So one of the disadvantages of coming this late in the program is that much of what I had wanted to talk about has been pretty well covered already. But one of the advantages is that I get to reflect on what I've heard the last couple of days. So I'd like to begin with two reflections before I dive into my material. The first has to do with the interface between clinicians and laboratorians. And I'm going to argue that we need a new paradigm for collaborative dialogue. In 1950, a physician would order an x-ray on a piece of paper, put it in the mail, send it to a radiologist sitting in the dark somewhere in a different building, and would get a report back that said something like shadow of unknown significance, additional clinical correlation recommended. And that really is still our paradigm. Our major concession to the 21st century is that we now send it by fax instead of mail. But I'm still filling out a form with some cursory clinical information. And the laboratory is doing an interpretation and putting that interpretation on a piece of paper and sending it back to me. And now it says variant of unknown significance, family studies recommended. We need a new paradigm. We live in a world of crowd sourcing and open access and networked intelligence. But simultaneously we live in a world of gene patents and proprietary interpretive algorithms and competitive research. And I really think that there needs to be more dialogue. And I'm not pointing fingers. Clinicians are just as much to blame. I have a telephone, you know, and I have email and I could engage in a dialogue. And I know I have examples, lots of examples where that dialogue has occurred to the benefit of the patient and to the benefit of an accurate interpretation. But we need to really build that more fundamentally into our algorithm. The second observation really, and I'm going to chastise us a little bit because what I've heard the last couple of days is that we know the questions, we just need the answers. I'm going to argue that we don't know the right questions yet. It would be foolish to believe we know the right questions. If we knew the right questions, there wouldn't be so much heritability that's missing in action. And we're talking about collecting information now that's going to be relevant to patients 60 and 80 years from now. I want to remind you that 60 years ago I had 48 chromosomes. You know, it was a couple of years later that it was discovered that the right number was 46. 80 years ago DNA hadn't been invented yet. And to imagine that we know enough now to think that the data we're going to be collecting now will still be relevant or interpretable 60 or 80 years from now is a little bit foolish, especially in the era of epigenomics. And what if we collect all this genomic data and realize that it's the changes in the genome over time that are most relevant or the environmental influences that we didn't put into the medical record now that are really going to influence our interpretation 60 or 80 years from now. So enough said about that. Let me actually cover the topic that Mark assigned to me. And I think we all understand what the word integrated means. But there are no two integrated systems that are built the same. The first decision that needs to be made is what's in your integrated system and what's outside your integrated system. Does it include dental care? Does it include medical transport? Does it include speech therapy for autism? Or is that part of the integrated educational system? I mean of course around that issue there's consensus. Both are convinced that it belongs to the other system. But in my system one of the fundamental elements and this will be familiar to our European colleagues or Canadian colleagues is that the payer and provider is integrated into a single system. So in my system an order by me or by any of my physician colleagues constitutes a coverage decision. And what that means is that we are charged with making good evidence-based decisions based upon our assessment of clinical utility. Is it rationing? I would argue that it's not rationing. There are no rules other than clinical judgment that guide our assessment of clinical utility. But we do have a fixed dollar amount available to us in a capitated prepaid system and we are responsible for being good stewards of those resources and providing the maximum benefit to our patients within that dollar amount. Within my system we have preventative care, primary care, specialty care, subspecialty care and that really allows the subspecialists to have a very great impact on the way that primary care and preventive care is practiced. I mean my colleagues love it when we take things over for them. My system would not only tolerate, it would love a rule that said that genomic tests can only be ordered by a geneticist or that neurogenetic tests can only be ordered by a geneticist or a neurologist. We really have the opportunity to influence the way that care is provided. And, you know, Howard's data was relevant yesterday but the ready availability of clinical geneticists in my system probably would make clinical geneticists the first source of information rather than up to date for primary care physicians. We have easy electronic systems for expert consults where we're carrying live phones so that a geneticist is always available with a hot phone to answer a telephone call and we're even mandated to have same day access so that a patient seen in primary care who requires a genetics appointment and is in the medical center that day can be seen that day in genetics. I know that's unimaginable and in less integrated systems. Prenatal pediatric adult and end-of-life care, there is a limit here. I think the average tenure of our members is about 20 years which is very, very good for an American healthcare system. But remember we were just talking about 60 and 80 years of actions and people do move and one of the side benefits of the great recession is that people are moving less frequently and changing jobs and therefore employer paid healthcare less frequently but we do lose patience over time. I'll skip down to test ordering performance and interpretation and this will lead me to a comment on my next slide. These are some of the foundational elements of an integrated system. There must be some element of scale. There is virtual integration and the electronic medical records greatest contribution may be to allow that kind of virtual integration. I don't think I'll say any more about the electronic medical record because it's been covered pretty well today. It has its limits. It is a wonderful tool. The model A4 was a wonderful tool in its day. It didn't have onboard navigation and it's silly to think of it as a wonderful tool now. The current versions of the electronic medical records simply don't have the ability to deal with genomic information. Group or virtual group practice I've already touched upon and internalization, the more that can be brought into your system the more integrated it will be. But there are some tests and some procedures that are done so rarely that even in an organization of our scale they really can't be done internally. So one of the things I've been fond of saying in the past is that Kaiser Permanente is like a small Scandinavian country and there are two things wrong with that analogy. First of all it's not small for a Scandinavian country. It's a large Scandinavian country. Maybe Northern California is a relatively small Scandinavian country but the other issue gets back to my comment yesterday is that the other thing is that we're not all Scandinavians. It's a very diverse population with a huge Asian population on the West Coast and a very large African American population in Atlanta and Cleveland and the Washington Baltimore area and a very large Latino population especially in Southern California. And obviously the captive population with the rich database really allows a lot of research ideas. I heard somebody float that idea yesterday and many of you have heard presentations on the UCSF, Kaiser Permanente Northern California collaborative effort to collect genomes and link them to the electronic medical record. So I'm going to leave you with these questions. I don't have answers to these questions but perhaps they can be the basis for some conversation. Which of these principles apply in less integrated systems because of course most of you practice in less integrated systems? Mark's already mentioned accountable care organizations a couple of times. I don't think any of us can predict what's going to happen to healthcare reform and whether accountable care organizations will really emerge or not but to some extent they are designed to function as virtual integrated systems. And finally how will the evolution from genetic testing to genomic testing foster or hinder integration? And I can give you an example on either side of that coin. I mean right now when I'm doing a genetic test I have to go to gene tests and figure out which one of 20 or 30 laboratories around the country I want to send my test to. You know in the era of whole genome or whole exome sequencing all laboratories are going to be doing it. Perhaps there will still be proprietary interpretation algorithms but once my own lab is doing genomic sequencing which I'm predicting will be one to two years from now exome sequencing at least. Next gen sequencing is probably the more accurate term to use than I may be less dependent upon a disintegrated model of relying on laboratories all over the country. And you know will the amount of data available simply exceed the ability of an integrated system to store and track that data? Is it feasible to imagine that 80 years from now somebody will refer back to a newborn screening genomic panel to call some data on how someone might respond to Coominin? So I'll pause there and take some questions. Thank you. Thanks Bruce. Questions? Yeah. You said that you know if you start now with the genome as it is right now then maybe there's the epigenome maybe there's you know other mutations throughout our lifespan etc. But all of those things are true but it's the same framework in terms of handling it. So I'd argue that you know we should start now anyway and just waiting for the perfect solution. There's things we can do now. There are low hanging fruits that we should go after and the systems will be able to handle these other genomic based things that come along later on. I absolutely agree with you. And by the way I think it's really good news that we haven't figured out the right questions. After all who would want to spend their life's work in a field where all the good questions had already been imagined and asked. I mean that's what science is all about. It's not just about collecting data. It's about figuring out the right questions. Bruce, so have you added data points? I mean when thinking about going forward and collecting data is there a discussion about different fields that you would want to add into Epic or that you've systematically gone after? Certainly not systematically and I have to admit that as a clinician I'm one of the worst defenders that well it's one of the differences between clinical medicine and research is that as a clinician what is most valuable to me is a narrative report. It's looking at a consultants report and being able to see how they thought about a case and what they considered and why they came to the conclusion that they did. And free text fields is not the way that you want to go if you want to aggregate data and have it available and searchable in the future. It's all checklists and using specific terminology and that's hard for a clinician but without it research is much more difficult. Yeah, Howard? I've got a philosophical question but since you've got the podium it gives you the right to pontificate. There's been the discussion throughout the last two days about the problems of people moving from one system to another be it an insurer or healthcare provider or whatever. So I would pose the philosophical question of thinking of the integrated system as the entire health system make it simple and say the U.S. health system but ultimately it would be the international health system. What do you see as a way to operationalize making all this data interoperable and interchangeable? Wow, that's a big challenge. I can tell you that there has been some pilot work between Kaiser Permanente and the VA who are probably the two systems that have the largest integrated medical records and they're entirely different electronic medical systems and yet the pilot work shows that they probably are interoperable to some extent, that they can crosstalk. Now, that's the extent of my knowledge. There are people in both organizations who would know more about that than I. Somebody used the analogy of the Sony and Betamax we cannot get into that situation. We absolutely need an interoperable data system and that's as ambitious as I'm willing to be. Imagining that there will be integration beyond the sharing of data in this country is a little bit beyond my imagination right now. Mark. So one comment that relates to that and then a question. This is an expansion of a point that I made yesterday which is the idea of certain data being treated as proprietary and we talked about that in the context of variant interpretation and being held by individual laboratories and not being made available which I think is a problem that needs to be addressed but I think there's also issues with data that is within health systems where while there are some barriers to sharing the information that relate to privacy and HIPAA and other things of that nature there are also examples where systems are holding onto the data because they say that gives us a competitive advantage which in the long run is detrimental to improving health from a societal perspective so I just would put that on the table something that I think needs to be part of the broader consideration about how we can make sure that we never use data as our market differentiator. Let me tell a little story that you may be familiar with there is a gold mining company that had geologic data that it could not interpret and geologic data really is the goal of gold mining companies they lock it in safes, it is their most proprietary information they couldn't figure out where to dig for gold so what they did was they put their geologic data on the internet and offered a half million dollar prize to anyone who could interpret the data they had 77 entrants and they awarded a half million dollars to someone who had a creative algorithm for interpreting the data and they mined three billion dollars worth of gold based upon that interpretation so we have to rethink what is proprietary and what is not Thanks Bruce


Tara Reid, Hollywood's once-it-girl, has been in the spotlight since the tender age of 6. While she has been quite open about her various procedures, it's not often that we hear about the dark side of cosmetic surgery. Unfortunately, Tara has fallen victim to multiple botched surgeries that not only left her embarrassed, but also led her to believe that they were the reason for her career downfall. We all know Tara from her role as Vicki in the Unforgettable American Pie series. However, she wasn't just known for her sweet and endearing character in her favorite teen classic. She also graced the silver screen in films like Van Wilder, Urban Legend, The Big Lebowski, Cruel Intentions, Josie and the Pussycats, and of course, the cult favorite, Sharknado. Growing up in New Jersey with her four siblings, Tara attended prep school, which catered to young aspiring actors and dancers. The professional children's school was also home to fellow actors Sarah Michelle Geller and Macaulay Culkin. Her first appearance on the big screen was at the age of 6 in the game show Child's Play. She went on to appear in several commercials and even graced the daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives in 1995, but it was her debut in 1987 movie Return to Salem's Lot that catapulted her into the big leagues. Tara was always known as the beautiful, slim, blonde bombshell of the late 90s and early 2000s. I won't deny that I dreamed of looking like her when I grew up. Young girls idolized her bikini body and beach hair.  I didn't realize how good I had it, but the second things go down, no one cares. Soon a pattern started forming. A, B, C. And I'm not only talking about breast size, but also the movie ratings she began to appear in. Could the two be somehow correlated? How could someone's physical appearance dictate their career to such an extent? Well, the 47-year-old actress would be the first to tell you that she believes her botched breast augmentation and liposuction played a major role in derailing her acting career. In 2004, Tara went under the knife with the hope of waking up to a new and improved version of herself. However, instead of the desired outcome, the surgery left her disfigured. The liposuction on her stomach resulted in a wrinkly and ripply torso, which understandably made her hesitant to wear bikinis. This in turn led to loss of numerous work opportunities. As if things couldn't get worse, Tara found herself at the mercy of the paparazzi when she experienced a classic Janet Jackson moment at P. Diddy's birthday party in 2004. The wardrobe malfunction caused widespread speculation about her sobriety. Although she denies that intoxication played a role, claiming she simply wasn't aware that the strap had fallen. However, the delay in her actions to cover up was rather lengthy, leading to a lucrative payday for the paparazzi who captured the moment.  Her breast augmentation in 2003 also turned out to be a botched jaw, leaving her with visible scars around her nipples and slightly deformed breasts. Not only was the American Pie actress embarrassed by her procedures becoming public, but she also endured humiliation in the worst way. Even men she dated felt compelled to comment on her breasts, suggesting that something was wrong and advising her to fix it. In an interview, Tara admitted that if she could go back in time, she would have never gone through with the surgeries. She initially opted for them because one breast was larger than the other, and her weight fluctuations caused her breasts to sag. Despite knowing that she was thin, she dreamed of having a six-pack. After all, she is in Hollywood and had the means to do it. But these unfortunate events not only forced her to seek professional help and therapy to regain her confidence, but they also pushed her to research plastic surgeons and gathered the courage to undergo corrective surgery in 2006. While her body was repaired, her mental health never fully recovered. Things took a turn for the worse in 2008 when Tara's friends and family staged an intervention, leading her to check into a rehab facility in Malibu. This renowned facility had treated other celebrities like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. The 60-day detox program worked wonders for Tara, and she openly credited rehab with saving her life. Unfortunately, her sobriety didn't stand the test of time, as she was later seen intoxicated outside nightclubs, stumbling out of parties, and even spotted drinking at an airport where her flight departed without her. It seemed that Tara had finally found her footing when the B-movie sensation Sharknado hit the screens in 2016. Despite admitting that it was the worst script she had ever read, she trusted her instincts and accepted the lead role with a modest salary of $50,000. Little did she know that this decision would propel her career forward and lead to five thrilling sequels. Sharknado not only brought Tara the exposure she needed, but also rejuvenated her passion for acting. Writing the B-movie train, she immersed herself in the world of low-budget films taking on project after project. Currently, her IMDb page posts an impressive 76 completed project and is staggering 18 upcoming ones. It's clear that Tara enjoys what she's doing and has found her niche in the industry. While Tara has embraced her role as the queen of B-movies, she also expressed her desire to break out of the mold and tackle more serious roles. She believes there's a whole other side of her that many people haven't seen yet, a side that's waiting to shine in a captivating and substantial role. It's undeniable that being typecast can be a challenge when you've lived a life reminiscent of most of your characters. However, despite the obstacles, we have nothing but high hopes for Tara Reid. The success of the Sharknado franchise showcased her ability to captivate audiences and embrace the fun and campy nature of these films. Just when it seemed that Tara was getting her life back on track, the unexpected happened. TikTok became her worst enemy. Recently, she has been seen singing and dancing on the platform, leaving fans concerned about her well-being and also questioning whether she has undergone further cosmetic procedures, perhaps even on her face. The lack of information regarding her new appearance has sparked speculation, with theories ranging from more surgeries to excessive Botox, aging or the toll of years of alcohol consumption on her body. It's safe to say that Tara wasn't the only party girl in Hollywood. In fact, she never really did anything wrong. She never landed in jail, never made a sex tape or got a DUI. She simply enjoyed popping a bottle of champagne and dancing on tables once in a while. There's no crime in having a good time. This woman has endured a lot over the years, facing scrutiny for her wild behavior, body shaming and bullying regarding her appearance and the constant mockery of her acting career. She also lived through the horrors of tabloid drama in the 2000s, a time when women were dissected for every move they made while men received praise for doing the same things. Is Tara's redemption period approaching? Will she rise from the ashes with a serious role that will leave us awestruck? Or will she eventually fade away and be forgotten? Let me know what you think in the comments below. We'll be back with more transformations, so make sure to like, subscribe and hit that bell to receive notifications. My name is Katie. If you want to hear more of this voice, make sure to check me out on TikTok. Until then, I'll see you in another video.


Well hello and welcome everybody to the OpenShift Commons gathering on databases. We're going to wait a few minutes to get everybody in the door because we've just started broadcasting now and myself and Jelom are going to be the host. I'll be the host and she'll be the moderator for today. So we're just excited to get started here. So let's give everybody a couple of minutes to say hi in the chat and if you have questions or problems just ask them in the chat on the side here and we should hopefully get rocking and rolling pretty soon here. So thanks for your patience with our process. We'll give it another minute and watch as people come in and it's going to be kind of an exciting day because we have some really cool end user story today about an interesting deployment at massive scale which is going to be cool and so we've got lots to talk about today and lots of new things going on around databases here at Red Hat and on OpenShift and out there in the entire cloud native ecosystem. So today is going to be a fun day to talk about all of that. So I can see that people are piling in all right event. I'll give everybody a few minutes if you want to give a shout out where you're dialing in from that would be great. I'm up in Canada here and on the west coast in BC British Columbia and my moderator today is dialing in from are you in Boston? Yes, yes, Boston. And there's Mike. All right so we are all set up here ready to go. I'm just going to give a little bit of background about what OpenShift Commons is and why we're here today. I'm talking at you like this from a community point of view and then we'll hey, hi there. We'll give a few shout outs to people around the world that are dialing in and doing this stuff with us and I'm just going to pop over to my welcome slides and advance and get us rocking and rolling. So OpenShift Commons is an ecosystem based open source community. They're members or it's organizational based so you join as an organization like KPMG or any of the other companies that are here today and anyone from that company or anyone from an enterprise using OpenShift or even trying to learn about OpenShift can join and it's where we come together to collaborate and work on OpenShift and all things cloud native. So we don't really specifically force you to use OpenShift. We do a lot of open source projects talks and you'll hear some today about things like OLM or operator life cycle management or operator SDK. Those things are CNCF projects. So the OpenShift Commons really incorporates all of those aspects of the cloud native ecosystem with you know a good smattering of OpenShift and Red Hat technologies. So today I'm Diane Mueller. I'm the director of community development here for the cloud platforms BU and I am the person behind the screen for all of the OpenShift Commons initiatives and you can find OpenShift Commons at commons.openship.org and Jaylum Pandit is a product manager working with me on all things cloud native here and Jaylum say hi. Yes hello everyone I'm Jaylum and I work specifically on OpenShift and in the product marketing team. Cool and so really what we're going to do is we're going to talk about open source. We are all about open communities so we try and do all of these things transparently and out in the open. If you know Red Hat you know that open source is in our DNA. We try and open source everything every acquisition we do whether it's StackRocks or CoreOS or any of the other things that we've acquired as a company and we try and imbue all of our participation in the CNCF and other foundations and other in the Kubernetes with a sense of openness and transparency and collaboration because really it is about that collaboration that allows us to drive innovation into our projects and products and into your enterprises so today is really about making those connections with each other so this is Hopin it's a wonderful platform there's a Q&A function there's a chat function please take advantage of those reach out and chat with us while we're talking there's a lot of people in the chat that can help you if you have a question but do post things in the Q&A if you can because really this is about connecting with other people. OpenShift Commons is really about a new community model we don't just work on trying to get people to contribute to our projects we know that all of our projects and products are interrelated and interdependent on other projects and other feedback mechanisms from end users from partners to that end we try really hard to promote these peer-to-peer interactions and if you'd like to be on our mailing list and join Commons you can scan that QR code or come to commons.openshift.org and we will get you hooked up with our newsletters we do like code contribution so if you're interested there's always a project that needs more resources and we have a pretty active OpenShift Commons Slack channel as well as special interest groups and working groups on specific topics. So I'm kind of excited today about what we're doing because we've got a great agenda and I'm going to let Jelun talk talk us through this because she's going to be the moderator for the day and you probably won't see my face unless something goes awry in the back end until the AMA session again so Jelun walk us through this agenda and tell us what's going to happen today. Yes thank you Dan so hello everyone thank you so much for joining us today we have a really exciting agenda lined up and we're going to cover quite a few interesting topics ranging from some new roadmap updates from our site to talk about backup and recovery for databases on Kubernetes and specifically OpenShift as well as some end user talks that will give us some great insight into how our end users and customers are building new applications and supporting platforms, massive platforms with databases on OpenShift and possibly the challenges that they're addressing as they build these platforms or these solutions and applications or the challenges that they face and they've overcome so we're really thrilled to have you here and we really hope that you stick around with us till the end because like Dan mentioned we'll have an AMA session with some experts from Red Hat please also feel free to keep putting in questions as and when they come up as well as sharing your experience about what you're doing in your organizations as we go through the event. We can go to the next segment. Now depending on where you are in the journey of adopting databases on containers and Kubernetes I'm sure that you've had or you've been met with hesitations around applying such stateful workloads such as databases but we've come a long way and databases are actually the top workloads on containers and Kubernetes now and this is this has been substantiated by several surveys. One of these surveys was done by us last late last year and this was conducted at a global scale with over 200 respondents from different industries such as fsi, to telco and over 75% of the respondents spanning roles such as CXOs, VPs, directors reported that databases and data caching workloads were actually the top workloads in their organization. So we can see that while the common culprits such as web servers, logging and monitoring softwares definitely are popular and they kind of show up at the top but data workloads are driving significant Kubernetes adoption as well and the specific steps and components in a data pipeline might vary across organizations and the use cases that you are trying to implement but the core steps that are highlighted in the diagram in the reference architecture they usually remain the same so from ingesting and aggregating the data from multiple sources to preparing and processing this data to storing this data in an operational database to performing analytics or preparing it for further AIML use cases this pipeline is pretty much what stays and you can see that Red Hat OpenShift is really equipped to support you in your journey with databases and data analytics and just general cloud native app development. We have a broad set of ISP ecosystems and strategic integrations to help you simplify and manage databases and data analytics workloads and all of this is enabled by OpenShift and can be run on OpenShift.


Toys for Tots, a program that has helped many families in need around the holidays. In 1947, Marine Corps Reservist Major Bill Hendricks started the program with his wife by hand making a raggedy and all. It was such a success, the Marine Corps Reserve adopted the program the following year.  The renowned success of the program resulted in Marine veteran Walt Disney creating the now famous logo. Many celebrities including John Wayne, John Glenn and Clint Eastwood have endorsed the program over the years. By the time 1970 rolled around, Toys for Tots collected and distributed nearly 6 million new and used toys per year and by 1980, the program was only accepting new toys. In 1990, Toys for Tots conducted a three-week promotion on television programs and raised nearly $3 million, and set the Guinness Book of World Records by distributing 7.9 million toys. During times of tragedy, Toys for Tots provided over 2.5 million toys to children who were affected by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The program also held special events for children in 2001 who lost to parents on September 11. And now, in 2017, the Marine Corps Reserve celebrated 70 years of Toys for Tots. Throughout Toys for Tots history, more than 542 million toys have been distributed to more than 250 million children and continues to spread holiday cheer.


What I will be primarily focusing on today is to identify the fact that human security can also explain action among refugees in asylum countries or host countries. More specifically, I'll be talking about how the refugee population in host countries enhance civil society activism, but then furthermore talk about what are the conditions that sort of mediate the relationship between refugee populations in host countries and civil society activism. So going back to the determinants of refugee outflows, as I just mentioned, the political science research has identified two prominent factors, so conflict, now we are talking about conflict within countries as well as conflict between countries that threaten security of individuals which then may lead to higher levels of refugee outflows followed by state repression. So state violation of human rights could also be yet another factor that may lead, that may threaten human security of individuals leading to higher levels of refugee outflows. Anecdotally, if we think about Syria for instance, high levels of conflict as well as state repression where the most recent Amnesty International Report documents human rights violation conducted by the regime on its citizens that could account for the outflow of refugees that we see from that country. Of course, economists have also identified other factors that could play a role as to why people move from one country to another. But as I mentioned, primarily looking at the consequences of refugee inflow in host countries here. I'm trying to highlight the fact that pursuit of human security is also important for the refugee population among host countries. Now in host countries, I argue presence of high levels of refugee population may enhance the overall level of civil society activism. Question is why? One of the reasons being as we know that the refugee population may not have the right to vote, for instance, however they are very much affected by the living conditions in the asylum countries or the host countries. So for instance, the domestic laws, the living conditions, that affects them as well. So they're more likely to be active in civil society in order to bring attention to their needs and preferences in pursuit of human security. So going back to Maslow, in pursuit of human security, this is one of the few ways in which they can bring attention to their plight. Additionally, there might be similar concerns where the concerns of the refugee population may be similar in some circumstances to that of the domestic population, explaining ways in which perhaps the two different groups may be able to bring attention to their common needs and sort of make the government be more responsive to their needs in that sense. The first hypothesis then that I'm trying to look at here is that high levels of refugee population in asylum countries increase civil society participation overall. Now, while that may be the case, one has to recognize that domestic structures within the host countries may also come into play. So what I'm looking at here is how economic inequality may condition the effect of the refugee population on civil society activism. High levels of inequality, I argue, reduces the effect of refugee population on civil society participation. If the host or the asylum countries is one that also has high levels of inequality, the government may especially be hesitant allowing for high levels of civil society activism for fear of high levels of redistribution. Essentially that puts a lot more pressure on the government because now you have a circumstance where not only do you have high levels of inequality, which may put pressure for high levels of redistribution, but also the fact that you have a large refugee population may put additional pressures. So the two factors taken together may sort of or high levels of inequality may dampen the effect of refugee population on civil society activism. Second hypothesis or the second part of the first hypothesis that I'm looking at here is that high levels of inequality reduce the effect of refugee population on civil society participation. This is a time series analysis on 41 African countries. Essentially, this is largely guided by the countries I have data on from 1990 to 2011. The primary dependent variable is civil society activism. The data sources are all listed here. So I look at the civil society index overall as well as its components. The primary independent variable, the total number of refugee inflows in countries of asylum. The other independent variable, the level of inequality, followed by some of the standard controls that are usually included, GDP per capita, size of the urban population and the level of democracy. And so if you look at the results here, we'll start with the control variables. If you look at the democracy variable, higher levels mean higher numbers mean higher levels of democracy. It's positively associated with civil society activism. And that makes sense. Countries that are more open will allow for higher civil society activism. Percentage of urban population, higher the percentage of urban population, higher levels of civil society activism. Having a more urban population may make it easier for groups to come together. High levels of GDP is associated with lower levels of civil society activism plausibly because if income levels are high, then perhaps that may explain why people may not be as motivated to be active since the country overall is doing quite well economically. Inequality, we see high levels of inequality associated with high levels of civil society activism that may explain, that may be explained by the fact that if there is a high level of inequality, people have more grievances. And so perhaps that could explain the high level of civil society activism. High levels of refugee population is also positively associated with high levels of activism as the first hypothesis stated. And then when we look at the interaction variable, it's negative and statistically significant. So if we were to graph that, what you see here is that as the level of inequality increases, the effect of refugee population in host countries sort of, it dampens the effect of the refugee population in host countries on civil society. So at high levels of inequality, refugee population, the size of the refugee population in host countries is associated with lower levels of civil society activism. So what does this mean? We know, what we know in terms of human security and outflows of refugee is that conflict and state repression is especially play an important role. But this sort of explains the fact that human security is also important when we look at the refugee population in host countries in that being active is one of the ways in which they can perhaps bring attention to their needs, to their preferences given that they may not have other rights that the native population may have. In terms of policy implications, overall it enhances engagement within society and to the extent that this can actually bring the government's attention to some of the needs of not just the refugee population but also for the citizens as a whole, it may enhance the accountability of the government. So in that sense, it could be beneficial both for the domestic population as well as for the refugee population. However, we want to keep in mind that the economic structure of the host country also makes a difference, more specifically high levels of inequality may dampen the effect of refugee inflows on civil society. So efforts to address inequality may be especially important in that it could make it easier or it could lower levels of inequality may make it so that not just the refugee population but also the domestic population, they are more likely to be able to operate in a more open environment. With that, I will conclude my talk and thank you for listening.


Vacated State House of Assembly has read the riot acts to file filling stations engaging in fraudulent practices including manipulation of fuel pumps and subtle imposition of point of sale, purest charges and customers. Rising from plenary after passing a resolution against the fraudulent act, the lawmakers express worry that some filling stations cheat customers by dispensing less than the leaders boss even at this challenging time of exorbitant fuel prices. Filiicitators say it is partnering with the state government and relevant agencies to clamp down on air filling stations wanting that no influence or connection will survive the onslaught. The House, the government, through all the complaints that we have received, have decided to pass this resolution and resolute about it that any filling station that forces people to pay extra charges before they can dispense to you will be locked down. Any filling station that dispense the quantity that is now up to a liter and collect money for a liter on it will also be sanctioned. It is a resolution that the House is serious about and all relevant agencies of government through the governor has been put on red alert and we are going to enforce it. And we also need people to also get in touch with us wherever this is such practices still going on so that we can also assist by getting those people arrested and get the place seal off. 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.