So, students in this module we will discuss the common features in number of different NoSQL products. What makes a product a NoSQL? So, there are certain characteristics which we will be discussing in this module. So, here is the module coverage. So, NoSQL databases are what you see schema agnostic. They are schema agnostic and they are not normalized. Not normalized means that they are denormalized. I will discuss more about it. And of course, they work on commodity hardware. So, what is commodity hardware? Commodity hardware are inexpensive machines which don't cost a lot, but collectively they can process and they can store lots of data which an expensive machine can do. So, they are not very specific machines for specialized use. So, they are not expensive and NoSQL databases are highly distributable. It means that the processing is done over disparate servers which are displaced, which are located at other places and of course, there are many benefits for this. So, denormalization which I will go into more detail is undoing the normalization. So, if you go to the course CS614, there are lots and lots of details about denormalization. So, let's now go into more details about schema agnostic feature of the NoSQL. So, unlike the relational databases for NoSQL databases, you don't have to worry about the schema of the database. As a matter of fact, the schema is not required. So, you can just populate the database. Of course, the type of data is different, different as compared to the relational model.  So, your work is not restricted by first designing a schema and then doing all sort of things. You can just start populating the NoSQL database. No schema at the read time. It means that when you write the query, of course, the query is different in the context of NoSQL. But when you write the query, then you need to know then you what should be doing. So, read to know means read time that at the time of retrieving the data, you need to know what the schema is. Before that, you don't need to know it. And as a benefit, it reduces the development time because if there are any changes in the database with reference to any change in the processing of the data or the process of the business, there is no detailed re architecting, which takes a lot of time, a lot of resources. And then of course, it is a hurdle. It reduces the processing and schema alteration can be done on the go without shutting down the database alteration can be done into the schema. So these are of course, there are some exceptions which are in the notes. So this is one aspect common feature of all NoSQL databases. Next, they are non-relational. Non-relational means that in the classical relational database model, we try to remove the duplication from the processes from the tables, duplication of the data, which results in low maintenance and high performance. But that is for a different type of application. When we say denormalize data storage, it means that the data will be replicated and this will be done by design. And the purpose is to get performance without, without doing the joints, we take a lot of time, okay, and the inter record relationships are not stored, okay. Now this is a flexibility. This is a flexible because if those relationships are stored, okay, that makes the system rigid. And when those relationships are separated, I run a query which looks across those relationships, then I need to perform a join and that join reduces the performance. Goal is not normalization. Some data is replicated. Not all the data is replicated. Some data is replicated when the benefit of data replication is obvious. When you replicate the data, then of course you don't have to go to this table and this table and left and right to get and collect the data. Multiple data views by denormalization multiple data views and it increases the storage space because you are replicating the data and you are making different views of the data which you have and these are denormalized views, denormalized views. And of course, the no SQL databases run on a distributed commodity hardware. Now this hardware instead of a large single server, okay, which has to process hundreds and thousands and maybe more Twitter tweets and Facebook posts, okay. You have the flexibility of working with commodity hardware, it's not very cheap, but of course it's cheaper than specialized hardware. So it costs like 10,000 US dollars and there are multiple search machines. And of course, when this data is replicated across those machines, then those machines can crash, they can burn, they can get out of the system, but the is which is called as graceful degradation of the application. It does not just shuts down. So these are some of the benefits or you can say the common things which are there in a no SQL database. That's all I have for this module.


The need for women's participation in decision-making, as well as in politics, has been stressed. A group womanifesto is a women's charter of demand. It's canvassing for women to contribute their quota in good governance by lending their voice to transformational leadership. Jacinta Albuco has more. This was the womanifesto dialogue 2021. The theme was connecting voices for transformative leadership. The organisers believe girls and women have a right to engage in civil society, vote in elections, be elected to government office, serve on boards and make their voices heard in any process that will ultimately affect them, their families and their communities. 2023 elections are around the corner. We need to push the envelope. We need to push the barriers. We need to push the frontiers. And for that, we want to call for the declaration of a state of emergency on women's political representation in Nigeria. We are not part of the constitution. So we addressed several issues. The issue of citizenship, the issue of indigenship, the issue of discrimination, dignity of human mood, political rights, social economic rights of women, federal character commission should be changed to gender character commission, right to manager, the issue of language and the issue of women with disability. A panel session got women, members of House of Representatives, insisting it is no longer the era where women's views and voices were not respected. Women have to take strategic actions, recognising that actually they are not weaker. If you are half the population and you are the one who bears the children, how can you not be powerful?  Don't think it is your bed right and you go home and relax. Politics is a good game. Nobody should cajole you to tell you that politics is bad. If it is bad, we will not be there. They also stress that the quest to participate in politics is not enough without the definition of purpose. If you forget those people that have voted you, four years is just like four days. The time we come back that you want to see their election and time have changed, we need to get that into our back of our minds. That is no longer when you keep money and you come and you give the people money to vote for you. The thrust here is that paving the way for more women in a political business and civic spaces is an investment in more just, equitable and peaceful societies. Jacinta Obuco for PLOS TV Africa. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Hello and welcome to the U.S. Institute of Peace for a conversation with the President of the National Assembly of Côte d'Ivoire, his Honorable President Adama Mitogu. I am Joseph Sani. I'm the Vice President of the U.S. Institute of Peace and I lead the Africa Center. For those unfamiliar with the Institute, the U.S. Institute of Peace is an independent nonpartisan organization based in Washington, D.C. and founded by Congress in 1984 and exclusively funded by Congress, the U.S. Congress and other U.S. government agencies. The Institute achieves its mission through training, research and analysis and support for peace processes and those working on the front lines of conflict around the world. As we all know, parliamentarians play a vital role in the success of democracy and particularly in West Africa. Today's conversation will be focused around an important role parliamentarians play in the peace-building process and what specific opportunities lie ahead for partnership with the international community and countries such as Côte d'Ivoire to continue to build peace in the sub-region of West Africa. President Adama Mitogu was elected first as Vice President of the National Assembly of Côte d'Ivoire on April 14, 2021 and then was elected as the President of the National Assembly by almost the entirety of the House, both the opposition party and the party in power in June 2022. He was also among other positions, Minister of African Integration between 2011 and 2012. Côte d'Ivoire has achieved significant economic progress since the violent political crisis in 2010 and 2011, with the country being seen as a driver of growth in the region. This stands in part to the country's parliamentarians who have made significant contributions at the national level in the last decade. With Côte d'Ivoire now facing a surge in violence extremist groups infiltrating its own northern borders and those of the coastal West Africa region broadly, parliamentarians' expertise can once again play a major role in ensuring peace and stability. This conversation comes at an opportune time as Côte d'Ivoire has been selected by the Biden administration as one of the priority countries in the U.S. strategy to prevent conflict and promote stabilization. For those of you joining us in person and virtually around the world, please join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag parliamentarians and peace. Please welcome to the stage Honorable President Adam Abic to go, President of the National Assembly of Côte d'Ivoire, please. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I talk in French because you used to talk in French in my country. It's the language, official language, so I am sorry for my American friend, but I talk in French. Ladies and gentlemen, guests, Mr. Vice President of the Institute, ambassadors, it is a great honor for me to be here in the country of Uncle Sam, a country that we admire. I would like to welcome this wonderful initiative and opportunity that you are offering to my country through the National Assembly of Côte d'Ivoire. We are so happy to be here with you, and we share this vision for our country, and we share the vision with our President, Ala Sanwattara. We believe in the excellence of our parliamentary institutions. As you know, the relationship between our two countries goes back to 1961 with the first President of our nation, and our relations remain excellent between the Presidents Joe Biden and Ala Sanwattara. So, we are here today in a context of good relations between Côte d'Ivoire and the United States in this environment. We are here this morning to talk about parliamentary democracy, to share with you our experiences, our experiences in Côte d'Ivoire.  There are no taboos today. Côte d'Ivoire is a country that wishes to strengthen its democracy. It relies on its citizenship and sovereignty, but also on its openness, because no country can live when it is closed in on itself. And so, for Côte d'Ivoire, openness is essential. And that is why we are here today in the United States within our partnership that falls into the excellent relationships between our heads of state. Mr. Vice President, if there are any questions, I am absolutely ready to answer them. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. President. I'd like to start with a question. Why are you here in the United States as President of Côte d'Ivoire's National Assembly? First of all, thank you. Thank you for having me and my delegation here in the United States. I am accompanied by the Vice President, Moïse Kekoudaoui, Executive Secretary of the main opposition party, and a Professor of Cardiology. I'm also accompanied by the former Minister of Energy and Oil of Côte d'Ivoire, Mr. Thomas Kamara, from the RHDP, which is the party in power. And I have other illustrious colleagues as well. Unfortunately, one of my colleagues was not feeling well and was not able to join us today. I hope he'll be able to catch up with us this evening. All of that is to say that our delegation that is here today represents all of the different orientations in our assembly. Concerning our presence here in the United States, it is related to parliamentary diplomacy. In Côte d'Ivoire, we believe that our institution has a role to play. First of all, we have a sense of accountability toward our people who have elected us. Now, regarding the ways that different powers interact, we see that parliamentary power is extremely important. And Africa, Africa should not simply need to follow along with decisions of more powerful countries. And so our parliamentary diplomacy needs to be a complementary diplomacy in order for us to be able to discuss different issues with parliaments around the world, so that parliaments in other countries do not make decisions that are then imposed upon us. The United States is an old democracy. And the United States is a symbol of the strength of institutions. For those reasons, it makes sense for us to be here in the United States. We can learn from the experience of American institutions. And we also hope to strengthen our relationships between the United States and the Côte d'Ivoire, although the relationship is already excellent. But we want our institutions, our parliaments, to have a strong relationship. And that is why we are here today, to inject new energy into the parliamentary relationship between our countries. You talked about the diversity of your delegation, political diversity, and even diversity in terms of the roles played. I remember when you came into office as the president of Côte d'Ivoire's National Assembly, you made sure to thank Alessane Ouattara, the president of the country, as well as former president Bagbo and former president Medier. What did that symbolize for you? As you know, there's a certain gratitude that I feel I had the chance before my election to serve as interim president of the National Assembly for my predecessor who was sick at the time. And during that time, I made a proposal to the different parliamentary groups. I suggested that we come up with a real parliamentary family, because what unites us is Côte d'Ivoire, the interests of our people. It's true that in politics we may take different positions, but as soon as we become members of the institution, we must think of Côte d'Ivoire above all. And that means that we must forge a family. What I can say is that before I was elected, before I was even interim president, the opposition was at the right, the party in power was on the left, and the two didn't communicate with each other. There was no communication between the two of them. So everyone came to the table with very fixed positions, and there was no discussion. And so there was no sense of listening to one another, having a real dialogue. Those things, along with compromise, are values that do not go against the idea of having different ways of thinking. Rather, compromise shows the different ways of thinking have come together. So I would like to commend the different political groups at the National Assembly who have shared with me their vision. During this entire time, we have tried to institute this sense of family. And when I was elected on June 7th, 2022, it gave me the opportunity to recognize the opposition because the president of Cote d'Ivoire, who appointed me, might be the R.H.T.P. president. But mathematically, our party was in the majority, so I could have thought, okay, that's sufficient. But it seemed important to me that we build this family together in the parliament. So I talked with the different parliamentary groups, and on the day of the election, what we expected was that the opposition would participate even in a passive way. The vice president, Moise Kikawe, took the floor and read a text on behalf of the opposition. And at the request of Henri Comédier and Laurent Bagbo, former president, asking them to vote for me. So for me, that represented a major advance because the fact that they read that text, that call to vote for me, had a huge impact. It expressed the shared desire to create this parliamentary family. It's a family that works in the ways that we came up with during this election, compromise, discussion, agreements. We try whenever possible to always find that which is going to unite us and bring us together rather than divide us. For those people who are following us online, Côte d'Ivoire is facing sub-regional instability, and there are terrorist attacks that have taken place, and there have been some coups in the sub-region. Today, what do you think are the roots of this instability in Côte d'Ivoire and in the sub-region? Before I address the matter of instability in Côte d'Ivoire, I think we have to go farther back in time. The deepest, oldest roots of instability in Africa come from electoral disputes. Those are the oldest causes. Ever since colonization independence, it seems clear to me, I wasn't around then, but I studied this, it seems clear to me that what would have been better would have been to come up with a structure for people to express themselves and to hand that kind of structure down from one generation to the next. When we gained our independence, certain political figures were imposed and they created, they generated the roots of this revolt, and so there have been coups after coups in many countries in the sub-region. These ancient roots of the multiple coups became over time community-based crises because a person leading the coup would belong to a specific community and then another community would get up in arms and so on and so forth. Then what happened next is that in certain countries, the crises came from poverty. There is also climate change, terrorism, which took advantage of this poverty and which has seen it as ripe conditions for terrorist acts. So what was clear was that young people didn't have enough access to jobs. 77% of Africans are young people in economic terms. If you look at a young population, you see that that's also a population of consumers, consumers with the purchasing power, but when that population is poor, things change drastically. So the lack of jobs for young people and terrorism have created a level of destabilization that has only increased. Democratic challenges in certain countries have unfortunately led to military forces or civilians creating ripe conditions for coups. Therefore, in Côte d'Ivoire, we have tried to avoid these pitfalls by fighting against poverty, especially because our country, following the 2010 elections, our country went through a post-electoral crisis with 3,000 people who died. We have drawn the necessary conclusions from this and taken on the responsibility for this and I would like to salute Alassane Wattara for all that the president has done and also the president, rather the opposition leader's willingness to take on his full responsibility. And in 2021, we saw that all three major leaders really wanted to focus on Côte d'Ivoire. Now, we have a sense of responsibility in all of this as officials. I was executive director up until one year ago. In the assembly, we do have an advantage. Well, there's the executive president of different parties, the party of Laurent Bagbo. And so this becomes the engine for social cohesion. We're creating this family, but I can also mention that we have this sense of responsibility and history has meant that we must have it. You talked about political instability and a democratic deficit. One of the causes is this question of term limits and the removal of term limits in the subregion. We've seen a number of heads of state, though the Constitution limited the number of terms decided to continue anyway. Removing this rule around the third or fourth term was made legal by the constitutional council. And so there is this question of legitimacy or legitimateness, rather. So what can you tell us about term limits and heads of state who decide to remove this limit? Here's what I can tell you. Term limits in and of themselves were voted upon by the different peoples. But each country has its own context, its own situation. Let's take the question of Germany. We had Angela Merkel who served for three terms and some people wanted her to serve four or five, but we don't really have the same situation. Today, each country in Africa needs to be to be able to look into the future and this relies on the voting of different laws. In Cote d'Ivoire, regarding the third term, I think you probably are indirectly talking about our country, but we had a constitution that was drafted in 2016. And we wanted, in the fifth of March 2020, Alessandro Watara announced that he would not run in the election that would be held in October 2020. So on March 10th, the prime minister, Mr. Coulibaly, was designated. He was designated before his party as being the next candidate for the 2020 elections for the RHDP party. However, our colleague was taken from us. Just two months before the election, I was executive director at the time, and we didn't have a choice. All I did was to take account of the state of mind in Cote d'Ivoire. And Cote d'Ivoire was on the point of implosion at that point. We thought that only two months from the elections, a different choice would have been deadly, not just for the party, but for the country. The president asked us to take time to reflect. As executive director of the party, I took on the responsibility of leading the party because I believed that any other solution could undermine all of the fundamental underpinnings of Cote d'Ivoire. So in terms of changing the constitution, I think that when a constitution is voted upon, certain provisions need to be put in place in order to preserve the dignity of those who are leaving. There's something else that we have noticed often in Africa as compared to developed countries. Former heads of state are treated with the dignity of the post that they occupied. But in Cote d'Ivoire today, whether this be president Bagbo or others, well, they are treated as the laws require. In 2020, we lost one prime minister after another, two in a row. But legally, the constitution allowed the president to be a candidate in the elections, legally. There are other interpretations, but legally, the president could run. So that was the situation. In terms of other countries, Guinea, Burkina Faso, the facts speak for themselves. These are countries that have undergone coups, so there are indeed lessons that we can learn from their situations. And I agree with you. Constitutions must be the compasses that guide our countries. We have a strong, solid constitution. And as President Obama said when he visited Ghana, at a certain moment, institutions need to be stronger than people in Africa. And that is what we are working on in Cote d'Ivoire, and what we have been working on since President Alas and Watara came to power. We've been working to, well, all of our institutions have been put into place, and we are working in, as we respect our texts, our laws. And then I will translate for the president. Mike, there are mics. Thank you very much for those insightful remarks. My name is Anne Watkowski. I'm the Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations at the Department of State. My question to you is, can you offer us some insight on your views with respect to, as was mentioned earlier, the U.S. strategy to prevent conflict and promote stability, specifically our partnership with Cote d'Ivoire on this matter, which focuses very much on some of the challenges that you've already discussed around concerns regarding instability in the region. So my question is two part. Can you express to us, unpack for us, how you see the necessary approach, the tools, to addressing these challenges comprehensively from a national standpoint, one, and two, how you see opportunities for regional cooperation in this respect? Thank you. The moderators are repeating the questions in French. Cote d'Ivoire, today, has gone over its budget, specifically with regards to security. Today's budget shows that growth has reached roughly 50 percent, but there are two different levels of security. There's domestic security managed by the Ministry of the Interior, and that's the most important level of security for us, given that terrorism, as I was saying, is finding a home with the young unemployed people. So we need more police, more security agents, more intelligence, as people and communications like to say, information guides action. If you have security but no good intelligence policy, you're going to fail. So intelligence is absolutely necessary. Investments therefore have been made in intelligence. Today, when you look at our capital city, Abidjan, you can see that there is a policy to trace incidents when they occur, but that's not sufficient. The Ministry of Defense along our borders has instituted a policy to protect our borders using drones, using high-performing technology, and other security measures. But we need to go even further, given that Cote d'Ivoire is surrounded in the desert by countries that are in fragile positions. When you look at Cote d'Ivoire today, insecurity has gained ground and is now an issue in roughly 70 percent of the country in Wagatugu and several departments around Wagatugu. It's not such an issue, but the rest of the country, yes, in Mali, you have Bamako, but the terrorists have really taken over a lot of ground in Cote d'Ivoire, therefore. Given our economic success, our what we symbolize, we've become a target of these terrorists. The sub-region needs a real armed force that will support each country's armed forces or armies. That means creating that army, training it, and so on and so forth. All of that requires a lot of resources, and unfortunately, our countries do not have sufficient resources to do this. We need to build hospitals. We need to build schools, highways, roads. We don't have enough resources to meet all of our security needs, so it's all fine and well to support regional cooperation and sub-regional cooperation, but that needs to be in support of the national armies that are at the front lines in this battle against terrorists. When I took office on, or rather when I arrived in Cote d'Ivoire on April 3rd, I met with roughly 15 parliamentary presidents. There was the president of the Burkina Bay National Assembly. There was representative from Mali, from other countries as well, and I spoke with them about the problems that they're facing. And what they were all saying is that today, terrorism comes from within their countries. If you take Burkina Faso, for instance, young people go out in the morning, they get money, and they come back at night, and if they provide intel on certain houses, there'll be an attack, and they take on and off their army fatigues when it serves them. And we need to find a solution for this poverty that is affecting this country and other countries in the sub-region. I just would like to follow up on what was said regarding this question. What are the solutions that you suggest? You're talking about reinforcing the armed forces, but what about governance? What is needed in terms of governance? Because otherwise we might walk away with the impression that there's only one solution to the security issue. No, there are several different solutions. There's governance as well, of course. The people need to feel that even if the government has few resources, that the government is using those resources well. That is reassuring to the people. And they need to feel convinced that their taxes are going to a good purpose. There's the equitable distribution of wealth that is necessary. There's also training. We need to take our educational policy in our countries and update them. I've had the chance to visit countries that are emerging countries, and in Africa we need researchers. We need astronauts, but what is absolutely essential is training for our young people. They need to be trained to meet our needs so that they can be employable. With regards to the governance issue, we need to overhaul education and focus more on professional training for young people. Our healthcare systems need to be overhauled as well so that we can serve needs on a local level. It's good to have big hospitals, but we need local community health centers that can offer diagnostic services and keep tabs on the local population. President Alassane Huata has instituted a policy of creating community health centers in all the different villages. And that's true for the entire subregion regarding employment. What we need is for governments to withdraw from certain sectors to focus on security and education. That means we need to find private companies that can handle certain services for us. It's clear that the solution cannot be a security solution alone. Everything is interconnected, and that's what we started doing by organizing the creation of 2,000 to 3,000 new jobs in Cote d'Ivoire. But this process is a work in progress. Even if our financial partners provide support, we still need visibility. We need transparent management of the aid that will be provided to us. Hello and thank you to the Ivorian delegation for coming. My name is Catherine Kelly from the Center of Strategic Studies for Africa in Washington. Here's my question for you. What is your vision for the role of parliamentarians in the management and supervision of security? Do you see a way of promoting collaborative work between parliamentarians and other actors to fight against insecurity in order to guarantee citizen security? I'm asking you this question because in March we had the great honor of doing an exchange with four members of your assembly in our seminar in Accra. Thank you. We have a defense commission in parliament which is in contact with the Ministry of Defense and of Homeland Security. As I was saying, the effectiveness of our security policy must be based on a policy that allows the people to participate. And this participatory policy can only be put in place through the deputies. We hold information sessions with ourselves and the Ministry of Defense and increasingly we think that at the level of the police we need to have community policing. The people must no longer fear the police. The police must be seen as a partner. Thus the people can be a means of gathering intelligence. Sometimes the people who place bombs might live right next to the victim of the bombing right in the same neighborhood. So we need a community policing strategy. That is why it's so necessary to have visibility on regarding security and defense policy. We need to have access to some information. Of course we can't have access to all information. Regarding that point, we have a very close relationship with the Ministry of Defense. Furthermore, when there were the problems in Mali, the Ministry of Defense had received our commission for defense to update us on the situation of Vavorians detained in Mali. And we didn't need to make a lot of noise because there were already processes in place. So the parliament was involved. And all of that is to say that we have access to information because we have this sense of accountability toward our people. You've mentioned Burkina Faso and Mali and of course that's not just random. These are countries that have undergone difficult and tragic situations. And you've said that Côte d'Ivoire is an island in this tumultuous sea. What is the role of Côte d'Ivoire in resolving this situation of instability in those other countries? Subregional institutions alone are not able to find a solution. So what is the role of Ivorian leadership and what can parliamentarians do to resolve these situations in these other countries in the subregion? The situation of Burkina Faso and Mali, as you know, well, Côte d'Ivoire has a policy of openness. Nearly 26 percent of people in Côte d'Ivoire come from other countries and Malians and Burkina Bays are among the most numerous groups. And so when there is trouble in those countries, Côte d'Ivoire is very concerned. There are, there's migration, there are population movements and Côte d'Ivoire welcomes a very high number of these migrants. So this can destabilize Ivorian society. What we must do and what we do in parliament is this. We put transition parliaments in place for these countries in transition. We wanted to be close to the president of the republic to, well, because some subregional organizations had passed resolutions to prevent certain displacements. But we would agree that the more we isolate these countries, the less likely we are to find a solution. We need to stay in contact and maintain our relationships, not as a recognition of the people in power, but we need to maintain these relationships with these countries so that they can see that the world that they are in is not a world of coup d'etat. Our world is not one in which problems can be resolved using illegitimate and illegal institutions. And I think that this will be successful. Molly is currently going ahead with a referendum to adopt the new constitution. Guinea is doing something similar. I hope that Burkina Faso won't be far behind. In our conversations, we've seen that they see that they have no other alternative than to come back to what's normal. And by that, I mean elections and institutions. And so Côte d'Ivoire as the locomotive of the subregion, which is in constant contact with other heads of state and Iqawas. Well, we are doing as much as we can. We are now arriving at the end. So what do you expect concretely from your visit to the United States? What do you expect from American officials? Can you say as concretely as possible what you expect from this visit? What we expect from the United States is greater involvement. Currently, Africa, following close to 60 years of independence from many African countries, Africa is no longer off limits. We've reached a certain level of maturity and we're in a win-win situation when it comes to partnerships. That means we need greater involvement. Americans, given the development level of the country, well, Americans are essential to us in Africa. It's true that with the Russian-Ukrainian war today, we're heading toward a new geopolitical order. Different blocks are being built or groups. Inflation is running high and each country needs to handle its own domestic issues, but that's a real danger. Whether the threat is COVID, the Russian-Ukrainian war, or the energy crisis, all of these challenges require that we pool together our resources and come together to face them together. In Africa and in Cote d'Ivoire in particular, we want to be a driver of growth of different things. When it comes to the U.S. and France, the U.K., Germany, the EU, the U.S., we need our allies to come together in support of Africa because today, Africa is facing a certain number of challenges at the same time. Africa is the continent of the future, but that future requires planning. If we don't plan for it, what seems to be an opportunity today, and economists talk about Africa a lot, they say, Africa has the resources, the natural resources, has the youth, etc., so there's a lot of opportunity, but the youth can equally be a threat. If the U.S., in terms of its involvement and support of Africa, helps Africa focus on professional training with digital tools, for example, because we are the continent with the greatest growth of the digital economy, but all of that needs to be planned for, it needs structure. The U.S. has the experience that Africa needs to benefit from, so the U.S. needs to see Africa as a partner, an opportunity, a pro, and not a con.  Africa is not something to be divided up or to be shared, it's a partner, it's a partner for the U.S., and I would say that's especially true of Kotiwa. Thank you so much, President.


Okay, so I think we're making good progress, fleshing out my sections, so that a few hours more work to do to get them in a decent format, but hopefully later on today I'll get most of that done. And we have Xing has volunteered to help with data with the key value access stores, but I haven't had any interaction with him specifically. Do we need to invite him to this crawl or to the status update call maybe next week? Yeah, I assume that would have been the case. Yeah, he's volunteered to write those sections. He added comments to the doc, and yeah, he should definitely be added to all invitations and emails related to this. All right, I'm really sorry, I just updated the table of contents and it's wiped out the comments we had to put in about who's doing which sections. I think I remember them all, but Clint, do you want to give a quick update on the blockstores in the file systems that you were looking at? Yep, I will. I just started working on the block this morning, and my plan was to flush it out this week. I think I'm starting with the tables because I feel like filling in the tables will help me fill out what's the right type of more detailed information to put in the descriptions. I went through the first pass on the block table this morning and then I was going to do the file system table this afternoon. Is there time for me to ask feedback on one quick thing in the block table to see what people think? Sure. Yeah, I guess I'm curious on how we think that this should hold up against what type of, possibly against what type of technology, and this is where it always gets more subjective, but as we create this table, I'd look at one box. If we look at the local and then the performance box, I put in that box that it's limited by local components and it can benefit low latency applications. I think that the obvious statement is it's limited by local components, but it sounds negative in the way that that's said, but in reality it can be the right thing. I tied in with that subjective statement of hey, this can be good for certain apps. Do you guys think that that's the right thing to do in this table, or should it just be very objective where it just states the obvious of it's limited by local components? Yeah, I don't feel too strongly about it. I mean, it does strike me that each one of the cells in that table could justify a whole paragraph almost. As you say, there's quite a bit more to say there about performance of local disks, and maybe that's something we want to add in the second pass or later. I think what you have in that particular cell right now is good enough for the size of the cell. I'm sure it could be done differently or better, but we have limited space and the intention of this table was that you could scan through it and you could say, oh, how does the performance of local versus remote versus distributed box doors compare? I can just read three sentences in the bottom row of the table and I get a reasonable idea of some generalities that may apply. It was sort of my thinking when I don't remember Alex, so I put this table together, but there was my thinking around these tables in general. Okay, so it sounds like just like an objective statement quickly in a few words and then a little bit of subjectivity that gives some hints as to the direction that we're thinking or helps them understand the rationale then. Yeah, I would also, one thing I found that people struggle with is actually understanding what the magnitude of some of these differences is. So putting some concrete numbers in there might be useful. So like the durability or something like that, like the availability of like nines or something like that? Yeah, you know, performances, yeah, exactly what you described, performance of local disks. Everybody knows I think this one is at 100, I opt for something per 10,000 per 60 or whatever. Remote disks is, you know, all this is magnitude more than that. Yeah, it gets a little bit more like on the local side with NVMe, it gets a little bit more complicated and the numbers change. So that's why I had a hard time putting in some of those types of details. Yeah, it is hard. I guess just knowing whether, you know, additional overhead in network transport is a 2x factor or 200x factor is kind of useful. Right, okay, that's what I was looking for. Thank you for that feedback. So my expectation is that I'll be working through this and I think I'll skip over to the NAS table and then I'll start writing more details in the descriptions and the appropriate sections. So I feel like it all makes a good progress this week. Yeah. So where were we, the last time I heard was that you were going to run through the block for feedback? Yeah, so I just did some feedback on the block and I'm pretty clear on on how to fill out the information based on Quentin's feedback. And the next one is going to be file system for the table and then I'll go and fill in the descriptions after that. So I feel like we'll make some good progress this week. Okay. We do have, so we have one more session on the 8th of October and then we're sending out two comments to the wider, to the storage working group on the 26th. Do we want to try and target the 18th or the 19th as when we send out the emails that we give a few days to collate feedback and we can discuss at the working group? I would love to target that date. I'm just whizzing through the document here. It's difficult to read it because it changes every time I read it, so I'm not quite sure which parts to reread, but it strikes me there's a lot of content missing still. And maybe that's just subjective, but so Volumes, are you doing that this week, Clint, did you say? Yeah, so I'll commit that for Friday to have my session done, so blockstores and files. So I'm committing to have basically all of the attributes and the storage layers completed by tomorrow. So sorry, which section is that? Is that the one called storage stack slash layers? Yes, correct. Okay, so that's another big missing piece. Okay, that'll help. And the next page, I guess. And the next. So then the next section, the orchestration and management interfaces, I think, I'm seeing has done an amazing job and that looks fairly ready to me in terms of being ready to review. Then Clint is working on the blockstores and the file systems this week. Who was working on the object stores? Is that yourself, Clinton? No. That's Louise. Oh, that's right. I'll pick him an email as a reminder. Sorry, I'm struggling to, this document's kind of getting large. So maybe, can somebody want to just present? Sure, I can do that. And what I was thinking of doing was actually scrolling through the document and just it's, if you just go through the table of contents, it's kind of difficult to get a picture of what's done and what's not. Can you see the doc? Yeah. Okay. So the scope and the layout and the attributes of the storage system are done. Okay. The the data access interface was what I was working on just a second before we joined the call.  Okay, hold on before you just go back up again. So volumes, block file system, shared file system application, API, object store, key value store databases. So volumes is what Clint's going to do, is that right, including block and file system? Correct. So that is just a 30 days of description to kind of say, this is what block is, this is what file systems are. So it's not too complicated. That's like a part of each. Yeah. And then the the storage stack of the layers, this probably means it's probably about half a page of content per layer, if I need to add in. How about you skipping over lots of stuff here that's not finished? Hold on. Sorry. Yeah. Is there a section that I'm that I'm not thinking about? Because when I assign myself from the from the initial list, it was like right now the page is what 23 and 24. And then I see there's like an empty volume section. So when you said volumes, were you referring to the block stores and file systems or referring to something else? Yeah, like that, volumes, who's assigned to that? No, this is me. Okay. I'm going to fill in this. Yeah. So you had the blocks in the file system section, correct? Okay, sorry. The storage layers, that's me as well. And I'm filling in these sections. I think I need there's about probably half a page of content for each of these that I need to finish off. So there's six sections here, which needs filling in six or seven sections. And then Alex, how is this section different from the latest part? Is this a more refer description compared to later the later sections? So this this section defines the different layers in in a storage system. So we're talking, you know, we kind of said, we want to differentiate the layers so that we can define common terms for things like the data protection and the transport layer and all those sort of things. So then the file system, the block, the object sections can can be much prefer because they don't have to define the data protection multiple times, for example. Okay. So I'm defining these layers. I'm not going into what a file system is or what a what a, you know, or examples of a file system or examples of a block storage. That's in the block section and the file system section, which is later. Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay. So I finish off these layers by tomorrow, hopefully, and then this section, the orchestration and management interfaces is the section that that Xenia has fleshed out. I think she did that last week, correct? Yeah, it's done. Yeah. So and this this covers native interfaces and the top volume interface and external interfaces and other framework and tools. So we have some sections for opening, sorry, open SDS and Rex Ray and Rook. Just one quick comment there, Jing. This is, I think, where things start getting dangerous, where we mentioned some projects and not others and some products and not others. So just a heads up there, I think. Okay. So what is your suggestion? You prefer we don't mention them at all? Well, I don't know. What I know is once we open this up for review, people are going to say, why is my framework not there? So we either have to have an answer that says, you know, we only mentioned frameworks that are in the CNCF, or we have to say we only mentioned frameworks that fulfill some other properties, or we have to mention all the frameworks that people want mentioned in the document. And I think I'm just telling you that you're going to run into that problem. I'm pretty sure I don't know what experience and I have this, but that would be my prediction. So Alex, what's your thoughts on this? So we're never going to make everybody happy here, whether it's on the orchestration and sort of framework tools, or whether it's in the examples we give in the block section or the file system section or the object store section. I think we have to, I think we have to be pragmatic and focus on some of the main things. And possibly we can use the CNCF landscape as sort of criteria as to whether we put data in or not. But again, right, we can't put every single system in it. It's pretty simple. There are lots and lots of systems. Yeah, I think like devil's advocate side, people, like if we took certain things out, people are going to look at it as incomplete, possibly. And if we're describing what's going on cognitive, we don't list any projects. And people may think that we're just missing the boat completely. I think we're damned if we do, damned if we don't on any side of this. So it's really tough. And so I would go with some type of a description like Quentin had suggested. And maybe it's that they're a CNCF project. Maybe it's that they've presented to the working group or presented to the TOC. Maybe it's some type of a statement like that. Yeah, I wonder if another approach isn't perhaps to just have extremely brief descriptions of these projects with links to the more detailed description and then categorize them, because some of them are going to be, presumably you can break those frameworks down into categories of some sort and essentially make it open to just about anything. Just a thought rather than neck three and describe them in a fair amount of detail. And then have to explain why we're not including the other 300. Okay, I'm exaggerating. Is this something that we can push back on the TOC and just say, hey, we're leaving the section open and here's our suggestion of the things we would include? No, we can't, because I am the TOC and I don't want to have to solve that problem. That's our job here is to solve that problem. Right. Is this important in this first round that we include these? Do you think that the first draft should just avoid including the projects and tackle out those like draft? Because the ecosystem is in flux, right? I mean, I think CSI is going to be GA at the end of the year possibly and things are going to change even more at that point. So maybe we can defer it to the next round. I just want us to be consistent. And I just want us to mention either only mention things that are in the CNCF and explicitly say we're only listing things that are in the CNCF or cover the landscape more broadly, which I think was our mandate here, in which case we need to cover more than that. So we did look at the landscape, but we can take a look and see if there's more that we should add here. Maybe just to make each paragraph just like one or two sentences and then it doesn't really elaborate on what exactly this is. My two cents. We can use any type of criteria and as we always end up being wrong. And the reason why I'm making this point is none of the criteria that we can ever debate on is going to definitely make this right. On a personal level, I don't think that saying that it's the CNCF project is a useful criteria because talking about object stores and not mentioning the object services like S3 or whatever from the cloud providers is kind of crazy. So I would strongly focus on making some pragmatic decisions. So we choose things which are in wide use to some definition of wide use, whatever that makes sense, but not the discriminatory. If somebody really feels that their project should be included, well, they can write up a paragraph and we can choose to include it or we can choose the link to it. But I don't think we should ignore the fact that the audience for this is end users and they want to be able to find out what the pragmatic solutions are. This isn't about sort of being the most fully comprehensive list and it's not about restricting who gets into the document. It's about finding some sort of medium which is based on what end users find useful and that is inherently subjective. So if anybody feels that they've been completely left out then and they feel really strongly about it, then we can always add a paragraph in later on. What if we just take the part about that statement which works me is allowing them to write their own paragraph because I think that they have the ability to say what they want and it can turn into a bunch of marketing and then we have to go back and forth with them about what they're going to say. What if we just break down the current storage landscape that we have that's published by CNCF and we just list where those projects fit and we just do a link to their project page. So we take the framework of whether framework and interface etc. tool and we just classify what we have on landscape and provide links to the project pages to get the description. I actually prefer Alex's proposal and that's essentially what I was trying to say and Alex said it much more eloquently than I did which is we need a criterion otherwise it's random and we're going to have meaningless arguments with people about why we included one and not another thing. So the criteria that Alex suggested is most widely used and that's subjective but you know the editor has discretion as to whether something classifies as widely used or not sufficiently widely used to make it into the document but at least we're telling people that's what the criterion is and we can say in the document the following are some of the most widely used storage systems and then we you know perhaps give a brief description about each one and then one way of doing a catchall for the rest is to say other systems that we're aware of are the follow and just have a you know a list a comma separated list of links to you know other stuff so and if anybody wants to claim that their thing exists and we could just put it in that list and that way they can feel they've been included in the doc but we don't have to clutter the doc up with descriptions of things that are not as much interest to the rest of the reading public of the doc. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yes. And Clint just to be clear what I'm trying to avoid is one of the I mean we actually have a duty here to the readers to provide value and filter through all the noise and stuff and I think if all we're going to do is like enumerate all the storage systems that exist out there I think we're not doing in that service. I agree with you and I guess the the the source that I was thinking about was what CNCF has already published I wouldn't say everything but if if Dan and CNCF has decided they want to put this thing on the landscape then yeah we can tell people why it's on the landscape but that's the only thing that I was thinking about and yeah. So I mean if I had more insight into what's on the landscape and why it's there I might be able to get behind that idea but but I don't even know what are the criteria for being on the landscape. You're asking me or? Yes. From what I know so far I had to do at the funding level and whether Dan decided to put them on or not. Yeah that was my suspicion and that's exactly why I don't think you could use it as a source. Yeah I don't even think it's the funding level I think it's whoever raises a Github PR for the landscape gets in because there are a ton of projects on there which are which are not even you know members of the CNCF. That is by design but because there were complaints that there were very you know before Amazon joined the CNCF you know S3 wasn't on the object stores and people were like what the hell's going on here. Yes so I think we have a duty to do that if somebody can find out a more compelling reason why the landscape is has a curation as to what gets onto the landscape and what doesn't and if that curation principle is these are commonly used things that people want to know about then we can use it. I don't think that is the criterion in practice and so therefore we should just do our own one. By all means we can double check against the landscape and say is this stuff on the landscape that we forgot about. I don't want to beat this dead horse but uh goo are you out there I see you've joined I don't know if you were listening that is part of the conversation. Okay yeah let's move on but that's my commentary here is we need to be consistent about what's in the document and what's not and anticipate complaints from people whose technologies are not in the document. Okay so moving on we don't have we you know as predicted there isn't there isn't a huge sort of amount of information on application interfaces or management interfaces for for object stores or key value stores or databases you know there are some there's some work on this and obviously there are APIs available from cloud services but this is kind of one of the one of the points I mentioned in the differentiation which is certainly the volumes are a much more mature management interface and orchestrated interface than anything else. So then we have lock store section which which Clint is filling in and we have the file systems and then we have the object stores so so can somebody remind me oh yes there's really the one that's doing the the object stores I'll I'll I'll think him and then I'll think seeing as well around the key value stores we agreed last time then that's the database section will probably take out of the first version of the draft just because I see some why it's a volunteering for the database section I think the the same person who is going to work on the key value what is his name the shum he I think he added the you look at the beginning okay yeah I think he added a comment there say he can he can do a database section he added a comment somewhere in the beginning I got a message from him yesterday which I haven't replied to I'll remind him and ask him if he can have it done by the 18th all right could you could you copy me or not the email and just volunteer me to help or whatever if he needs to leave I think I did already and he did reply to it and he did copy you on the reply okay I'll reply to that then so maybe it's actually easier if you just chase him up reason being you're sort of coordinating all the people and getting the doc finished so I don't want to be out on the side road somewhere so yeah just reply to that email that you copied on and given the timelines and deadlines and things okay and then and then we have the we have the appendix which is um well we have some we have some data that their shiang has am I pronouncing this right is that shiang shiang yeah it's shiang is put those small comments there I think that kind of makes sense but yeah I'll resolve all that I have on my to-do list to add the two and three phase commit and just write a little paragraph under each of the other headings there and then I think the appendix is done all right so that's good that's the little doc yeah I guess my my big concern is that the actual body of the doc is largely empty there were many pages we scrolled past there that are completely empty and I'm becoming increasing you know we've been at it since May I guess and arguably the really important parts are totally missing so yeah we just need to it's not unachievable in the next week but we're rapidly running out of time that's a fair comment I think there has been quite a bit of talk to put into it and I think we can we can speed up I can certainly cover my stuff by Friday Clint this is where you and me having maybe a one-on-one call and you can sort of brainstorm some of the process to the block stuff that's that's how uh yeah if you if you want to if you feel like you've got some some input or some perspective that would accelerate my work then sure all right I'll ping you I'll ping you offline and just to decide the time okay okay does we have anything else to cover uh so let's I wanted to make sure that we're clear on the the timeline make sure that that's updated we were talking about the 24th that's being when the the next SWG is meeting and you guys wanted to send out something prior to the 24th to to let people review before the SWGs so that means on Monday or does that send it out uh the Friday before well I think Monday at the latest right so so we target for Friday that on Monday at the latest so like the 19th is when we want to send it out yeah and that basically means that next Thursday when we meet we'd be doing and go no go on uh on sending this thing out correct I I think um we should also kind of say that if one or two of the sections isn't completed in time we should still solicit feedback I think because we can we shouldn't sort of use the whole block being ready as the gates if there are certain sections which are which are ready to review earlier we could do that too yeah that makes sense to me yep I'll give it up cool all right did we have anything else on the agenda for the working group do you have anything else for us Clinton sorry I don't know if you can hear me I've lost a window here and I think I might be muted can you hear me oh we can hear you probably means you heard me chewing my cereals as well no I was just I was thinking of personally actually reading through the doc like the day before next Thursday because by then it should be mostly complete and largely in the state that it will be when we send it out to the rest of the group but I was also wondering whether yeah I mean we need to have some internal real review before we send it out I think so maybe others want to do roughly the same thing just go through all the content as it is ideally as it is by next Wednesday but you might only have time before that and at least make sure that you're comfortable with what's in the document or all provide any input if there's egregious stuff there yeah I don't think there is but you know I haven't read it all in detail all I've really been doing is keeping track of roughly what's done and what's not done and I flipped through the first draft but it's changed a lot so yeah that makes sense so we would just be communicating through email right are we going to have another meeting next Thursday or no yeah we have a we have a meeting on Thursday I'll send that I'll send that to you fine does any particular preference on time does this sort of time on Thursday work what you mean Thursday 11 11 or 12 what what time you're talking about 11 or 12 or 8 or 9 you're talking about so it would be 11 Eastern like luck today okay yeah that's fine does that work for you guys too Clinton Clinton yes next Thursday yeah let me take a peek yeah I'm good for that cool all right I'll send that to you okay and yeah make sure you invite Liang and and just touch base with him before so he knows exactly what's expected and by then yeah cool okay thanks guys all right thanks everyone thank you


As 2023 is coming to an end, I would like to follow tradition and take this final moment of the year to extend my gratitude and heartfelt thanks to all the great people at Dandrite and around. 2023 has been a very special year. In March, we celebrated our 10th anniversary and remarked this occasion with a festive reception attended by the great participant and supporters of Dandrite, including the Lundbeck Foundation and the University Leadership and Support Units. Over these first 10 years, Dandrite has established itself as a crucial and significant hub for neuroscience research in both Denmark and abroad. We attract great new people and ideas to Danish Neuroscience and we link to a growing network of neuroscience and translation all around the world. The impact of our research is reflected not only in the growing number of publications, but also in a broader outreach of our activities, and 2023 certainly showed many examples of this. Dandrite published many key publications in 2023 that emerged from the research programs of our group leaders and team leaders, and most of them in fact from collaborative efforts within Dandrite and OHS and internationally. Exciting patent applications were also submitted, for example on stem cell developments into pure neurons and opening many great new perspectives in regenerative medicine. In October, an impressive and largest ever 3D mapping of the human brain at the cell type level was published, providing a comprehensive brain cell atlas at the transcriptional, epigenetic and functional levels. Among the 250 contributors was also Marco Caponius and Yesen Cernsens groups. Marco's blueprint of the research was marked by a beautiful commemoration in November, one year after his passing. Many grants were obtained that enable career transitions, consolidation of programs and many exciting new research directions to be taken, and this for both PhD students, postdocs, junior group leaders and established researchers. The Pro Memo Center of Excellence was also extended for the full 10 year program and continues to frame research into memory. As an international research center, we also engage in many close interactions with colleagues from abroad. We welcome many accomplished researchers to deliver open, exciting lectures in OHS. Among many distinguished speakers were for example Volker Hauke, who is also now a new member of our advisory board. Nobel Laureate Joachim Frank visited at Midsummer and gave a brilliant Nobel lecture on cryoelectron microscopy, co-hosted by the Royal Danish Academy for Science and Lessons. In September we hosted Professor Takashi Emi from Tokyo University and in November Dr Jerry Chen from Boston University. All our visitors take keynote of the excellent opportunities in OHS to grow new research in neuroscience and life science in general. We also headed out, and this year for example a delegation from Dandrite visited our collaborators at the Brain Research Institute in Japan, providing a marvelous experience of their fantastic science and great hospitality. Locally our integration also continues to evolve. This year for example we launched a joint fellowship program with the OHS Institute for Advanced Studies, which allows our new group leaders to engage in this great community and meet an academic home of international scholars across all disciplines at OHS University. The doors at Dandrite are always open for new collaborations, visits and ideas. This is also very clear from many new exciting new initiatives from support from our support and communications team, which constantly try new ways of enabling research, developing a supportive community and testing exciting new ways of outreach. Our collaboration with the Nordic EMBL partnership also had a milestone this year and together with our colleagues in Norway, Sweden, Finland and at EMBL we reaffirmed our partnership for another 10 years at a great event in Helsinki. Our newest initiative is the NORPOD postdoc program, inspired by the great experiences of the EMBL iPod program. NORPOD is supported by NORFORSK and will support joint postdoc projects between our partnership nodes and address significant research gaps in molecular medicine, such as in precision neuro-medicine. 2023 is also a year of change. Dandrite is currently undergoing an exciting transition. Our first cohort of group leaders is gradually stepping into new research roles outside of the Dandrite group leader program. It is exciting to follow their development and stay in contact, such as also for future collaborations. Thanks to the very significant work, Dandrite now has a legacy and we recruit great new people. The new generation of group leaders now redefine and change the paths of the Dandrite community. In March we welcome Thomas Kim from Johns Hopkins and Jao Sun from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Brightport to join with Tauro Kitasawa. Next month in January we will be joined also by Anna Klavon, coming from our position at the University of Copenhagen. We expect also to welcome a fifth and final group leader of the current Dandrite group leader program in 2024. The future is definitely bright for great new neuroscience at Dandrite. The winds of change also go to the Dandrite leadership. We started the year by welcoming Jelena Radulovic in the senior management and but by the end of the year I'll be stepping out of the senior management. This year's greetings are therefore very special for me and it marks my last as the Director of Dandrite. From January I'll be the Vice Dean for Research at the Faculty of Sciences. I have gained fantastic experiences with Dandrite and all the great people around me, both at the University and in Denmark and with the Nordic EMBL partnership and many great people at the advisory board and connections all across the globe. I would like to use this opportunity to thank you all for trusting in me as the Director. I'm tremendously grateful. I'll continue my ties to Dandrite as an affiliated researcher. Paul Henning Jensen steps in as the interim Director until a new Director has been identified. To represent the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics in the Dandrite management, Manus Kergo steps in to the senior management with great excitement and commitment to his new role at Dandrite. As always we see the world changing but certainly the changes at Dandrite are positive and go well and forward in our direction. On a larger perspective artificial intelligence for example challenges our view of the human mind and climate changes and global conflicts continue to threaten humanity and the world of free spirits and opportunities. Knowledge, collaborations and cross-disciplinary thinking is the way forward. Dandrite will certainly strive to add positive steps to those big questions and we happily engage. So with a very light mind in all the dark times I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year ahead.


What's going on everyone Sam here with late in sports cards We're ripping one box of 2020 21 ponini mosaic team all basketball for Jerry H So good luck here Jerry. See we got in here for you buddy. See some fire Looking for two gold waves and then 10 red waves. I believe that's usually how it breaks down right there. All right Here we go. Good luck. Good luck RJ Hampton, there's your gold wave first one CJ McCollum Teres Halliburton rookie on the true base Paul Pierce and Jameis Ramsey rookie for the Kings on the gold wave very nice Always good to pick up a gold wave when it's a rookie James Wiseman NBA debut. It's my favorite picture from mosaic right here. This is Wiseman Red wave, Mitchell Robinson Isaiah Stewart red wave Isaiah Stewart On the rookie Sadiq Bay NBA debut and red wave use of nerf or the bleach That's tail Maladon and red wave Anthony Edwards on the uh, NBA national pride. Nice one there Ant-Man Trey Jones, there's an Anthony Edwards national pride again red wave Tricia Thompson going to the Celtics That's a mosaic Mason Plumley red wave Bradley Beal Wizards a couple more to go here Lamar Stevens red wave NBA debut is Sadiq Bay Jalen Smith red wave Trey Jones on the rookie going to the Spurs Do to go here. Good luck here Jerry Isaac Acoro, that's red wave Mark Elfels and last pack of the break. Good luck Jerry Lamello ball national pride. Nice And joshacogi on the red wave That'll do it for your break there. Um, Jerry congrats on the hits buddy. We'll get them right out to you Thanks again


All right guys, happy new year 2022 and thank you from the bottom of my heart to everybody that supported this channel throughout the years. Thanks to you guys, finally Boomer Bobby has a new laptop. It is an Asus Rogue Strix with a Ryzen 9 processor and a GeForce RTX 3070. Yes, super high-tech, now nothing stands in our way to start 2022 right. We're gonna have amazing live streams with plenty of guests. Be it on the topic of veganism, spirituality, Bulgaria, Macedonia, geopolitics and whatnot. All of this was possible because of you guys. Still thanks goes out to Pugman, the biggest supporter of Bobby's perspective. Without him this wouldn't have been possible. But of course everybody else that shows up on the live streams and supports via streamlabs and superchat such as David Moresco, Danimal, PPPooPoo, Najib, MrEko, Amar Singh, YarkoTurmanen and so many more. Thank you guys from the bottom of my heart. You guys really make this channel. As you know, we are ShadowBand. As you know, YouTube is censoring. So without your support, none of this would have been possible. All right guys, but this is it. Yet again, Happy New Year 2022 and as always, may God bless you all. Much love and peace.


Hi everyone, welcome back to another Ethan Journal video. So if you missed it, Apple just had their spring event, which was really cool as you can see, and I'm on their website right now, and you'll notice that there's a brand new iMac model as well as some other really cool things that they just launched. So I'm going to kind of go over some of the things that they did in my opinion on what they are. So as you can see, the first thing we're going to talk about is the brand new iMac. Now I'm a big user of the iMac as such, actually yesterday my Mac mini came in, which is not my current computer, but I've always used an iMac. And as you can see here, they just released the brand new iMac with the rumored brand new design. Now it's not this, it's really close to a lot of the designs that people thought it was going to be, yet in its own way it is different. And as you can see, they have almost like, I think it's like three different models here and they have quite a few colors for each. Now that's the funny thing is like on the first iMac, the original one that came out like 1998, that one had multiple colors, so it's nice to see Apple bringing that back. So looking at the different models, as you can see, they're still based on Apple's M1 CPU architecture, and I don't see that changing anytime soon as they just released the CPU model, and I expect that to stay the same until around maybe the end of this year. But looking at it, it's quite a pretty cool design, I mean, I'm just going to select this one here. As you can see, it looks really cool. Looking at the colors that it has, and then all of the different, I wonder if that's a background that comes pre-installed on each of them. Looking at how thin they are is just crazy, and the fact that they also have Apple's 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU of the M1 chip, also the base model having the 7-core CPU, it's quite cool to see what Apple's done with these brand new computers. Now the only thing that I'm not fond of is the fact that there aren't many USB-A ports. Now, yes, I know Apple's been trying to make companies transition over to USB-C and Thunderbolt for the past few years, as the MacBooks have had just USB-C and Thunderbolt on them for quite a while now, but the fact that they only have on the base model one here only two Thunderbolt ports and no USB-A ports, in my opinion, isn't great. At least they let you still get some on the newer ones. I'm sorry, on the more upgraded ones. It's still the fact is that people still use USB-A. I mean, even Apple's keyboards, if you have an older one, still use USB-A. If you're just trying to get into streaming, Stream Deck's only use USB-A, and stuff like that, and USB-C is coming up on their highs and more and more devices are using it, it's just not there yet. And I know Apple's always been that company to push things forward as fast as possible, like with the iPhones removing the headphone jack and such like that, and transitioning to not using USB-C on their iPhones and still using Lightning. It's kind of like Apple's thing to always go to the next best thing right away and push it in your face as hard as they can until the rest of the market switches over to their set standard. And that's the thing I foresee staying in Apple's thing for quite a while now. And with the new iMac, to be honest, I like it. And it's pretty much the same as the other iMacs, but except for the design. I mean, on the inside, as you can see, it's super thin. And it's brought this brand new design now. I'm not, I really do like what they've done by having the bezel how it is, except still that bottom part there, I'm pretty sure they could have removed that now on their demonstration date on their video. They did show how the speakers are located there. But still Apple, I mean, I think you could do better. But still, I guess this is their first M1 iMac, and we can't expect much from it yet. So now let's move on to iPad. Now Apple just released this brand new iPad Pro with their M1 CPU, which is kind of funny. The fact that they put an M1 CPU inside of an iPad is just crazy. I mean, it's a desktop chip, but I guess with its power efficiency, it can work as a decent iPad chip. And the fact that it's gonna bring you the experience of the M1 CPU to an iPad, a portable device, more portable than like a MacBook or a MacBook Air is just crazy. And to be honest, I don't think they're going wrong when they do that. I mean, Apple's A series of chips are still powerful, coming in around the same gigahertz speed as the M1 CPU, except the M1 CPU takes a step further with that neural engine and other things with power efficiency and performance. Design, I don't think has changed that much. I mean, it definitely looks quite cool. And it still is kind of the same iPad Pro we've known for a few years now. But the fact that it has two terabytes of storage now is crazy. Because that's about this maximum storage you can get on a normal Mac at this point. And the fact is, how would you install two terabytes worth of apps? But I guess if you're doing professional work like editing in Lightroom and stuff like that, going on trips, doing HDR footage, two terabytes is gonna come in handy. But the fact that it costs $2,000 is quite crazy. But otherwise, yeah, I think the iPad Pro is going in the right direction with the M1 CPU. Now again, this is only my opinion.  But in my opinion, I think they did a really good job with it. And the fact that they still kept that LiDAR sensor, I think LiDAR is gonna be really good for things like AR games. And even like they showed, they wanna create the thing where it can detect faces and only detect that face and make it better for recording. To be honest, I think someday maybe an iPhone and iPad can be used for professional movies, that'd be really cool. As well as allowing you to use the Thunderbolt on it. Yes, the iPad Pro now has the Thunderbolt connector, which I thought was really cool because Thunderbolt is quite fast. It brings all of that amazing versatility with USB-C as well as allowing it to be even faster, connect more devices like they said their Pro Display XTR, which is also quite cool. And I'm glad they still kept the charger with an iPad. I mean, I know they removed it from the iPhone. Don't do that. Don't remove it from the iPad, Apple, it needs to stay there. And I guess one of the last few things is the fact that they introduced AirTags. And I believe AirTags will be under iPhone, yep. Now, AirTags have been rumored for quite a while now. I mean, I remember in iOS 13 there was a bug where if you went and defined my setting it would actually so find your AirTags will show up. They removed that in iOS 14, but now it's probably back as, well, they introduced AirTags. And the fact that the only cost 30 bucks is crazy. Now, that is cheap, but for the versatility that they have and the fact that they have their design, I think it's a bit overpriced for their product. But again, this is Apple's first version of the AirTag. And I think the AirTag is quite a good thing.  It'll come in handy for people like me and many other people as well. As being able to ping your device, having it beep, having your phone direct you to exactly where it is is quite nice. And especially being able to find your keys if you have, you can attach each like your keys or your wallet and you'll be able to find them. And I think that like a four pack for 99 bucks isn't bad, but still I do think it's a bit overpriced for what it is. But the fact that you can add an engraving is pretty cool. Like you can have a smiley face emoji and stuff like that. And then you can have your own custom AirTag for the same price, which is also really cool. And then finally comes Apple's new Apple TV. Now I've always had an Apple TV. I don't have the newest one, I have an Apple TV second generation. But I think Apple TV is actually quite good. It's competing with things like the Amazon Fire TV and the Roku stick and stuff like that. And the fact the operating system has come a long way from what it used to be. I think that Apple is going a step in the right direction by introducing all their new features. Now when it comes to the remote, which is something they talked a lot about at the event, they're brand new remote. To be honest, I don't know what I think about it. I kind of liked the old one a bit more than this one, because I mean, it in my opinion doesn't match the actual Apple TV itself. I mean, if you look at the Apple TV here, it's completely matte black and it looks good. But the remote is like a complete invert of that. Like the Apple TV has some white on it with a lot of black. Well, the remote has a lot of white on it with less black and just black for the buttons. And I mean, for most people that might seem good, but in my opinion, I'm not a big fan of remote. You might be and that's fine. But in my opinion, I think the old remote was better. But knowing Apple, they're not going to change it. So I'm guessing that remote is here to stay and we're just going to have to live with it. But to be honest, I'm okay with my Apple TV second generation right now. All I use it for is for airplay and streaming YouTube videos to my TV using airplay. I don't use it for all the Apple Arcade. I'm not an Apple Arcade subscriber. But if I was, I mean, the Apple TV 4K would be nice. And the fact that it works with controllers is also really cool. So yeah, that is what I think, what my opinions are on the Apple event. I will actually link the Apple event in the description of the video below. Definitely check it out. Apple's animations have gotten super cool. And it's just getting better and better every time. But I can't wait for WWDC this year as that's my favorite event from Apple. And it's gonna be exciting to see all the brand new products and stuff like that. But until then, my name is Ethan, have a great rest of your day and goodbye.