oh, we're already recording. Cool. I'm going to start sharing since we're already recording. That's great. Share screen. You should be able to see my proposed agenda. Hello, Mark. Hi, Aditya. Thanks for joining. Hi. Happy to be here. See, so am I sharing the correct screen, Aditya? Do you see the agenda on screen? Yes, I do. Great. Okay, then let's get started. So welcome, everyone. It's the Jenkins Advocacy and Outreach Special Interest Group meeting. Oleg has joined us as well. That's great. I've got draft agenda topics here. I don't expect to see Elissa Tong. I believe she's out this week. So topics I had, KubeCon booth support, DevOps world, and Hectoberfest. And then outreach programs, we had talked last week and the week before, or two weeks ago and four weeks ago about campus programs. I could give a status on Google Summer of Code and SheCode Africa for 2022. Any other topics that should be added to the agenda? It depends on whether we have people joining. It doesn't make much really in discussing color topics. Agreed. And I don't expect, I don't know about Jackie, but I don't expect Elissa to join. And so I would hold any topics that need Elissa for another time. Oh, did I misspell your name, Aditya? Oh, I did. Thank you. Corrected. No problem. All right, so I propose let's go through the topics we've got and we'll conclude the meeting after we've covered them as well as we can. So KubeCon booth support was a request sent by email from Jackie. I believe it went to Jenkins users or was it Jenkins advocacy? I don't think I've seen any responses yet. She's looking for both remote help and local help at the conference. And I'm confident, I think I could mark expects to be available to help. I just haven't blocked it out on my calendar yet. I don't commit on that because time is terrible for me. And yeah, I mean, it happens on the evenings and many other details you mark know about. So yeah, I prefer to not commit at all. And my KubeCon application was rejected anyways. Okay. Aditya, are you interested in joining as part of a being part of a booth at the KubeCon conference relative to CDF? That could be good, but I'm not aware of the timings and the dates of this one. And so let me let's that's a good point. I should have had that ready. Let me find her message and let's get the details put into this into these notes because that that will certainly be important to people. Where is it? It's in Oh, here we go. CDF virtual booth. Okay. It will be she says this coming. Oh, here we go. Okay. Virtual booth staff hours. So there are there are her notes. Oh, that didn't help. Okay. Let's just do it this way. Monday, October 11 through Friday, October 15. There we go. And let me embed the the link to that email so that others can find that it is. Oh, interesting. Okay. It's it's at CDF foundation mailing list. So it's not. Okay. There we go. All right. But I don't see any replies to it even even on the CDF list. Okay. So more help needed for Jackie. Like the time they are in which time zone? Pacific. Yeah, US. No, this is US Pacific US Pacific. Okay. Yeah, sorry. So that means shift them by what 11 and 11 and a half hours. So yes, I guess. Terrible. Late evening, late at night to impossibly early in the morning for you. Looks like it. Yeah. And that's that's certainly a challenge with any of these conferences that are in US time zones, right? That's your your time in India is half a world away and it really is half a world away. Yes. Okay. So that was all I wanted to do was remind on that. Be aware of it. Next topic was DevOps world. The announcement has been approved by the governance board and has been merged. Now we've got more topics happening there. So we've got DevOps world talks by Google Summer of Code students. So Aditya, you'll be speaking, I presume? Yes, I just got the invite, speaker invite for DevOps. Great. All right. Excellent. Thanks very much for speaking there. Then other topics for DevOps world. We've got workshops the 28th. Oleg, does it still feel like it's going to work for you to be involved in the in the contributing to Jenkins workshop? It depends. We still need to discuss it with all organizers whether my involvement is required. Okay. It's currently not in my quarter plan, but theoretically it's possible. Okay, so it depends on the complexity of the workshop, because it was just guided tour, we can do one if it's something really complicated. We will need to prepare. Great. And previously, I had, Dheeraj had agreed to assist, has agreed to assist. I don't recall if I'd asked you, Aditya, if you'd be willing to assist again with another contributing to Jenkins workshop like you did for the contributor summit. Yes, Mark, you did. And my reply to that was that 28th and 23rd September, right? So that's a little bit far in my calendar, because it'll be a new job and all at that time. So I won't, I'm not sure whether I'll be able to give my time to this. But yes, I am interested in general. So you had put me on hold as far as I remember last time. Oh, good. Okay. On hold. And let's just, that's great. Thank you. Sorry, I should have, should have brought my notes forward. Thanks. Excellent. So Mark, planning to lead. And, and yeah, I agree, Oleg, with your observation, it depends on, I think we should keep it simple. But, but even then, let's be sure we keep talking to see does it actually fit in with, with your capacity? I'm still not sure what is my capacity. By default, I'm not sure. Is Damian still interested? I, I, I think he was interested. I'll, I've, I've got to double check with him. That's my, my action item, a check with Damian to see if he's interested. I don't recall. I thought he and I discussed it and he said no, he just wasn't going to be able to do it. But let me double check. Great. Now, on the Jenkins or the, on the, is it a CDF track or Jenkins sessions? Is there anything, Oleg, that you're aware of that we need to do there? I think the conference organizers have already got their speakers selected and started the recording process. I know that Xenob and I have submitted our recording or have, have had the recording session. So I know for sure that my student has submitted the recording for GSOC. I don't know what status for the rest. I believe it's Kara who was managing that. Maybe you and Elise, I have no idea. Yeah. So GSOC recordings are in progress and, and that's good. I was just thinking if there were any other details that you, you were aware of that outside of GSOC, I'm not aware of any. I think, I think that's under control and the organizers have got it handled. I'm not sure the plan was to publish the agenda in June. Now it's August and from what I understand, I think has been published yet. So for me, I still don't understand whether we will have lots of feedback, whether we will have booths for Jenkins at this time, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, I'm slightly disconnected. I want to chat with Alisa, but we haven't done it yet. She's available today. Maybe I'll have a chat after this meeting. Yeah. I think she's on, on vacation today. I don't think she's in the office today. I will check it. Okay. Yeah. Because currently I have zero overlap with Alisa because of various things. Right. So yeah. So that, those are all the topics I had for DevOps world, anything else on DevOps world? Oh, logistics. I don't have an answer. Oh, go ahead. Contributor summit. Oh, yes. That's right. Good. Do we have everything confirmed? So the, the confirmation things that I was aware of is that we will do it during, do it during Asia pack time zone and that we will host. Basically, right. Hosted on our, on the Jenkins zoom channel, zoom channel. Because then I would like to challenge the date because October 1st, if you do it, it will be firstly complicated for any DevOps world participants because of the conference is over and then next morning you wake up and something like three or four hours to start at the Jenkins contributor summit. I think that in this case, we should push it to the next week or maybe to do it on Saturday. Because Saturday may be more convenient for many contributors who kind of dedicated their working time for that. Right. Good insight. Yeah. So particularly with this, with this effort to reach Asia Pacific. So Aditya, does Saturday work better for you and for colleagues that you know who are employed? If we did it Saturday during the, during the, say, waking hours, would that be better for, for many people in India or is Saturday off limits? Saturday is fine, but Saturday is compared to which day over here. I think Friday evening would be better than Saturday. If you're doing Saturday evening, but if you're saying morning hours, then definitely Saturday morning is better compared to Friday morning. That's what we will be meeting today. So how I envision that it's not confirmed, et cetera. So we would start at something like seven, eight AM UTC so that Europe can participate as well. And yeah, in this case, it would be second part of the day for E-PAC region. And yeah, I checked time zones two months ago, it would be even for New Zealand, if you are going to us like that. But yeah, it's still tentative. So, so that I had to just do the translation. So that would be 12, 30 PM or 130 PM. Oops, it would help if I didn't, right there you go. Sorry, I pressed the wrong key. 12, 30 PM or 130 PM India standard time. So for me, that's, that's noon or lunch or yeah, afternoon, India time. And that would, that, oh, like your point is that has the benefit that allows New Zealand and sort of Eastern Australia or is it Western, Eastern Australia and China and Japan to still be able to reach into this during, at a reasonable time of day. Great. Okay. So is that a discussion week? We should start in the mailing lists. Should we, I guess discuss it with Alyssa, et cetera, first and then I think my link would be fine. Okay. Again, taking time zone, Alyssa will like to be able to participate on her own. Right. So for us, well, the critical question was whether we align it with the world or not. My assumption taking the currents or that you mark a good information that no, is it correct? Sorry, we'll ask your question again. I missed the question. So when we were discussing contributor summit, maybe one month ago, you took an action to discuss with stakeholders and confirm whether we align with the DevOps world or not. And, and I talked with Alyssa and other stakeholders and she wanted to continue that alignment. But I think even so, it's still open for us to have this conversation with them to see should we separate it because of the APAC time zone. APAC time zone. If you do APAC time zone, it's already separated. Ah, I see your sense is that that, that, that action alone disconnects it because DevOps world is in Pacific time zone. If I remember it or USC, it's, it's not in, not, not compatible with APAC time zone. Well, theoretically, it's possible to do a contributor summit in West Coast Slasher Park. So basically instead of doing it in the morning call the, you doing it late night, you, so it's possible, but then somebody, well, it, it will be more like this DevOps world, APAC will be able to participate. Europe won't be able to participate. It's doable, but yeah, we need to align on that. Yeah. And I think, I think Europe morning is a much better choice for the success of the contributor summit and for, for our engagement in the contributor summit. So I think that's, that's worth in the conversations with Alyssa and others to, to change the time or to set the expectations that we're going to meet during APAC time zone. I shared that with her previously. So I think she's aware of it. It's just this would say, Hey, we think it needs to go at least one day later so that we can get some sleep after the end of DevOps world, or we may want to do it during the following week for, for, if we want to do it during a weekday. So it's for someone to decide. Definitely have preference of a contributor summit in the APAC time zone. Definitely cannot commit to doing two contributor summits like briefly discussed in June. Yeah. I agree. This, this is a single event. Absolutely. No way should we attempt to do too. Well, it could be possible, but it requires bandwidth, organizers, and we have just three participants at this meeting. So I'm not exactly confident about having enough organizers for this event. Right. If we do two. Got it. Okay. All right. So Mark, to start the discussion on contributor summit date and time. Okay. Got it. Anything else on DevOps world and contributor summit? So the result of common topics like Schwach, etc, coordinate sponsorships, but yeah, until we have time, I wouldn't commit on that. Right. Right. That's the, there's, there's an awful lot of organism organizing agendas, etc. But let's get a date, a date assured and then we'll continue the organizing. All right. So next topic we had was on Hacktoberfest and we discussed in our last meeting with Aditya what topics we wanted to cover, etc. So one idea was in the 28th contributing to Jenkins workshop, we could do an introduction to Hacktoberfest there. We could also do it during a contributing to Jenkins segment at the contributor summit. Both great excuses to involve people, particularly from Asia Pacific, who are being Hacktoberfest participants in a session that's Jenkins specific. And we've got, we've got some rough material, some materials that have already been prepped from previous Hacktoberfest that we can use to prep and run this. So I think that's part of the exercise. We need a plan. And then we've got to review the plan and talk about how we approach it based on capacity. Now Aditya, you had asked a question last time, or you mentioned Hacktoberfest and active loop. Could you give us a little bit more on what that concept was? Yes, Mark. So the concept was something like this. Active loop was a part of, so there were two entities over there. One, there was a curated list of all the, you can say, organizations slash projects that are participating in Hacktoberfest. And these what made them different from the rest of the crowd was they were providing some kind of a leaderboard that I'm keeping tracks of the contributions made during the Hacktoberfest for swag or mostly for swag. And yeah, that leaderboard was, you know, something that was encouraging some healthy competition. And that, and I forgot the name of that repository, which had this list, but active loop was one of them. And I participated in that and contributed to active loop. So I know the name of the organization and yeah, that thing. So active loop was one of them. And they had this leaderboard where they were keeping track of issues, the candidate is solving the quality of the issue as well as number of issues. And according to that, they were scoring them. So the issues had easy moderate and difficult difficulty levels. So stuff like that. And finally, they gave swags to people on the leaderboard list. They give t-shirts to top three. And then some other kind of swag stickers to rest people saw something like that. So that was a way of like a parallel swag thing along with the W, wait, I forgot the name, Digital Ocean, along with Digital Ocean Swag. So that was the whole program. And I see you have already mentioned, but yes, they did that, but they had specific Slack channels just for Hacktoberfest questions and support. Okay. So this feels like it would be an expansion of techniques. Now, Oleg, you had, if I remember correctly, in a previous, was it a previous Hacktoberfest or a Jenkins Hackfest, you had a GitHub repository that we had used that tracked contributors. Is something like that usable for this concept? Or am I misremembering things that know that idea wouldn't work? It worked quite well. It's possible. This repository is basically a configuration scope. So it's still available. It's just GitHub action to be connected to the repository. Yeah, I think we can do that. Again, just raises a question who would be administering that, who would have time because all this administration requires time. Right. Exactly. And is your sense that that's something that requires your level of skills, or could somebody with my level of skills or Aditya's a new arrival be able to do that? What's your sense of how difficult it is to administer that kind of a thing? Well, it's not difficult. It's just a matter of self-organization because there are so many various things. There are so many time sensitive topics, you need to perform to make it efficient. So basically it's not about technical skills. It's about ability to dedicate time and to deliver on major action items. Because, for example, if you don't announce October 1st, you wasted some time. If you didn't summarize results, like it happened with the contributor summit again, maybe lose some impact. So you need to just be careful to handle and not Okay, great. Well, and so I assume we would need to, we would have to announce it. And as part of the announcement, we'd have to show how the repository tracks and tracks contributions and how we use it. If we were to use the idea of that Aditya described, we'd have to find a swag sponsor and some people who are willing to spend the time scoring contributions. And my guess, my fear is that maybe more than we can handle. Okay, great. Yeah, so the three people who are on this call with their limited capacity. Yeah, so, okay. It feels like, well, anything else to discuss there on Hacktoberfest. It's, for me, the big gap is we've got a planning exercise that's got to happen and people to help lead the exercise. And I'm not feeling like we've got all the all the capacity we need yet. So probably have to ask in the community, look for others who may be willing to help see if Gavin or other other community participants might be available to assist in some way.  Right. I'm thinking about organizing something for Hacktoberfest. I will be definitely doing a local meet up should be allowed at that time. Nothing's, but right now I don't want to commit. And I think that makes perfect sense. Absolutely. All right. Next topic I had on the list was about outreach program status. So we had talked in depth about campus programs. But I think that needs Alyssa. We had had a discussion with Aditya and with Dheeraj in our meeting two weeks ago. Aditya, is there anything additional you wanted to share on campus programs while you're here with us today? Actually, no, Mark. I did share everything in the last week. If you want, I can maybe speak on it, but it would be just a reputation basket. That's okay. I think we can refer to the previous meeting notes and when I get the recordings uploaded, they'll be available as well. Great. So Google summer of code brief status report there. It's moving forward. Thanks to Martin and to Oleg and to Kara. Martin's getting things scheduled for the final presentations. Aditya, congratulations on your progress. So presentations will be done in a webinar to the community as a whole and also at DevOps world. Then she code Africa is planning their contribute on for 2022. So think April of 2022. It's a long ways out. I've posted an initial question to the Jenkins community forum to community.jenkins.io. No responses yet, but we'll continue working that topic as we get closer. Probably participate in that, but in a more public language that we did at last time. We need more mentors, but I think that we can do that. Yes, and I agree with you. We need to use what we learned from our last retrospective to do a better job with contribute on, but I think we can and should participate. Yeah, one other things. So a few other things for outreach programs. So last year, we tend to be discussed. Yeah, LFX mentorship programs for documentation. So it's a question for you, Marcus, the documentation officer. Do you see any possibility that we can make it happen? I think it might be possible in like November, December. I don't see anything between now and end of October to we had someone who was interested in applying and we had topics relative to Kubernetes, but I don't have capacity between now and end of October to to do a documentation mentorship. And I don't think others have that capacity either. Now, we've got we've got several consistent attendees at our docs office hours. Diraj attends every week, Meg McRoberts and Kristen Whetstone. So we could conceivably repurpose those documentation office hours as mentorship weekly and and consider that. So I'm just not sure that that I can see it happening yet. Is there a time? Is there a time scale on this Oleg that it needs to happen soon? Money might go away or something like that, or it's more of, hey, the sooner we do it, the sooner we get benefit from it. It's the latter and also policy. So there are standard timelines for the next standard consulate starts in October. But yeah, I don't think that it's something. So next next you say starts. They they have a running series of is it quarterly every six months? When do they start new mentorship? So October and then January when we want. So there is a kind of standard pattern. So if you want to be in newsletters, etc, you should follow this pattern. If not, yeah, then it will be a bit more complicated, but it's doable. Okay, I see. And is that newsletter promotion on a quarterly cycle or on every six months or every year? Because, well, let's say they're organizing LFX team at the moment. So I'm not sure who's handling that. I have direct connections with leaders of LFX at the moment. So we can help with that. So again, it shouldn't be an obstacle for us. Okay. Great. So if we had if we had mentors, we could we we've got we know we've got funds available. And we know we've got we we could use this if we're October if mentors are available. Maybe what I'll do is let me I had not put this under the docs office hours. Meeting agenda. Let me put it on the agenda for discussion there. I suspect the answer will be no, I don't think there's capacity, but let me ask. We also had a tentative discussion for who is the operator of the client plugin. I mean, I don't have to revisit it right now. Maybe I'll think people later. Yeah, so there was Kubernetes in general. And you said Kubernetes operator and tecton client plugin. Okay. Any other outreach program items that we should should note? Not at the moment. So I guess you won't be applying to even the session of our preaching. I haven't seen any interest in that at the moment. Yes, it is. It helped me out there is outreach different than the Linux Foundation mentorship. Yes, it is right. It's a separate project, separate program. But firstly, it's quite expensive. Secondly, need to apply in September is project ideas. And I wouldn't like to commit unless there is a company sponsor who wants to fund this effort. So many funds in Jenkins will spend 20k dollars on outreach. So as events officer at the moment, I'm against spending funds on that unless we have clear idea how it would be official to the community and how we could use it efficiently. Okay. Well, and I assumed that we would would prefer a corporate sponsor in that case rather than using Jenkins fund direct funds directly. We don't have enough funds to fund the preaching. So just some numbers. If you want to run outreach, you have put six and a half thousand dollars per student. It's higher than Google summer of code at the moment. It's higher than LFX mentorship. It's basically higher than almost any outreach program in the world. Okay. And so far, I don't see that it achieves its goals, because students participate but then they disappear. We have never had any student who's ticked around in the Jenkins community as a result of outreach. So if we want to actually reach the program's goals, we need to come approach completely different.  Got it. Okay. So not planned, not even hoped for. That makes sense. It just doesn't make sense for us to attempt outreach. If we could, it seems like we could get greater benefit and more flexibility from the Linux Foundation mentorship than we could. Yeah, you can run three programs instead. Right. With funds. Choose of mentees, because in outreach, you basically don't have much choice. Other than assuming replicas and yeah. Got it. Okay. Yeah. So the crucial.  I would have to drop off because of another meeting. That's perfectly fine. Thanks, Aditya. Thank you for joining. And I think we've covered all the topics. Were there other topics, Oleg, that you had? Well, there is one minor heads up. I will be sending an email to Advox, because I've got a request from whatever German aggregator of open source jobs, etc. They want to list the German Jenkins community on their website. So they requested some collaboration from the project site. I will probably just start a thread in the mailing list. And another quick heads up with it. Most likely I will be returning to the question of job sport incoming into Jenkins IO. So we had a brief discussion this game in Morgan about that discussions with these other contributors. I think it might sense, might make sense to have it. But yeah, I need to firstly be consensus in the Jenkins governance board. Great. And last but not least, we have the elections cycle starting in September. Right. So and the actual election is elections are in, is it November with announcement in December? Is it actually elections or in December? No, elections are in November. You might adjust the timeline slightly. But if you follow the biggest timeline, it would be November. Yeah, excellent. Anything else? Okay, then let's call this session end. Thanks very much. I'll post the recording. I'm way behind on posting recordings. So my apologies, it may be several days before I get to posting the recording of the meeting. Notes are available here and recording, I'll get to it as time allows. Thanks.


Hello, in this lecture we're going to talk about variance analysis with regard to direct materials. We will be covering price variance and quantity variance. At the end of this we will be able to explain the use of variance analysis for direct materials and calculate price variance and quantity variance for direct materials. So when we think of variance analysis in terms of the direct materials what we're going to do is compare what actually happened to what we believe should have happened and in order to do that we need to have a flexible budget and the reason for that for example is that if we compared to the static budget that we have created and we produced at a different capacity level we will have a problem in terms of our cost will not be comparable. We won't have apples to apples as they say. So for example if we said that they fixed a budget had a 70% capacity and we thought we're going to produce 42,000 units and then we ran the process and we actually know that what actually happened is we produced at 90% capacity and we produced 54,000 units which is actually a good thing. We can't really compare that to the


I love what Mr. Bidwell has done. I love him trading for Zach Hertz. If you think somebody, especially after the Williams injury, tease him peace, arrest him peace, moment of silence to the injury that Williams, that I do not know that Williams guy existed. Watching him the first five weeks has been awesome. That injury looked terrible. Obviously everybody has massive amounts of respect for him. We need to fill that position right now if we wanna go in, which is what we think we can do, especially in an NFC West that is gonna be a murderous row. I love an aggressive owner. I love a team that buys in and says, let's go win now. And I think the players in that locker room are gonna be appreciative of it as well. Think about Kyler Murray looking at this owner, looking at this front office, Steve Keim, looking at Cliff Kingsbury. Hey, I lost one of my weapons. I lost one of my tight ends and they're like, hey, don't worry about it, buddy. We're gonna get you another one by the end of the week.  A guy who's made $46 million in his career with the Philadelphia Eagles. He says, one is Super Bowl. Who wants everything like that? I just, I think this is great.


Hello Shoshaneem! I know you're heartbroken. I know you miss me badly. You can tell me everything in strict confidence. I'm a professor of psychology and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Lover, Narcissism, Revisited. Back from my trips you see I'm sentent and a lot more handsome than when I had departed. You can watch videos from my trip on my Instagram, Malignant Self-Lover, Narcissism with Vakni. One word. So today we're going to discuss identity. Identity? Is there such a thing at all? Is it real or is it a confabulation by psychologists as deranged as I am? Is identity simply a convenient organizing principle? Or is it a real construct hiding somewhere within our minds? I mean those of you who have minds. So let's dive right in. Modern psychology is permeated, suffused by concepts and constructs of dubious provenance and even less impressive evidence. Yes I can say safely that the pseudoscience known as psychology is not exactly evidence-based. Consider for example the individual. What on earth is the individual without for example social interactions? Consider the concept of personality. Consider the self. All of them are useful literary metaphors but they're not science by any extension of the word. Similarly that we have a core identity is taken for granted by every psychologist and his dog. But do we? Do we really have an identity? Identity diffusion and identity disturbance are perceived widely as real. They're actually permeates seeped into the kind of infiltrated and insinuated themselves into various diagnostic criteria.  The brain is decentralized. The brain has built-in redundancies.  Why would our brain-based psychology be any different? If the brain is decentralized, if the brain is redundant, why would the psychology that is kind of the software that runs on the hardware, why would the psychology be different? A far more realistic model of consciousness in mind would revolve around a cloud, yes a cloud of self-states with permeable partitions which allow for frequent exchanges of information, motions and cognitions. And these self-states are probably organized in scheme-like lattices. I suggest that we don't have identities actually. We have assemblages of self-states. But identity had been in use for at least 400 years. So I think I owe it some respect, at least in the sense that I should try attempt to deconstruct it. Bear with me. It's going to be a bumpy ride with some vakening. And to, as a take-off point, I would like to recommend the movie The Ghost in the Shell, just an animated feature. I've just watched it recently with a newly minted good friend. But there's another movie I think which deals much more directly with the issue of identity. And it's a movie Shattered. Shattered? 1991 movie. In this movie there's a guy, character, protagonist, his name is Dan Marek. He survives an accident and he develops total retrograde amnesia regarding his past. His battered face is reconstructed by plastic surgeons. And with the help of his loving wife, he gradually recovers his will to live. But Dan Marek never develops a proper sense of identity. It is as though he is constantly ill at ease in his own skin. As the plot unravels, Dan is led to believe that he may have murdered his wife's lover, Jack. This thriller, Shattered 1991, offers additional twists and turns. But throughout the entire movie, we face a single paramount question. Dan has no recollection of having ever been done. He has no recollection or experience of being Dan. Dan does not remember murdering Jack. It seems as though Dan's very identity had been erased by the accident. And yet Dan is in sound mind. He can tell right from wrong. Should Dan be held morally and as a result, perhaps legally as well, should he be held accountable for Jack's murder? Would the answer to this question question still be the same? Had Dan erased from his memory only the crime, but recalled everything else in an act of selective dissociation? Do our moral and legal accountability and responsibility spring from the integrity of our memories? If Dan were to be punished for a crime he doesn't have the faintest recollection of having committed, would he feel horribly wronged? Wouldn't he be justified in feeling that he is wronged, that he is mistreated?  Really no memory. Not pretending, but really I have no memory of it owing, for example, to an accident. Should I still be accountable? Should I still do time in prison? What about killing someone in a stupor? What about killing someone in an alcoholic blackout? There are many, many states of consciousness that involve dissociation and selective amnesia, hypnosis, transcend possession, hallucination, illusion, memory disorders like organic or functional amnesia, depersonalization disorder, dissociative fugue, dreaming, psychosis, post-traumatic stress disorder, and drug-induced psychomimetic states. And this is a partial list. Consider, for example, the following. What if Dan were the victim of multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identity disorder? What if one of his alters, one of his, one of the multitudes of identities sharing his mind and body, one of his so-called personalities, what if this personality had committed the crime? Should Dan, the totality of Dan, the entirety of Dan still be held responsible for the crime? What if the alter, John, had committed the crime and then vanished, leaving behind another alter, let's say Joseph, in control? Should Joseph be held accountable for the crime that John had committed? What if John were to reappear ten years after he had vanished? What if he were to reappear fifty years, five zero, after he had vanished, having committed the crime? What if John were to reappear only for a period of ninety days and then vanish again? And what if, what is Dan's role in all this? Who exactly then is Dan in multiple personality disorder? Who is Dan? Who are you? Who are you? That's the question of identity. Buddhism of course compares men to a river. Both men and a river retain their identity despite the fact that their individual composition is different at different moments. The possession of a body as the foundation of a self- identity is a very dubious proposition. Bodies change drastically in time. Consider for example a baby compared to an adult. Almost all the cells in the human body are replaced every few years with the exception of some parts of the brain. Changing one's brain via brain transplantation also changes one identity, one's identity. Even if the rest of the body remains the same when someone changes your brain in the future, you wouldn't be the same person. And I must admit most of you would benefit from such a procedure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was my contemptuous dig of the day. And so the only thing that binds a person together, the only thing that gives a person a self and an identity, is time. Time or more precisely memory across time. When I say memory, I mean personality, skills, habits, retrospected emotions. In short, all the long-term imprints and behavioral patterns. The body is not an accidental and insignificant container that someone trying to say. The body constitutes an important part of one's self-image, self-esteem, sense of self-worth, sense of existence, spatial, temporal, and social, etc. etc. We all need bodies, some of us, more than the others. But one can easily imagine a brain in vitro, in a vial, in the lab. And this brain, bodyless brain, would have the same identity as when it had resided in a body. One cannot imagine a body without a brain, or with a different brain, as having the same identity it has had before the brain had been removed or replaced. But one can imagine the opposite, a brain without a body. What if the brain in vitro, in the above example, the brain in the laboratory, in a vial, what if this brain could not communicate with us at all?  In other words, is the very concept of self critically dependent on the ability to communicate? The biological functions of people in coma are maintained, but do they have an identity? Do they have a self? And if yes, why do we pull the plug on people in vegetative states so often? It would seem, as it did, for example, to Locke, the philosopher Locke, it would seem that we accept that someone has a self identity if, A, he has the same hardware as we do, notably a brain, and B, he communicates his humanity and is humanly recognizable and comprehensible in a world. He communicates this to us and manipulates his environment. We accept that a person has a given the same continuous self identity. If, C, he shows consistent intentional, willed, volitional patterns, and has memory in doing so, and B, for a long period of time. So there's a series of cumulative conditions. For us to accept that someone has an identity, he needs to be exactly like us. The resemblance is critical. This similarity is crucial. Let's go through these four conditions again. For someone to be perceived as having an identity, he must have a brain, the same hardware that we do. He must communicate his humanly recognizable and comprehensible in a world to us and manipulate his environment. He must show consistent, volitional patterns and memory, and he must do this for a long observable period of time. It seems that we accept that we have a self identity, that we are self-conscious. If, A, we discern usually through introspection, long-term, consistent, intentional, willed, volitional patterns and memories in our manipulation relating to our environment, and B, when others accept that we have a self identity. People like Herbert Mead and Foyer Bach analyzed this crucial second component. For us to feel that we have a self identity, this self-identity needs to be acknowledged by other people. If all other people around you had behaved as though you don't exist, as though you are transparent, you would not feel that you exist. You would feel that you have no identity. You would feel that you are slowly evaporating, disappearing, an invisibility cloak. Dan, remember Dan, the accident-prone protagonist in the movie? Dan probably has the same hardware as we do, the brain. He communicates his humanly recognizable and comprehensible in a world to us, which is how he manipulates us and his environment. And so Dan clearly has a self identity. But Dan is inconsistent. His intentional, willed, volitional patterns, his memory, they are incompatible with the intentional patterns and the memory demonstrated by Dan before the accident. There's a Dan before the accident and a Dan after the accident and they are utterly incompatible. Though Dan clearly is possessed of a self identity, we cannot say that he has the same self identity that he had possessed before the crash. In other words, we cannot say that he did is Dan. Dan himself does not feel that he has a self identity at all. Dan discerns intentional, willed patterns in his manipulation of his environment, but due owing to his amnesia, Dan cannot tell if these patterns are consistent or long term. In other words, Dan has no memory. I recommend that you watch my lecture, Identity and Memory. It's a university lecture, but still accessible. The lecture is available on my YouTube channel, Identity and Memory. There are two sides of the same coin. They may even be synonyms. Moreover, in the case of Dan, other people do not accept him or regard him as Dan. They have their doubts whether he is really Dan because they have no memory of Dan as he is after the crash. So the entering conclusion, having a memory is a necessary and sufficient condition for possessing a self identity. And yet, resorting to memory to define identity may appear to many people to be a circular, total logical argument. When we postulate memory, don't we already presuppose the existence of a remembering agent with an established self identity? I mean, who is doing the remembering someone with an identity? Moreover, we keep talking about discerning, intentional, willed, volitional patterns of behavior, but isn't a big part of our self in the form of the unconscious, where there are repressed memories? So a big part of what constitutes the self is inaccessible to us. You can't access your unconscious.  Who is doing the discerning, the intentional, the willed, the volitional behaviors? Who is committing them? This alleged agent, someone with agency has no access to the unconscious, which is 95%. That's the exact figure 95% of our memories and of the information that we are getting from the environment. 95% is not accessible to you. So in which sense do you have an identity? Don't we develop defense mechanisms against repressed memories and fantasies against unconscious content, incongruent, incongruent with our self image and self perception? Yes, we do. Not only, not only we do not have access to our unconscious, we actively defend against it. We do not allow ourselves to access our unconscious because the outcomes could be very traumatic. Even worse, this hidden inaccessible, dynamically part, dynamically active part of our self is thought to be responsible for our recurrent discernible patterns of behavior. In other words, it's the unconscious that very often determines your behavior, not your will, not your volition, not your conscious part. But if you don't have access to your unconscious, who are you? Who is this agent that is committing these behaviors? Your unconscious is hidden, defended against, repressed, and yet it's active. It's dynamic and it generates behaviors in which sense are these behaviors yours? How can you own these behaviors if you don't have access to the part of you that is generating them? The phenomenon of post hypnotic suggestion seems to indicate that this may indeed be the case. The existence of a self identity is therefore determined through introspection by by oneself, and through observation by others of merely the conscious part of the self, never the unconscious, which is the bigger part. But the unconscious is as much a part of one's self identity as one's conscious part consciousness. What if due to some, you know, due to some hoax, cosmic divine hoax, what if the roles were suddenly reversed? What if Dan's conscious part were to become his unconscious? And his unconscious part were to become his consciousness? What if the roles were reversed? What if all his conscious memories, drives, fears, wishes, fantasies and hopes were to become unconscious? While his repressed memories, drives, etc. were to become suddenly conscious? Would we still say that it is the same Dan and that he retains his self identity as he had before? The reversal? I doubt it. Not very likely. And yet, Dan's unremembered, inaccessible, unreachable unconscious, for instance, conflict between his ego to use Freudian terms, they determine his personality and self identity. The main contribution of psychoanalysis, later psychodynamic schools, is the understanding that self identity is not a fixed entity. It's a dynamic evolving, ever changing construct, and not a static, not an inertial, not a passive entity. It cast doubt over the meaningfulness of the question with which we ended the exposition. You remember what we asked? What I asked? Who exactly then is Dan? The question is meaningless. Dan is different at different stages of his life. Ericsson read the work about life stages by Ericsson. Dan is constantly evolving in accordance with his innate nature, Jung. Dan is progressing and changing according to his past history, Adler drives Freud, cultural milieu, horny, and a bringing Klein, Winnicott. Murray said that needs psychological and other needs determine identity. The interplay with the genetic makeup is equally important. Dan is not a thing. It's not an object. Dan is a process. Even Dan's personality traits and cognitive style, which may well be stable, they're often influenced by Dan's social settings, environment is social interactions, object relations school in the 1960s. It would seem that having a memory is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition for possessing a self identity. One cannot remember one's unconscious states. The one can remember the outcomes of these unconscious states. One often forgets events, names and other information, even if it if it was if they were conscious at a given time in one's past. And yet once unremembered unconscious is an integral and important part of one's identity and one's self. The remembered as well as the unremembered constitutes one's self identity. Hume said, the philosopher said that to be considered in possession of a mind, someone needs to have a few states of consciousness linked by memory in a kind of a of narrative or personal mythology. Can this conjecture be equally applied to unconscious mental states? For example, subliminal perceptions, beliefs, drives, interpolations, emotions, desires, not clear. Can we rephrase Hume and say that to be considered in possession of a mind, someone needs to have a few states of consciousness and a few states of the unconscious, all of them linked by memory into a personal narrative. Isn't it a contradiction in terms to remember the unconscious? There's no memory in the unconscious. The unconscious and the subliminal are instances of the general category of mental phenomena, which are not states of consciousness, which are not conscious. Sleep and hypnosis are example examples of non conscious states. But there are background mental phenomena that are also unconscious. For example, one holds onto one's beliefs and knowledge, even when one is not aware, not conscious of them at every single given moment. We know that an apple will fall towards the earth. We know how to drive a car automatically, dissociatively. We believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, even though we do not spend every second of our waking life consciously thinking about falling apples, driving cars or the position of the sun. And yet the fact that knowledge and beliefs and other background mental phenomena are not constantly conscious. This this fact does not mean that they cannot be in principle remembered. unconscious mental phenomena can be remembered either either by either by an act of will, or in sometimes involuntary responses to changes in the environment. The same applies to all other unconscious content. And conscious content can be recalled. Psychoanalysis, for instance, is about reintroducing repressed unconscious content to the patient's conscious memory. And so making this unconscious content remembered. In fact, one's self identity may be exactly such a background mental phenomenon. Always there, not always conscious, not always remembered. The acts of will which bring identity to the surface are what we call memory and introspection. And this would seem to imply that having a self identity is independent of having a memory or the ability to introspect. Memory is just a mechanism, just a mechanism by which one becomes aware of one's background, always on an omnipresent or pervasive self identity. Self identity is the object and predicate of memory and introspection. It is as though self identity were an emergent extensive parameter of the complex human system, measurable by the dual techniques of memory and introspection. These are profound words, mainly because I wrote them. And so I would like to repeat them.  Allow me to reread to you these words, this paragraph. It would seem to imply that having a self identity is independent of having a memory of the ability to introspect. Memory is just the mechanism by which one becomes aware of one's background, always on omnipresent or pervasive self identity. Self identity is the object and predicate of memory and introspection. It is as though self identity were an emergent extensive parameter of the complex human system, measurable by the dual techniques of memory and introspection. In other words, self identity is a complexity artifact. We therefore have to modify our previous conclusions. Having a memory is not unnecessary, nor is it a sufficient condition for possessing a self identity. But if this is the case, we're back to square one. The poor souls in Oliver Zucks's amazing book, The Man Whom He Stuck His Wife for a Hat, everyone in the book, they are unable to create and retain memories. They occupy an eternal present with no past. They are unable to access or invoke their self identity just by remembering it. Their self identity is unavailable to them via introspection, though it is available to those who observe them for many years. But do we doubt that they have a self identity? No, it exists for sure. Therapy often succeeds in restoring pre-amnesiac memories and self identity. Self identity is not only always on, it's not only all pervasive, but it is also incorrigible. In other words, no one, not an observer, not the person himself, no one can disprove the existence of a self identity. No one can prove that a report or a self report about the existence of his or someone else's self identity is mistaken. In other words, we cannot falsify self identity and therefore, it is not a prediction by a theory. It's not linked to any theory. It is also an open question whether it is equally safe to say that no one, an observer, the person himself, no one can prove or disprove the non-existence of his or other's self identity. So not only can't we falsify, not only that we cannot falsify the self identity, we cannot disprove it. Is it equally safe to say that no one, neither an observer nor the person himself can prove or disprove the non-existence of his self identity? Would it be correct to say that no one can prove that a report about the non-existence of his or another's self identity is true or false? Let's go back to Dan. Dan's criminal responsibility, you know, he'd been accused of murdering Jack, but he has no recollection of this following the crash. So Dan's criminal responsibility crucially depends on the answers to exactly these questions. Dan cannot be held responsible for Jack's murder if he were able to prove that he is ignorant of the facts of his action, if he were able to prove the non-existence of his self identity or at least the non-continuity, discontinuity of his self identity. If Dan has no access to his former self identity, the culprit, the perpetrator, Dan can hardly be expected to be aware and cognizant of these facts, the facts of the crime. What is in question is not Dan's mens rea, his criminal intent. What is in question is not the application of the McNactin test. We're not asking did Dan know the nature and quality of his act? Could he tell right from wrong? These are not the questions here.  There's a much broader issue at stake. Is Dan the post-crash Dan, the Dan after the accident? Is it the same Dan? Is it the same person? Is the murderous Dan, is the murderer Dan, the same person as the current day Dan after the accident? And even though Dan himself seems to own the same body and own the same brain and is manifestly sane, he patently and obviously has no access to his former self identity before the crash. Dan has changed so dramatically that it is arguable whether Dan is still the same person Dan in a way had been replaced, mind snatched. And finally we can try to unite all the strands of our discourse into this double definition. It would seem that we accept that someone has a self-identity if the following conditions are fulfilled. Number one, he has the same hardware as we do notably a brain and by implication he has the same software as we do an all-pervasive omnipresent self-identity. Condition number two, he communicates his humanly recognizable and comprehensible inner world to us and manipulates his environment. We accept that he has a specific, a continuous, the same continuous self-identity. Condition number three, he shows consistent intentional volitional willed patterns united unified via memory. And number four, he had been doing this for a long observable period of time. It seems that we accept that we have a specific self-identity, that we are self-conscious of a specific identity. If number one, we discern usually through memory and introspection a long-term consistent intentional willed volitional pattern of behaviors unified by memory in our manipulation or relating to the environment. And the second condition is that others accept that we have a specific self- identity. So others are very crucial to the issue of self-identity. It seems that the self is relationally determined like a node in a network or like a Venn diagram where two circles overlap and the overlap is us. In conclusion Dan undoubtedly has a self-identity. He's human so he's endowed with a brain. But equally undoubtedly his self-identity is not Dan's, is not his own. It's a new self-identity unfamiliar one. And this is the stuff of nightmares. Body snatching, demonic possession, waking up in a strange place not knowing who we are after an alcoholic blackout for example without a continuous personal history without long-term memories when the hippocampus is impaired we are not, we don't exist. It is what binds our various bodies states of mind, memory, skins, emotions and cognitions. This binding, this glue creates a coherent bundle of identity. Dan speaks, Dan drinks, dances, talks, even makes love. But throughout their time he is not present because he does not remember Dan. He does not recall how it is to be Dan. He may have murdered Jake but by all philosophical and ethical criteria it was most definitely not his doing therefore not his fault.