Now I see it. Good grief. So through the talk, I'm not, I had to turn off the chat so that I can see my slides. But I do, I would like to hear from people.  I wanted to start out with this because I found it really funny. I'll let you read it. I think a lot of us when we are inundated with work and we can't seem to get started. This is what happens. We start breaking our big tasks into smaller tasks and then we're faced with a million small tasks. So what is burnout? It is a state of emotional mental and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress. So we're all doing what we love. Why on earth would we be burned out? Because we don't always feel in control of our job or role. Over extension is something that especially perfectionists often do because you don't want to just do the job, but you want to do everything. So there's a couple things that you can watch for in yourself, especially dread. If you are dreading doing a part of your job, then it is time to really think whether you need to do that part of your job. Cynicism, you might not catch that in yourself, but your friends might catch it and you might catch it in your friends or your teammates or your workmates. Cynicism is a real tip off that people are burning out and actually getting sort of crispy. So I'm sure we've all heard of reframing, but we all know why we joined the KDE community. We all know why we went to work at our job. We all know why we married the person we married or whatever thing it is that you're dealing with. You originally saw the mission. You saw a calling. I have been using reframing for quite a while. I remember how much I used to hate doing the dishes and they would pile up in the sink. And then I started thinking, well, do you like to eat a meal? Sure. What makes eating a meal? It involves thinking about what you want to prepare, making sure you have the ingredients, which might include shopping. It includes the cooking and then the cleanup after. It's all the thing. And once I started to think about that, the dishes just got done. In fact, my dishwasher is running right now, but even when I didn't have a dishwasher. The other thing that you can do, and this I used the last time I burned out a few times, I have burned out and just left the project, which is one of those times at least without a word, which is just the worst. I mean, if you have somebody in your group that just has gone, you should call them up or go to their house or however you can figure out what is going on, because maybe they just need a little help to step back gracefully. I mean, sometimes you well and truly are burned out. You're going to need to step back from being a maintainer or even from, you know, whatever you're doing as a part of the team. Or you might just need to prune out the parts that don't fit your own personal mission. The last time I was burning out, it was because my dad was declining in health. He did eventually die a few years back. And I found that I could just hardly look at IRC, which I love IRC. I've been in IRC ever since 2001. And I couldn't, because of my various jobs, I couldn't entirely leave, but I just stopped reading channels that I didn't need to do for my job. And that helped a lot. So I had a few low, very low volume channels left. Same with email. I started searching for the emails from various lists that I knew that I needed to read. I would scan for the threads that I needed to be in on and just not read the rest. And pretty soon I started to feel better.  Go see a movie with somebody, if that's even possible anymore. You see why I want other people to speak up, because some of you have things that you could offer here. How to help others.  And you have to remember that you are very powerful. If you call somebody, if you even tell them in IRC how much you appreciate what they have been doing, it is really powerful. And again, let's see. I would welcome other people. Sorry, I looked at the chat for a second. I would welcome other people giving their experiences. People aren't having a problem hearing me, right? No problems. Go ahead. All right. Okay. I would like to mention at the end, seriously, I need other people to talk because you all have stories. I read this fantastic article on Medium.  And I think it is what we are all going through.  It is just what we are all going through being semi locked in our houses and, you know, we're not at Academy, we're not hugging one another. We aren't usually even able to see our family and those who can see our family are often just in the house with them and, you know, you don't know if you love them or hate them. So I think that this is an extra layer of not quite burnout, but we all knew, we all realized that we had an emergency and we needed to deal and so we put on that surge capacity and it's been months now. I mean, it has been months and some of us have gone through people that we love dying and it's just a lot. So please write us at the community working group if you need help shaping reshaping your job, you need help with an individual in your team. If you want to step down gracefully and you want someone to be by your side as you have a difficult conversation, because we're here for you, that is what we're for. We are not police, we are for you, we're here for you. And I don't have a slide that says, hey everybody, if you need to talk, let's talk. I guess I can put that is, I always have to look that up actually, just look for community working group on duck.co and it takes me to our page and I get that address so it's not. All right, I'm really tired of hearing myself talk. So, hey, February, this is bothering. You are talking about burning out. Maybe I should add the camera as well. Yes, okay, you can do all of that, allow, allow, allow, allow. So, at this point, what's actually maybe burning out me most is, it's just kids. Just today, someone approached me telling me, I can't paint, I can't paint, I cannot paint, please help me. I'm pretty sure she is on the top, and I want to help her, but we are actually at millions of them right now. The reason I originally got into hacking on Katie's software creator stuff like that is like, okay, I want to have free painting software for everyone. And now it's for everyone. I can't help everyone. And that's just true. Yeah, that is true. And I feel that way sometimes too. The thing is, for Krita, there are lots of places where people can get help. It doesn't have to be you. There's loads of people who can help. So, sometimes you just have to step back. So, I thought about putting this slide in, but I didn't. But every time you take an airplane, remember you used to take airplane flights before they take off? They tell you, if there's a problem and the oxygen masks come down, put on your own oxygen mask first, and then you can help someone else. This is really important, especially for those of us who do lots of helping. You have to put on your own mask first and be breathing, you know, some oxygen into your lungs before you can help someone else. You have to get a good night's sleep, or you can't function the next day. You need to eat good food, or you get sick. You absolutely have to take care of yourself first. And then out of your extra, out of your bounty, out of your search capacity, you can help those who are in need. Thank you. Well, thank you. I have something to say. Excellent. I really appreciate what you're saying, and I think I really appreciated hearing what Boud said too. Speaking personally here, I'm the father of two small children, and seeing what's happened to them during the last six months has been absolutely heartbreaking. This is something that I mostly keep to myself and don't talk about, but it's really hard to deal with a lot. And I think the point that I want to make is you don't know what other people are dealing with. And that's why it's so important for us to be kind to other people, because you don't know if that flippant remark or that harsh word might just be the thing that sends somebody over the edge on a particularly difficult day. And personally here, KDE has in a lot of ways been my mental health lifeline. I genuinely don't know how I would be coping, if not for KDE. Over the last couple of months, KDE has given me a sense of mission and purpose and made it even just a little bit easier to wake up every morning and face the horror of the real world, especially in the United States of America right now. So I want to thank everybody here for everything that you do in helping to make this a welcoming and loving place. And I think it's so important that we keep focusing on that, that we make sure always to be kind to each other. And when we're feeling bad, we need to make sure that we don't express that. We need to make sure that we don't grate on each other and be mean and rude to each other just because we're feeling it. We need to support each other and help each other right now. It's so important. Yes, it's actually so much better if you feel like yelling at somebody in IRC or in an angry email. You can write the email, just don't send it and then go take a walk. In fact, you might want to sleep on it. In the chat, I put the two rules of Linux checks because I only have two. Be polite, be helpful. And if you can't be polite and helpful, then really go into your bathroom, close the door and scream at the top of your lungs until you start crying and get it out. Because it is so bad to spread your anger, your frustration onto other people instead of giving them what is really in your heart, which is your love, your sense of mission. And what we know we can do. I mean, I couldn't participate in all of Academy because it started when I was still asleep. But what I could, it's so amazing what we're doing. We're doing wonderful things and we're going to keep doing wonderful things. And I think we just have to keep that in mind. And it's sometimes really hard. And that's what this talk is for is just for all of us to realize that it is sometimes really hard for us. And it's sometimes really hard for the person that is irritating you so much in IRC on a mailing list, on the forums, whatever. Yeah. I hear people talking in the chat. It's surprising how much actually speaking with your voice helps. So this can be a therapy session for a few more minutes. One of the things which clearly can lead to burnout is fear of missing out. And I'm particularly bad at it, I guess. I usually have fear of missing out and just evolve myself into many things and then never get rid of it or something like that. But in the previous years I have learned in this very short which I have learned, it's okay to step out and it's okay to get rid of fear of missing out. Yeah, that's what I'm worried about. I sometimes worry about you, Bhushan, because you do so much and I do hope you take time to sleep. So over the last few months I found myself quite a few times in a situation where I think I was at the brink of burning out, because for the most part he is just a hobby for me and a hobby that I love very much and I care very much about. But I don't have as much time for it as I would like to. And even when I actually found some time to do something between having a job and doing a master's degree, even when I found some time, I sometimes found myself in a position where I actually had time where I was just staring at my screen, knowing okay, I could be productive right now, but I had no real sense of what to do, no real motivation of doing anything except for knowing, oh, you should be productive right now. And at some point I decided, okay, I need a break from all of this. And it just so happened that it was right before the plasma sprint, the virtual one is here. I said, okay, you will do this sprint and after the sprint you will take a week off of everything from KDE, which aligned quite good with some other personal plans I had. So what I did was I essentially closed all the KDE related chat applications. I deleted the Magics client from my phone. I just ignored everything KDE for a whole week and I felt so much better afterwards. And I had some new energy and new motivation to do things. And if you find yourself in the position of, oh, you should be doing KDE stuff now, but you really don't want to, then take a break and things will look brighter again in the future. That sense of dread is a real thing. So thanks for recognizing that in yourself and take care of yourself. Hey, Nicolas. About that, there were a few personal projects unrelated to KDE that I had to suspend, I would say, because I kept thinking, no, I should be working on my presentation. And so I thought, well, when academy ends, I can finally go back to those. And now I find myself at the end of academy with a long-to-do list of things that have shown up during the buffs. I really need to make an effort to, if I was planning to make a break, actually do it. Actually take a break if I actually need it. It's always a conflict between, oh, but I want to get those things done anyway. But yeah, it's bad in the long term if I will end up burned out. Well, I think it's important to listen to your heart, do the things that bring you joy. And I very often find that doing something that makes my life better in some way, I mean, when I was first starting to work on this talk, instead I found myself cleaning the back window, which now the sunshine comes in and it's not full of cruft from the weather. So that actually helped me get my talk organized because I could think about the talk as I was cleaning the window. Oh, Nuno says, if it's not fun, it's not worth it. Well, it has to be fun at some point. But, you know, reframing the task as I talked about, you know, dinner dishes, if it becomes part of something that's fun, you can do all the bits, but just tackle the fun part first. Hey, Alex. Hi. So I fixed my mic by switching laptops. Just something I wrote in the chat about someone's like, oh, yeah, I'm going to be so sad when this is over. Well, condrop is a thing. Condrop is when you stop, leave a conference and it was so great. It was so awesome.  So that's a thing. And now you try to re-involve yourself with the community some maybe to make up for it. Take care of yourself.  Yep. I think a lot of us were dreading not seeing people. And I know I'm missing the hugs. I'm just, I'm missing the hugs. But there are advantages to the online life. My genealogy society, I've been helping get everybody to online meetings. And we now meet way more than we used to. And you can look at somebody's eyes. We use Google Meet. So it's, it's bigger than the tiny little, I guess, if I want to see myself bigger, I can just get rid of it. Presentation, but you can look in somebody's eyes and you listen to one person at a time instead of having those side conversations. And one of the things I do love about Academy always did was the hallway track because the talks are not always that fascinating for me because they're way more technical than I am. I always like the intro from the end, but the middle sort of loses me often. So, but we have a hallway track here. And it's really fun. So I would like it if even more people showed up. Alex shows up with her daughter, which is just awesome. All right. I think we have like four more minutes. So who else wants to speak up? Oh, AIDS says there's non-hugging people. That's true. I don't just grab people. I say hug. I'll just say hug right now. And yes, breaks are good. Everybody, I mean, there's a reason that Europe people take vacations. Americans are not so big on vacations, unfortunately. But in my family, we always had the cabin where we could go. And if anybody comes to visit me, I'll take you up to the cabin in the mountain. So not right now because there's a forest fire between us and the cabin. But unless you come this week, come any other time, we'll go up to the cabin. Yeah, the fires. Yeah, it's very smoky here. Yesterday, the weather report was sunny with patchy smoke. I've never heard that before. It was blowing from the east to the west and I live in the west of my state, just south of Seattle. Today, it is a south wind and it's blowing from Oregon and California. So.


The later state government has sealed a unique Villas Montessori School, over the flogging of two-year-old Cherish Ohamadike by her teacher, Joy Igile, who inflicted marks on her back. The later state commissioner for education, Fala Shadea De Fishayo, said the case is within the context of informal education because a victim is a toddler, and according to her, the school operates without approval, adding that the later state government is working to clamp down on such centres of learning.


At this point we are going to talk about a lot more about electrons, we're going to talk about how they are arranged in the atom, so kind of we'll be talking about where they're located, although as you'll see or as I will confess to you in a little bit, pretty much everything that I tell you in the next video is a lie, but it can be a useful lie and even though I feel like I need to take a shower after I say all this stuff, it's still somewhat useful, so let's let's just get going and you'll sort of understand as we go. Here is some pretend atom, you can probably figure out by now two red circles means two protons, two protons means a helium atom, this helium atom has a mass number of four and it also has two electrons and so two negative charges, two positive charges and I'm going to, because of that it's electrically neutral, so we could put a zero here if we wanted to. What we're going to talk about now is the arrangement or the location of these electrons in different atoms, so the idea here is this is a pretty simplified situation, I've got a helium atom and it only has two electrons, but there are many atoms that can have many more than two electrons and so we're going to talk about where those electrons go or where they're located in the atom or another way of saying that is how they're arranged and what I want you to think of is that the electrons are arranged or located in different energy levels in an atom, depending on how many electrons the atom has, there may be many different energy levels, so for example, or just a, this is something you're going to have to just kind of memorize, the lowest energy level and I'm putting energy level in quotes here because it's a little bit of a simplification, the lowest energy level has a slot for two electrons, in other words the lowest energy level can hold two electrons. The way I want you to think about this is think of this as, think of the atom as being like concert hall, there's a stage here and there's seating, this is the first row that I'm circling here and the first row has two seats and which means that it can hold two electrons and this is the lowest energy level and then in the stage on the stage there are protons and there are neutrons as well, okay so the lowest energy level in an atom can hold two electrons, the second lowest energy level, think of that as the second row, as far as seating is concerned, can hold eight electrons and the same is true for the third lowest energy level, it can hold eight electrons as well, so first row holds two electrons, second and third rows hold eight electrons, we are not going to go beyond the third energy level or the third row, so keep that in mind, let's see, so if I have one proton like this proton that just showed up here, I have a hydrogen atom, if I wanted to make an electrically neutral hydrogen atom, I would need an electron and I need one electron because it has to balance out the positive charge of the one proton and what I'm going to tell you is that electron will go into the first energy level, so watch this awesome animation, everyone see that now there's an electron sitting in the first energy level and so this is a neutral hydrogen atom, imagine that I had a helium atom, heliums have two protons, so here are my two protons, if I was going to make a neutral helium atom, I would need two electrons, so where do you think that second electron is going to go, we've already got one electron here, is there place for the second electron in the first energy level, yes there is, there's the empty slot, so if we wanted to make an electrically neutral helium atom, we would add another electron or the electron would probably be located, or as far as we're concerned would definitely be located in the first energy level, so there it is, now I've got a helium atom that is electrically neutral because it has two negative charges and two positive charges and you can keep doing this, you can say what if I had a more complicated atom that was electrically neutral, imagine that I had a lithium atom, lithium has three protons, if I wanted to make it electrically neutral it needs three electrons as well because the electrons are negatively charged, the first two out of these three electrons will sit in the first energy level, but we have to add one more, if we want to make a lithium that is electrically neutral that has a charge of zero, where does that third electron have to go, can it go in the first energy level, no it can't because we've used up all two slots already, so the third electron, everyone see that awesome animation I'm going to show it to you again, there it is, the third electron now starts to fill up the second energy level and this is basically how electrons are arranged in more and more complicated atoms, in other words if your atom has a bunch of electrons the electrons will sit at the lowest energy level, you'll sit as many as you can in the lowest energy level, once you fill that up you'll start to fill up the second lowest energy level, once you fill the second lowest energy level you'll start to fill up the third and that keeps going on and on and on, there's a general idea that the lowest energy level, the electrons in the lowest energy level are closest to the center of the atom, so they're like in in the front row, the electrons in the second lowest energy level are a little bit further away, and the electrons in the third lowest energy level are a little bit further away still. Again, that's a simplification, but it's partly true. And it's a reasonable way to think of it, and it lets us draw these pretty little pictures with orbiting electrons. So you can think of these electrons as sort of moving around in a circle around the atom. Again, not really true, but as far as we're concerned, it's good enough to understand what's going on. And again, just in case this is not clear, these filled blue circles mean that there is an electron sitting in that position. The empty or the white circles means that there's no electron sitting there. That's an empty slot. OK, so I've basically described electron energy levels. We're only concerned with the first three energy levels. And again, to summarize, the first energy level can hold two electrons. Second and third can hold eight. We're not going beyond the third energy level. And you can keep filling these up. I can have a beryllium atom. It's got four positive charges. If I wanted to make an electrically neutral beryllium atom, I would need four electrons as well. And we can put two of those four electrons in the first energy level, but we still have two left over. So we have to put two in the second energy level. So that is sort of a brief introduction to how electrons are arranged in atoms that become more and more complicated. All right, everything that we talked about in the previous slide dealt with atoms that became more and more complicated and atoms specifically that were electrically neutral. So every time I showed you a new atom, I said pretend it's going to be electrically neutral, which means the number of protons equals the number of electrons. And I basically went over where the electrons were going to be located in different energy levels. So as far as we're concerned, there are only three energy levels. First level can hold two electrons. Second level can hold eight. Third level can also hold eight. What I want to talk about now are different terms and a weird rule about electron energy levels. First is the term. Electrons, if you're looking at an atom and you're looking at the electrons in the different energy levels, the electrons that are in the outermost energy level are called valence electrons. So before we go to this more complicated example, let me try and explain what I mean. If I have a simple atom and there's only one energy level and there's one electron sitting in that energy level, even though it could hold two, this is the outermost energy level for that atom. And because of that, this electron sitting there is called a valence electron. But it won't always be that simple. Here's a different situation. Imagine that I have a more complicated atom. I'm not going to draw the protons. I'm just drawing the electrons and the energy levels. Here's an electron, or I'm sorry, here's an atom with three electrons. Two of the electrons, this one and this one, go in the first energy level. The second, oh, let's say that it has four electrons. The second, the third, and the fourth electrons go in the second energy level. This first energy level is not the outermost level anymore. The second one is because of that, these two electrons that I'm circling here are in the outermost energy level. And these two guys are now called valence electrons. And these two that were sitting in the first energy level, they're not valence electrons. Just let me bear with me. Let's do a slightly more complicated one than that. Imagine that I have a more complicated atom. It has a whole bunch of electrons. Here's two electrons sitting in the first energy level. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, sitting in the second. I've got these lovely little streaks. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. And then I've got another third energy level. And maybe that energy level has, I don't know, five electrons sitting there. Again, this first energy level, the one that I drew that has two electrons in it, this one and this one, those are not valence electrons because they're not the outermost energy level anymore. Neither is the second energy level, also not outermost. This time, because our atom is more complicated, this third energy level is the outermost one. And the electrons that I just circled, those are the valence electrons for this particular atom. So a valence electron is an electron that is in the outermost energy level of your atom. And it's gonna be a different energy level for different atoms. Now let's go over here. This is some pretend atom. It has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven protons. I believe that is a nitrogen atom. Don't really need to know that. And this is an electrically neutral nitrogen atom. So it also has seven total electrons. It has two electrons. There's number one and there's number two sitting in the first energy level. Those are not valence electrons. And then the second energy level is the outermost one. And the electrons that are sitting there, number three, four, five, six and seven, those are called valence electrons for this particular nitrogen atom. So hopefully that's a reasonable introduction as to what a valence electron is. That definition is not quite correct, but as you'll see, it's good enough. And it's correct a lot of the time. Here comes the rule. The rule is that atoms don't like, and I put like in quotes because atoms don't really have feelings. They don't like to have partially empty energy levels. So this is supposed to be an empty slot for a nitrogen atom. This is supposed to be another empty slot. That's a third empty slot. So as far as this nitrogen atom is concerned, it's electrically neutral, but its second energy level is only partially filled. And what I'm gonna tell you is that in general, atoms don't like to be in that situation where the outermost energy level is partially filled. And if you give them the chance, they will actually do something to try to fix that situation. So they will either try to fill the empty slots. So imagine that I have my nitrogen atom. In this state it has three empty slots. It's not happy with that situation. One way that it can try to fix that situation is to fill those three empty spots. It can, one way to do that is to steal three electrons from somebody else. Imagine there's another atom bouncing around nearby with three electrons and this nitrogen just steals them. So that's one way of this nitrogen atom becoming happy. Obviously happy is very informal term, but basically this is the nitrogen atom trying to live by this rule that I'm circling here. Another way that this nitrogen atom can fix this situation is to interact with a nearby atom and basically ask, I know it can't really ask, but ask the other atom if the other atom could share three of its electrons with those empty slots part of the time. So that's another way of fixing the situation is to basically broker a deal with another atom that has three electrons and say, hey, could you please share your three electrons with me at least part of the time so I can partially fill these empty slots and then I will be more stable. Those are two possible ways that atoms can sort of fix this rule if they're not obeying this rule. The other way is to be completely empty. In other words, completely empty the outermost shell of electrons. That means get rid of all of these electrons that are sitting there so that I have eight empty slots instead of three. In general, either situation works to satisfy this particular rule that I'm talking about. In general, however, the idea is that the atom will make a change that requires the smallest number of addition or removal of electrons. So in this case, this nitrogen atom, the easiest thing for it to do is to steal three electrons or share three electrons compared to losing five. So the idea or the rule of thumb is that as far as this atom is concerned, it's easier to steal three than to lose five. For other atoms, it might be easier to lose electrons. So it'll be a different situation as to how different atoms satisfy this rule. Sometimes some atoms have a tendency to steal, some atoms have a tendency to share, and some atoms have a tendency to get rid of the extra electrons in the outermost energy level. So before we go on, let's ask how many electrons are in this nitrogen atom and the way that it's drawn? Well, the valence electrons are the electrons in the outermost energy level. So here's the outermost energy level, this outer circle, and we count them, one, two, three, four, five. That's a horrible four. Okay, so the answer to that question is that there are five valence electrons in our neutral nitrogen atom. That's a different question than how many electrons because if I don't use the word valence and I just say how many electrons, then we have to count all of them. We even have to count the ones in the first energy level. So the answer to the second question is that there are seven total electrons. It just so happens that only five of them are in the outermost energy level. So try to understand the difference between those two questions. Okay, here comes the confession. The rule, actually it was only one rule, so let's just say rule, that you just read is a massive oversimplification. It's basically a lie, but it is a good enough lie. It's true enough of the time that this rule is useful to allow us to make certain predictions that we will go over in the upcoming videos. The reason that we tell you, or the reason that I'm telling you this horrible lie is that if you really wanna understand how electrons are arranged in atoms, it requires at least two more years of college math. That's a lot of calculus and actually math beyond calculus. So most people probably don't want to do that. So that's sort of why I am confessing to you that the rule that I'm telling you is not quite correct. It works a lot of the time, it's useful. I'll show you what it works for in a minute. But it doesn't work all of the time, so keep that in mind. I've also brought this up in the past with other classes. And then I mention it as we progress in the course. And as the course progresses and students forget about this confession, a lot of times when I bring it up and I say, well, yeah, that rule about the atoms don't like to have empty slots in their outer most shell, it's a little bit of a lie, a lot of times students look at me and they act as though I just told them that Santa doesn't exist. And so what I'm going to tell you is that Santa actually does not exist.  And if you follow this rule, sometimes you can still learn useful things. Now, if the rules and the terms that we used are not quite correct, what's the benefit of doing this? The general benefit is that you can learn things about atoms and what electrical charges they like to have. The thing to realize here is that people usually look at the atoms in the periodic table, these and these, and they think that all atoms like to be electrically neutral. That it turns out that that isn't really true. And if you follow the rule that I mentioned a couple of slides back, you can actually figure out what electrical charge different atoms prefer to have under many circumstances. So what you'll see is that nitrogen very often does not like to be electrically neutral and it will pick up three extra electrons and become charged at negative three. That is something that you can figure out just by following the rule that we went over a couple of slides back. And I'll show you some examples going forward. But the idea is that you will learn a rule that at the very least works for figuring out the preferred electrical charge for many of the atoms in the first three rows of the periodic table. This row, this row, and this row. And sometimes even into the fourth row, this works. After that, the rule kind of falls apart, but I'm not going to ever ask you any questions about valence electrons or electrical charge of atoms beyond these three, maybe four rows. We will talk about other atoms in the periodic table, the ones beneath the first three rows, but we won't be talking about electron arrangement in those cases. And so that's the benefit that it lets you figure out what charges many different atoms, especially in the first three rows, which is where a lot of chemistry takes place, what charge those atoms tend to end up with. And if you can figure out what type of electrical charge different atoms have, that actually lets you figure out a lot of things about how atoms stick to each other, which is where we're going. We're trying to figure out how atoms stick to each other and describe that to other people. And the first step in getting there in figuring out how atoms stick to each other is figuring out what electrical charges different atoms have or different atoms prefer to have. Here's a situation. I'm going to ask you four questions. Here are the questions. We're going to be referring to this atom. First question is what element is it? How many valence electrons does it have? Is its valence level filled and how can it fix its problem? So you can pause the video, try to answer those questions. I'm going to unpause at this point. And so this guy has a single proton. If you look up who has a single proton in the periodic table, it's hydrogen, whose symbol is capital letter H. How many valence electrons does it have? So valence electrons are the ones in the outermost electron energy level. This guy only has one energy level, so that has to be the outermost one. And it has one electron there. So the answer to the second question is one. Our guy has one valence electron. Is its valence level filled? The answer is no, because the first energy level can hold two electrons. And we have an empty slot there, so no. And so what you have to do at this point is you have to think back to the rule that we just discussed a couple of slides back. And the rule is that the atoms don't prefer to have these partially empty energy levels. So you can think of this hydrogen atom as being maybe sad or unhappy. There's our sad hydrogen atom. How can it fix its problem? Well, it can do it in one of two ways. And this is one of the situations where it's not obvious what hydrogen's gonna do. Hydrogen can either completely get rid of that electron and then make the first energy level completely empty, or it can steal or share another electron to completely fill the first energy level. What I'm gonna tell you, and you wouldn't necessarily be able to predict this, so I would not quiz you on it, is that hydrogen has a tendency to get rid of this guy, to satisfy that rule that I mentioned a couple of slides back. But that being said, if our hydrogen got rid of this extra electron, pretend it went away, it's gone, then our hydrogen atom would have one positive charge from the proton, one plus and zero negative charges. Because of that, our hydrogen atom would have a total electrical charge of plus one. And what I am going to tell you is that hydrogen atoms do not like to be in the situation that I've drawn here, where they have one electron and one proton. They much prefer, and if given the opportunity, they will turn into hydrogen ions, and if you remember an ion is some atom or group of atoms that's charged, they will turn into hydrogens that have a charge of plus one. So we've just figured out a way, or at least a little bit of a way, to determine that hydrogen doesn't like to be electrically neutral, and it prefers to have an electrical charge of plus one. So this is how you use the rule that I described a couple of slides back. You basically pretend, let's see, pretend you have an electrically neutral atom. That's how you start. You look at the valence electrons, and you ask if the valence electron level is filled or partially filled.  I know that's a huge oversimplification, but you gotta live with it, and then you say how can it fix its problem, and you pick the easiest way to fix it, and if you do that, you can figure out what the electrical charge is that is generally preferred for many of the atoms in the first three rows of the periodic table. We just did it for hydrogen, but we're gonna do it for a couple of other examples as well. Here's a different atom. Same four questions though. What kind of element is it? How many valence electrons is a valence level filled? How can it fix the problem? You can pause the video, try to answer those questions. On pausing, this guy has two protons, two plus charges. And if you look up who has two positive charges in the periodic table, you'll see that it's helium. This is the symbol for helium. If we wanna get fancy, we can count the protons and the neutrons and figure out that it has a mass number of four. So we've answered the first question and then some. Where's the outermost electron energy level? Well, only one level, again. So it's easy. That has to be the outermost one. How many valence electrons? In other words, how many electrons in the outermost energy level? One and two. So the answer to question number two for this helium atom is that there are two valence electrons. This is an electrically neutral helium atom because it has two plus charges and it has two negative charges from the electron. So if we want to, we could put a zero there. Is its valence level filled? Yes, it is because the first electron energy level can hold a maximum of two and that's how many electrons are sitting there at the moment. So yes, filled. How can it fix its problem? This is a trick question. There is no problem because the rule is that atoms prefer not to have partially filled electron energy levels. And this one is completely filled. So not a problem. And because of that, we can basically learn that helium atoms prefer not to have an electrical charge. Helium atoms are generally perfectly stable being electrically neutral or having a charge of zero. So we just use that rule again to figure out that heliums don't like to have an electrical charge. Third atom, same questions. What element is it? How many valence electrons is the valence level filled? How can it fix the problem? You can pause the video again, try to answer these questions on pausing. This guy has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine protons, so nine plus charges. If you look up in the periodic table, what atom has nine positive charges? It's a fluorine. The symbol for fluorine is a capital letter F. If we wanted to know the mass number, it's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 10 neutrons plus nine protons makes a total mass number of 19. This atom, the way that I have it drawn, it has nine total electrons or nine negative charges. You can count them up. It's got two in the first level and level one. And it's got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven electrons in level two, which makes a total of nine electrons and so nine negative charges, nine positive charges. Right now our fluorine atom is electrically neutral. How many valence electrons does it have? Well, it's got seven because level two is the outermost level. And so the answer to that is seven. Is the valence level filled? No, it's not. If you remember, second energy level can hold a maximum of eight electrons and so we have an empty slot here. So no, almost filled but not quite. How can it fix its problem? Well, you can think of two possible ways. One, it could get rid of seven electrons, could get rid of the seven in the outermost shell. But the idea is that is not as easy as it would be to actually just steal one. And so fluorine has a very strong tendency to just steal one electron from an atom that might be bouncing around nearby. If it steals one electron like that, let's say steal an electron, it's not electrically neutral anymore because it used to have nine negative charges, but if it steals one, it's gonna end up with 10. But it still only has nine positive charges. So it has one extra electron or one extra negative charge. And because of that, what you can reason, what you can figure out through this rule that we've been using over and over again is that fluorine atoms do not like to be electrically neutral. Fluorine atoms have a tendency to have an electrical charge of negative one. So we've used this simple rule over and over again three different times to figure out that some atoms like to be positively charged, like the hydrogen, and I said it, likes to be charged at plus one, some atoms like to be neutral, like the helium, and some atoms like to be negatively charged, like fluorine, which has a tendency to have a charge of negative one. So you can do this for many of the atoms in the first three rows and even a little bit beyond the first three rows of the periodic table. If you follow this rule, in many cases, you can learn certain things about the shape of the periodic table. A couple of slides back, I told you that hydrogen has a tendency to be charged at plus one, and you can figure that out from this rule. But it turns out that everybody in this column pretty much has a tendency to acquire an electrical charge of plus one. If you follow the rule that I described that we've just been going over, and you use it on beryllium and magnesium, and calcium, and you can even go further down, you will see that these guys, if you follow that rule, have a tendency to be charged at plus two. Over here, in this general area, the rule breaks down. And so we're never gonna use it in that area. We will talk about electrical charge, a lot of the atoms here, but it won't be in relation to that rule, and we won't use it here either. The rule tends to work on the edges. So a couple of slides back, I said, we reasoned through the fact that helium likes to have an electrical charge of zero, another way of saying that is helium likes to be electrically neutral, and this is true for all of the atoms in this column. They prefer to be neutral. We said that fluorine, by following this rule, prefers to have an electrical charge of negative one. That is horrible negative one, huh? There. And if you follow this rule for chlorine, and many of the others, you can figure out that the atoms in this column have a tendency to be charged at negative one. Here, negative two, it works there. And here, negative three, although this starts to fall apart as well in that general area. But, again, that's why it's a rule and not an absolute law or anything like that, but you can figure out by following the rule that we've been going over that the atoms in this column prefer a charge of plus one, plus two, minus three, minus two, minus one, and electrically neutral. So there's two ways you can go about this because you kind of need to be able to do this. You can either memorize this. You can look at this chart and say, all right, it's plus one, leftmost column plus two, then big wasteland in the middle, minus three, minus two, minus one, zero. Or you can memorize the rule and then you can reason through it for most of the atoms. And I will only ever ask you, what's the preferred electrical charge of an atom where you can actually figure this out correctly? I won't ask you any of the weird situations. Now, why is this important? It isn't really.  In particular, I think many of the people who are listening to this are trying to get into the healthcare field. And there is probably never going to be a situation where someone turns to you and says, quick, how many valence electrons does an electrically neutral nitrogen atom have? That's probably not gonna come up. So at some level, a lot of this is not relevant. What lets me sleep at night is that I feel like this course is a test to see whether people can think logically about weird things that they may never have encountered. So you may never encounter this, but you will somewhere in your careers encounter weird things that you have to think logically about. And so this course, at least at some level, is a test of how well you can think logically about unusual things. Maybe in a more practical sense, so I'm gonna get off of my soapbox now. Why is this important? It's important to understand other parts of the course. And as I mentioned, if you can figure out what preferred electrical charges different atoms tend to have, it can help to explain how different atoms attach to each other. So for example, I think most of you know that the formula for water is two hydrogens stuck to an oxygen. If you follow these rules, and we will do this in the next chapter, you can figure out why it's always two hydrogens stuck to an oxygen for water and not, let's say, 12 hydrogens stuck to 84 oxygens. So this doesn't really exist, but if you follow the rules that we've been going over, you can figure out that water, or when you're merging hydrogen and oxygen atoms, it will very often be two hydrogens to one oxygen. So it helps you figure out how molecules are assembled, let's say. So that's it. There was a lot of stuff, a lot of confessions.


Hi, I'm Tim Rogers. I'm the library director here in Jacksonville and my favorite book is The Lord of the Rings. I've read it when I was an exchange student in Finland and it's a story of adventure, excitement, heroes and villains, people of all shapes and sizes doing crazy things. To me it was a book that really spoke especially as a young person. It was something that spoke to me about reaching potential, about trying to be a hero when you feel very small. I think books can do that, reading can do that. It can help people experience things that they wouldn't normally have the opportunity to experience. Vote for your favorite book as part of the Great American Read at wjct.org.


Hello everybody. My name is Ray Dogum and welcome to the Hyperledger Healthcare Special Interest Group meeting. We hold these meetings every two weeks. I am the co-chair and here we have about three or four people here. Erica is the co-chair as well. I have a beer bower. I have Elizabeth Green on and Doug Bullitt. Thanks guys for joining today. These meetings are recorded so anything you do say will be in a subject to the Linux Foundation Antitrust policy and they're published. The videos are published on YouTube as well. So if you do hear anything, if you have any questions or comments throughout this discussion and you're viewing this after the meeting, feel free to leave some comments. We'd love to hear your questions and thoughts on the subject matter that we discuss here. So I don't think there's anyone new on so I'm going to go ahead and get started with some just a request if there's any community announcements that you guys would like to share. So in that case, I want to get started here and discuss or just bring to your attention some of the upcoming events that are happening. Right now actually in Boston there's the MedTech conference going on. Lots of good speakers there. So if anyone has attended or is attending, yeah, let us know how you thought of that conference. On November 7th through the 11th, there's the IEEE Global Emerging Technologies Forum. This is a great event as well. You should check it out. Part of the agenda includes Hyperledger Blockchain. So this should be a good one and it's all virtual and it's five days long. So that could be a really, really cool one to check out. November 9th through the 10th in London, UK, the Token 2049 Europe Conference will be going on. You can check out the link to all this in this public Confluence page as well. Next we have on November 13th through the 16th in Las Vegas, the Health 2022 Conference major event. Lots of great speakers here. A big production, if you haven't heard of this one. December 1st through the 2nd in London, the Blockchain Expo Global event will be going on. Also that'll be partially virtual as well. So lots of really great speakers here as well from many different companies, including a lot of enterprise existing companies. I'm just looking here FedEx, Citigroup, BP, GE. So there's a lot of big companies here that are in the enterprise space. And then finally, December 5th through the 6th in California, the Next Generation Patient Experience Conference will be going on. So these are just a select few of the events in the healthcare and blockchain world. I'm sure there's others if you have one that you want to share. Feel free to add them in the comments. All right. Does anyone have any other events that they are attending or plan to attend that they want to share here? Okay. And let's dig into some of the interesting articles that I happened to come across over the last couple of weeks. This first one is interesting. Pretty sure it's about Sweatcoin, which is a platform that's been around for a few years now. And they've been trying to basically reward users who have, they collect steps on their apps or on their phone. And the more steps that you do per day, the more tokens that you're rewarded with. And basically what this article is saying that in aggregate, all this data is sort of becoming a data union. And what that means is the people, the individuals that are producing this share to earn tokens, they're collectively empowering themselves as opposed to having large companies like Google or Facebook, et cetera, to monetize their data. So in a way, they are monetizing their data instead of these larger traditional Web 2 companies. So in here it says, Sweatcoin, the mobile app that rewards people simply for moving has proven data unions can work at scale. So there's many companies like this that do this share to earn or sweat to earn sort of model. But Sweatcoin seems to be one that is showing a lot of success. And it talks about what's their secret sauce here. And it's really, they argue, it's really about the way that they present the data to the user. So here it says, while most data unions have believed their members won't care much about the data that they're sharing, the Sweat team focused tirelessly on building a community around step data. They put data first and don't try to bury it in almost every way the data is their mission to create a healthier planet. So I thought this was interesting while just quoting here, while the Sweat app rewards people instantly for generating movement, until this year, those rewards have been paid out in points rather than transform the tokens. So originally they didn't have tokens, they were actually just rewarding their users with points managed by a centralized company, Sweatcoin. But now it seems they have crypto tokens and while the points are instant and could be spent in consumer-facing marketplace for exclusive deals and merchandise, members couldn't transfer those points into cash. But now I believe they could. So I don't know if anyone's actually used Sweatcoin, I have. It's pretty interesting. The app is really smooth. It feels like I'm monetizing my activity, so that's always good. And yeah, I just think this concept of a data union is really interesting for the future of decentralized health. Wait, this is Wendy. I'm just curious. Hello, hello everyone. Is there a fee to join? No, it's free to join. At least it was when I joined. Okay. Let me see here. So it says very clearly on their website that they will not sell vast amount of geolocation and wellness data they now collect even though it would appear that this is one of the most valuable assets. Yeah, I don't, there is no fee to join. Okay. Wow. That's great. Yeah. And if someone thinks otherwise, please let us know. I'm not an expert in Sweatcoin. However, data, so it says here, however, data monetization is very much on the agenda. The CEO, the founder, has said he does want to offer Sweat members with the choice to monetize their data. Of course, now they have numbers. Those fully opt-in or zero-party data sets will be ever more valuable at scale. So again, this is a complete reversal of the usual data union tactics and it has worked as a charm. So worth checking that out. The next article that was important to discuss here was, and this is a broader trend that we're seeing. I don't have membership to this and I was able to access it before, but let me see if I could find another similar article. Meanwhile, I've been trying to find an app like Dataring, like whatever it is, but then I found this one called Ouro Ring and it seemed to be similar. It seems like eventually you'll be able to get all of these devices to track what you eat, how you meditate, exercise, et cetera, lay out the data for you the way, say, the air table or data plot or whatever it's called does, and then you can monetize that if you wish already, right? You don't need them to monetize it for you, but I'd like to know if anybody knows. If you can list some of those apps in the chat, maybe we can synchronize them. I put one in the chat. Awesome. Thanks, Elizabeth. Yeah, we see it. Ouro Ring. Yeah, and they've also been scaling pretty well. I know my brother wears an Ouro Ring, so he loves it. Okay, so I was able to load the page. The Mayo Clinic, which we all know is one of the largest and most respected health systems in the US, it warns it won't take most Medicare Advantage plans. So recently, and I'm not an expert in Medicare Advantage, so if there's others in here that want to share their perspective, Mayo Clinic sent letters this fall to eligible Medicare beneficiaries received care at its Arizona and Florida facilities in the last three years, warning them that it is out of state with most Medicare Advantage plans. So previously accepted, now not accepting, so this is going to be a major impact to people with Medicare Advantage plans. And if Mayo Clinic is doing this, I'm sure many other health systems are doing this, which is going to put some of these patients really at risk of not having the financial ability to pay for some of these services. So just to clarify here, this notice allows the patient to make an informed selection of coverage if the patient would like to seek a plan that has Mayo Clinic in network. So again, more complications with the landscape of Medicare in the United States due to some recent laws that were passed. And I bring this up mainly because I do believe that the future of healthcare could be more simplified. And I think blockchain Web 3 DLT have the potential to make things more transparent and provide some stability for a lot of these patients who might not have specifically financial stability for patients who are going either employee to employee year to year, not really sure what the next year is going to hold for their health plans. So here as a broker, it's important for anyone marketing Medicare Advantage plans to be aware of the network including hospitals. The network information needs to be made clear to the consumer. So yeah, pretty big challenge. And I think just one more quote here. 1.4 million people each year with serious or complex illness for all 50 states and 140 countries. So yeah, any thoughts here on this or any perspectives from group? Sounds like similar to fraud because patients think that Medicare Advantage is Medicare and Medicare covers everything. And so I think when the advantage as an HMO is it or what kind of a healthcare plan is advantage that makes it different from Medicare? I believe it had some additional. You know what? I'm not going to not really sure exactly. I don't want to say the wrong thing here, but I do know it has something to do with medications, I believe. So it basically includes additional financial support for medications. So yeah, I'm going to hope that some of the people listening might have some additional information to share and would love their comments as well. Just going to load the agenda back up here. All right. The next article thought this was pretty interesting claiming that Apple is going to launch a health insurance plan in 2024. And I think that would be quite remarkable for a tech company like Apple to get involved in the health insurance space or in the market. This is definitely going to put some pressure on existing traditional large insurers. And I think Apple is pretty well positioned to make an impact here and disrupt how traditional insurers are working. They have a lot of the existing consumer data. Collectively, if they take all the information they collect from their iWatch, their iPhones, and etc. from consumers, this can impact the way they do business. So yeah, so here, this subtitle says Apple Watch or Trojan Horse, kind of stating that this, the Apple Watch is really like the way into people's health space or health insurance and just general health services space potentially. So such a move would raise questions over whether Apple launched a watch with the long-term goal of entering the lucrative health insurance market. And is there any information in that article as to where they will be offering these insurance plans? Yeah, so I mean like what states, I don't think they specifically say what states they're going to start in, but that's a good point because each state does have specific laws around how. Yeah, I was just curious, so since I was just doing a quick search, it looks like they offer, I don't know if this, it says Apple Health and it's offered in the state of Washington, but it could just be for its own employees that work there. I was just trying to learn more. I'm intrigued at how they would make this work. Me too. I think, you know, it'll be interesting to see this happen. And I don't know if they've been involved in sort of acquiring existing insurance companies, that might be one way for them to kind of jump into it. And there's this last sentence here, it says the analysts predict that by 2030 a third of Apple's revenue will come from software and services. It currently represents just a quarter of the business. If you want to know the technical details with a patient's consent, the physician would be able to search through patient's data and find the patient who they think is most likely to succeed with their treatments and choose that patient over others. And supposing the Apple watch has a smoke detector on it and the doctor, the physician only wants to take patients who do not smoke, then they would choose the patient with a smoke detector that has never gone off or that rarely ever goes off and presume that that patient doesn't smoke. Because, you know, as long as maybe there's a way to tell if the patient was actually wearing the Apple watch when, you know, during the time in question. Wow. Yeah, and that brings up a lot of privacy concerns and thoughts there too. Well, let me do the patient consent. So, for example, I would gladly give consent because my reputation is excellent. I do everything right, everything possible. And so the physician will look at my chart, my data and say, wow, this is a model patient. If this, if my new treatment works with anyone, it will work for this patient. And so I would get, maybe get a free clinical trial procedure done. Right now, clinical trials are actually charging people, charging their human subjects to let them use their bodies to try out something new that might fail or be fatal. Can you explain more about that, Elizabeth? I had, I had spent my entire career in clinical trials and I had not heard that. Tell me more. Of what part? About charging patients. Oh, so in California, there are stem cell treatments that are, they're not standard of care. Anything between an initial concept and standard of care could be a clinical trial. Okay. And so, you know, they, they, they, they believe that doctors believe that there's enough work done to show that it works in most patients or say more than half of the patients. So now they're ready to start charging and they charge maybe three, four thousand dollars for a treatment. But when, if it were actually a clinical trial, it would cost anything or the human subject would actually get paid for their time. And so there's a, there's a huge controversy about that, of course, but as long as they can find people willing to pay, they charge. So with this kind of work, it would be, you know, the physician would get much more data and the principal investigator would find out so much more about the actual patients who are undergoing the clinical trial. Then they would provide that to the doctors, researchers, insurance companies, et cetera, who decide on a yearly basis what is, what the standard of care is going to be and they would have more data to work with. They would be able to say, sure, okay, because this works with all of the patients, even the smokers, we're going to call it standard of care. So suddenly all of these experimental procedures would become standard of care and patients would have more choice of what's covered by insurance. Doctors would have more choice of what to prescribe to their patients, knowing that it was covered by insurance. That's what you're saying. Yeah, I suppose that some treatments are just so expensive that you know, researchers aren't able to, you know, find the resources to pay for conducting the trial. So if patients are willing to pay for it, you know, they'll make that happen. Interesting. Thanks for sharing it. The next... If you can pay for that clinical trial using your data, wouldn't that be wonderful? Right. I think that's like the Holy Grail really of what we're all talking about. If we can monetize, in aggregate, all the data that people generate in order to fund, in order to really, yeah, it'll fund the research that is happening. So the value of the aggregate data will hopefully supersede the cost to run these trials and then we're in business, right? Next here is an article just kind of featuring a new... This isn't really that recent, I guess, June of this year, but I thought it was new to me. Egg's Chain, which is a company that's trying to store records using blockchain, store the records of frozen eggs, embryos, and other specimens using blockchain. So I thought it was interesting. They're using NFTs and the founder, Wei Eskala, she's a, you know, she's a Web3 evangelist and they're based in Austin, I believe. So it looks like the company was actually launched in 2018 and they have a patent to track the chain of custody of biospecimens on the blockchain. You know, and it's not just for embryos and things like that. It's also for organs, tissues, blood, stem cells, DNA RNA and more. I think with the name, the implication is that they're starting off with the female reproductive science first. And yeah, it'll be interesting to see how this unfolds as well. I don't know if anyone has heard of this company. Worth checking out. So is this like the egg gets a name and an NFT and then somebody can buy it and use it later on for artificial insemination? I don't know if it'll be that someone else will be able to use it. So here it says once they launch the company, she led by example by having the retrieval of her eggs documented on the platform. So I think it's just to track your own eggs. In this case, her eggs are stored at the Yale School of Medicine. That's where they're physically stored, which along with Boston IVF fertility clinic, partners with egg chain and documenting biospecimens on the blockchain. So it's more about documenting your own. But here it says in March, egg chain held an online auction, allowing people to bid for the first publicly available spot for sperm storage on the blockchain. Interesting. So you can make a bid to have your sperm stored on the blockchain. The auction garnered 66 bids, which also included the rights to an exclusive piece of artwork and a discount for storing the sperm at a participating clinic. Anyone who stores their data about their specimen with egg chain has secure ownership of their information in their data wallet that is protected with a private key. And users can broadcast their data on the blockchain for visibility without exposing any personally identifiable information. So that part I find to be kind of, you know, I could challenge that potentially because if you're using a public blockchain, people could see what transactions you might be making. And if they know your identity, this might not be true. But other information such as the date of the egg retrieval, how many eggs have been stored, and whether any medical tests were administered could also be stored in the data record. Interesting model. So how do you keep track if you don't say put the egg into the box that's sealed that has an NFC in it so that it tracks if somebody, you know, an emotion detector? I mean, how do you make sure that nobody's stealing that egg? Isn't that what it's for to make sure nobody steals that egg? It's not clear to me. I don't think necessarily that it's use is to prevent someone from stealing the specimen, the biospecimen. I think it's more just to track the, you know, the digital information about the egg and where it's stored and things like that. But again, I'm sure this is, you know, that's a great question. Some information on the website about it. But yeah, I don't know. Maybe we'll have her on the, so here you can take a look and see that X chain learning series. There's a video on this. So this might have more information. And you can actually consult with them. It's 400 bucks or 45 minutes. So could be, you know, if anyone's interested, check that out. Could be interesting. Yeah, Elizabeth, I'm not really sure how to answer your question clearly. I see it's more like this is one of those in the future. We might find out how women can bear children after age 35 safely. So until that time, freeze your eggs because you may have a chance in the future to bear, you know, maybe laboratory right now, they have test tube babies in China. And maybe one day you'll be able to make your own test tube baby.  You can wait till you're old and wise and have a baby in a test tube and here save your eggs for that purpose. I can see a lot of use for that. Sure. Yeah. I know that market is also growing. So the number of women that want to wait until they're, you know, whatever personal choices that they make, they want to delay having a baby. And yeah, I'm going to move on to the next article here. This is published Coinbase and it kind of talks about the past, present and future of smart contract platforms. So I just thought this might be interesting for those folks who you know, want to get into more detail about what does a smart contract really mean and how it could evolve in the future as well. And really why they matter. So now they talk about the history of use cases. Interestingly, the term smart contract was coined in 1994, according to this article. And the theoretical use case was a smart lean protocol. So for repossessing leased vehicles from deadbeats. 18 years after Zabo's musings, Nick Zabo, Ethereum, the world's first smart contract platform was launched. So yeah, they talk about current use cases as well. Things like crypto kitties, DeFi platforms, NFTs. And, you know, as we know, in like the healthcare market, there's so many potential use cases for smart contracts. It's kind of like the core tool that can be used in blockchain to enable trustless transactions. And getting into some of the future use cases here. Let's see. Looking here, talking about banking. Yeah, check this out if you're interested in learning more about smart contracts. And if you take a look here, actually, the markets have been on the uptrend very recently in the last day or two. So smart contracts are getting a, I guess, are more trusted, are getting more validity, let's say. But you know, you really can't base it on the market prices. Just a thought there. Anyways, the last article here in these... There's a good use case for that though, is that this patient is going to provide all the data necessary for the doctor to see if the procedure worked. And as soon as that data shows up on blockchain, it triggers the smart contract and the patient, the provider is paid for the procedure because there's now evidence that it was successful. Absolutely. I think the insurance market, health insurance market too, can really benefit from smart contracts both on the insurance and a provider side as well as the consumers, individuals that are contracting with the insurance companies. We all have heard how it's sometimes really challenging to get reimbursed for the financial or for the healthcare services that you receive. Doctors also have to basically fight with some insurance companies to get paid. If there was a way to streamline that entire process through smart contracts. And I know it's easier said than done. But with some of the software tools that we have now, it is possible. No longer do we have to really fact some medical history to a provider or to an insurance company to prove that a specific service actually occurred. So it'll be interesting to see that plays out. I think there's going to be for a long period of time the ability or capability to retract some transactions somehow because inevitably you're going to have some either human error mistakes that are put into the blockchain that need to be reversed or something. So thinking about those use cases or extreme cases I guess you can say is going to be important. Otherwise you're going to have a lot of angry people. So but the power to make things more streamlined is really there. So we'll see how that goes. This article here, the critical link between healthcare, cybersecurity and health disinformation. This is a well-brained article I thought worth sharing and it just discusses in more detail about really the state of cybersecurity and healthcare and how sometimes the data that's out there just cannot be trusted and it's really a dangerous situation for health systems providers across the country and really across the world too. So here, although medical misinformation has long existed, the rise of Frank medical disinformation was accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite early warnings about disinformation, misinformation early in COVID-19 in the pandemic, the quick spread of vaccine disinformation has prevented uptake of COVID-19 vaccines. So misinformation has a direct link potentially to poor health decisions made by individuals. So being able to prevent that from happening is going to be an important thing in our future. I think this part here is really interesting. Disinformation as a service. So one of the greatest shifts in information technology over the past decade has been the emergence of as a service models. So infrastructure as a service, etc. But what's interesting here is what they're saying is disinformation as a service can operate in a similar way. So bad actors no longer have to design a disinformation campaign, develop an access strategy for intended target populations and build the technological capabilities for a simultaneous launch and do all the monitoring and response activities. So that's a lot of work for these bad actors to do, right? What they can do instead is literally just hire people from either the dark web or other sources and have these services run their disinformation campaigns for them. This also shields the bad actors from being pinpointed as the bad actors. So it just happens on the internet somehow and then people believe it for some reason. So it's quite effective. I think do this as we've seen with COVID-19. And I think it's not just a health care issue. We're seeing this in the political landscape as well, you know, through election misinformation, etc. So what are we going to do about it, right? This article kind of presents potential strategies to mitigate these risks. Any thoughts on this? I know this is a big issue for many people. This is Wendy. I thought I would share that my son is actually studying this very question for his dissertation. And he just proposed his dissertation on Monday and it got approved by his committee. And he is studying the effect of Twitter, of tweets, and he uses computer science scraping tools to scrape the tweets, natural language processing for analyzing the content. And he is comparing the effect of the nature of tweets in two states, Tennessee and South Carolina, as to the overall COVID vaccination rates and hospitalization rates for alternative treatments that were not effective, such as use of, I can't remember, different aspects. Oh, one is ivermectin prescriptions. So anyway, he's actually studying this empirically. And I am eager to find out exactly what he is able to see for this. That is awesome. Yeah, I'm also very interested. So once that comes out, I'd love to read it as well. We've heard anywhere from like 50% to 85% of accounts on Twitter could be just bots like fake accounts. So being able to empirically say what the real number is or just understanding how that could impact society is going to be really, really important. So absolutely, you know, so much of it has been anecdotal evidence. And so now he's studying it empirically. Awesome. That's really cool. And the cause mob mentality. Well, I've been working on an app for decades trying to figure out how do you, how does artificial intelligence detect mob mentality? So, you know, artificial intelligence could, for example, detect that what's it called the telephone game, you say one thing to one person, it just changed slightly the next person to say artificial intelligence could scrape the web and find that kind of a chain of deceit or misinformation and trace it back to where it started with all these tweets find out where it started. So that's just one way. But until children grow out of being susceptible to mob mentality, I'm afraid it's or or here's what the Green Party says everyone should get free education in the medical field so that everyone already knows enough to be able to spot, perceive, you know, intellectually knows what's true and where to find correct information. You know, so I guess education could be one solution. This is Elizabeth over screen. Thanks, Elizabeth. Now, I mean, education always a good idea, I think. And the thing is like some people, some communities may not really be interested in getting involved with learning about that. So there's gotta be like clever ways to incentivize people that might not normally want to engage with health education and motivate them to at least appreciate the data, the information that's out there and be more skeptical skeptical of some of the misinformation that they could be seeing on, you know, on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, etc. So this this problem is going to be with us for a while. I think I just to kind of illustrate a little bit what this article is trying to portray. Here's an exhibit aligned and combined tactics to combat disinformation and cybersecurity threats. So I think this is really nice for really anyone who's trying to communicate what's happening at different levels of an organization and at different like you know, perspectives as well. So the C-suite engagement, what they what they can do, how to gamify education. So, you know, Elizabeth, you mentioned education. This is an example of what they could be doing, why it's separate from compliance, the evolution of the workforce and you know, what can be done about what strategies can be employed for them and go on the offensive. So proportional investment, offensive cyber security. So yeah, really good idea. So yeah, hopefully, I think everyone on this call believes that blockchain, DLT will have a role to play in helping to prevent misinformation and disinformation online, how that's going to play out. It's a little kind of an unknown, but we got to have these conversations now to find out the right solutions. Okay, so I have a few educational nuggets, but I just want to point out that there were some messages on the Zoom here. So I just want to open these articles up just to just hurt anyone listening in who might be curious. So the OR ring, Elizabeth, you mentioned this before when talking about you know, monetizing data and collecting data as well as Erica, you shared Shiro Health, which is a company that's also kind of paying people to do their daily activities. It's open public beta. So check that out if you're interested. And then Doug, you shared this article about how the environmental and acute margin pressure on the industry level for what's happening to hospitals really. So inflation becoming a much bigger deal for hospitals. And we're seeing a lot of pain. And you know, hospitals are struggling to keep their financials going and even like paying some of their employees, etc. So especially in underserved communities. So that's the major issue here, I think. So yeah, any thoughts on those or anything else you wanted to share on those links? Okay. On the last point, I guess it's just a simple one, really. Based on what we are, who we are, what our jobs are, we tend to get fascinated with some of the more frontier esoteric issues now and then. And we lose sight of the forest for the trees. But in reality, the crushing force here is economic. It's not really just hospitals, but it's kind of rose to my attention, my sister is a nurse, and she's telling me that the hospital she works with, having the nursing staff now is to meet their shortfalls or having to pay as much as $150 an hour. And she uses that just as an example for other things. So in Atlanta, one of the major hospitals just shut down completely, leaving a big gap in supply on the supply side of healthcare. There's almost a kind of tectonic force that is going to drive different approaches, I suppose. By the way, saying that, the conventional care models are breaking down. And it just seemed to me that's worth reflecting on. Just some kind of pedestrian level applications like using, it was alluded to a little earlier, using verified credentials and digital identities to identify and augment customer acquisition costs that if physicians or hospitals even can use the web to basically solicit people to volunteer their information so that it can cherry pick them, if you will, for trials or for more profitable procedures. Stuff like that, somebody's going to make a killing if they figure out how to address simple use cases of that sort. Totally. Yeah, no, thanks for bringing that up. I think you're absolutely right. You know, us being this sort of futuristic pattern of thinking about the future and how new technology is going to improve everything, we really need to also reflect on, like you said, reflect on some of the basic economic issues that these companies or these hospitals are facing. I hopefully will be able to find solutions for them that are both related to tokenomics somehow. But again, a lot to be considered there. Now, there's one more megatrend. I don't have a link here for it, but a totally different topic perhaps, but perhaps we could focus on some future call or near term call. But this whole Q and Tefka thing is the hot mess. And I think that it deserves more attention than it's getting relative to the case in point example is that it's the new Tefka rules are extraordinarily regressive as they relate to decentralized approaches. That it's really trying to lock in 20th century hierarchical, federated and centralized methods to the exclusion of even fire for Christ's sake. It doesn't even really allow currently network exchange using fire protocols, which is kind of fighting with itself. The 21st Century Cures Act specified by our APIs as a requirement, yet the Q and Tefka regime that's coming in right behind it doesn't have a decent way to support that. So it's a huge mess that if to the extent that we thought public policy along the Cures Act was going to help us drive innovation, the Sequoia RCE Tefka rules are driving us in the wrong direction. I probably shouldn't say all that given this is a recorded call, but I think it's true. Fair enough. I am sharing the Tefka site as well for anyone interested. Very important stuff. And yeah, I think it would be valuable to talk about this in more detail in a future meeting too. So we could discuss that potentially how we'd want to go about doing that. If anyone has any ideas or specific strategies to tackle this topic as it is pretty complex or open to suggestions. Yeah, unfortunately, it's mind numbingly complex. It's hard to get your head around it. It's such a pervasive change. It could just Peter out completely given that it's ostensibly a voluntary program, but Health and Human Services and CMS have a way of pressing their, you know, their voluntary requirements through Medicare Medicaid such that it becomes a de facto standard to the extent again that it's it's somewhat regressive in its current manifestation. I think it's worth more attention. Thanks, Doug. Appreciate that. I'm going to jump into some of the educational nuggets and these are three quite long time consuming pieces of content, but I think are very valuable in learning more about the topic. So the first one is an article written about decentralized science, more or less. And here is Gassing the Miracle Machine by Elliot Hirschberg and Jocelyn Pearl. And Jocelyn Pearl is very active in the decentralized science communication space. And it really just goes into the details of the history of what science sort of is, how funding and science has traditionally worked and what the future of science funding and research can look like using Web 3. So I'm not going to get into the details, but one thing I just wanted to highlight is there is a really cool landscape of all, well, of the majority of decentralized science companies categorized by DAOs, open science, ecosystems, biotech and tech bio, arts and NFTs, publishing, data storage, protocols, foundations and institutes, financing, communities and chat. So I know this list is growing every day, really. And I just wanted to make the group here aware of this article. Really, really well written. The next thing I wanted to bring to your attention is an eight hour podcast that Lex Friedman, who's excellent at podcasting as a researcher at MIT and does a lot of other cool stuff with robotics. I talked eight hours with Bellagie, Srinivasan, and they talk about government, social media science, FDA, blockchain, Web 3, et cetera. So if you have a full day's worth of free time and you want to check that out, I think on YouTube they also split it up. So I just wanted to bring that to your attention. Really interesting thoughts there. And then last but certainly not least is this Bloomberg article, which is 40,000 words long about the crypto industry and crypto stories. So for anyone who might not know anything about blockchain or crypto, who's just trying to start learning about it for the first time and they like reading, this might be a great way to get started. It's very easy to read, I think, and kind of goes over the whole history and what the future could mean. So it really does a great job kind of taking in everything that's happened in the last many, I guess, last decade since, I guess, Bitcoin even before that. And yeah, I just wanted to highlight that for everyone's attention. So yeah, any thoughts or has anyone, anything else they want to share? We have about five minutes left for any discussion. Excellent. So just as a reminder, if anyone's listening on YouTube, please subscribe to the Hyperledger channel if you find this conversation interesting and let us know what you think of the comments as well. Like it if you think it was worthwhile. And I want to thank everyone on the call today as well. Your input is extremely valuable. And I love talking to you guys and I think it's really important to keep these conversations going and the community will hopefully benefit from it as well. So thank you all again and just nothing else. I hope you have a great rest of your week. Hang with it, Ray. We need to keep this going. Definitely. Yeah. And if there's any ideas or specific topics, we discussed a few today that we want to go into more detail about. I'm happy to organize an agenda in that way as well. Thank you. Thank you all. Bye. Thanks, Ray.


What are some of your favorite success stories from your clients? I have a lot of good ones. I think my favorite success story, I had a client named Ernest and he was my first diabetic. And I told him right away, I've never done this, but I met him at a Best Buy and I was carrying some personal training cup and I was getting a new phone and and he asked me, you know, what do you do? And I told him I was training. He's like, I've been on a mission. So over the time period that I learned to work with Ernest and to not to mess with his sugar levels and put him in danger but trying to lose weight and then we lost 75 pounds safely.