My talk is about Calisphere and the online archive of California. Let's see how this thing works. As I mentioned, I'm from the California Digital Library. We're actually in Oakland across the Bay, and we are under the University of California Office of the President. So we serve all 10 University of California campuses and the lab. And we focus on things that make sense to do on a system-wide, excuse me, or consortial level. So for example, we have a unified library catalog for the whole system. We license journals for the whole system. We run an open source publishing platform for people who want to do, to start journals, publish monographs even, and also run a system to implement the open so that people can deposit their material for open access to comply with the open access mandate that was passed several years ago. And so I work in the Digital Special Collections Group, and we run a couple of services that I will describe for you now. So we aggregate sort of as an introduction to those couple of services. We aggregate a couple of different things at the CDL. One thing is finding aids, which I don't know if you're familiar with this. They're basically descriptive records for collections. So in terms of archives, we're talking about descriptions of things in boxes. How would you find those? How are they organized? And these are talking about physical artifacts in the library. And then the other side is digital content. So things that we've scanned in, mainly images, but also audio, video, and so on. So on the finding aid side, it's for people to figure out how to go and look at things physically. And on the other side, it's how to find things digitally. So I'll talk a little bit now about the finding aid side of things. So this is the online archive of California. It's been around since 1998. There are over 45,000 collections represented here from across the state of California. And this site has been through a few different iterations. It was last redesigned in 2009. And we're talking actively about a redesign. And the idea is to collaborate more broadly now with institutions, the California State Library, as well as other consortia around California and the West. So that's an exciting development. So this site contains finding aids. This is an example of what a finding aid looks like. And you can see here this is a document or a collection called the California Fruit Exchange Documents Collection. So it has a little bit of metadata information. What's in this collection? It says the collection is open for research. And you'll notice that it says there are no online items. So for a lot of the stuff in the OAC, this is just pointing you towards physical collections. If you're interested in this item, you would need to contact the institution itself. So in this case, it would be the California State Railroad Museum Library. And they would let you know how to come and look at these items. And this finding aid would tell you where these are available. In some cases, there will be a link that will link you through to a digital object. If there has been funding to digitize those objects, then you can go and look at that. So I'll focus mainly for today on the digital side of things. But some of you might be interested in this resource if you're interested in actually going physically looking at things. Yeah, so that is clickable. The contact. Yeah. Any other questions? Yeah. Yes. Yeah, it is hierarchical by institution, collection, and then items within the collection. Yeah. Any other questions before I move on to the digital side? You can also, I think there's going to be a question and answer period as well as in case. Okay, so onto the digital side of things. We run a site called Calisphere. Calisphere is a portal to digital collections across California, across the state. It's primarily developed and hosted by the California Digital Library, but the collections are owned and they've been contributed by all 10 UC campuses, plus libraries, archives and museums across the state. So I don't know if you know that UC apart from having obviously a mandate to support the UC also has a mandate for public work for the state of California. And mostly the material in here is special what it's called special collections type material. So unique primary sources broadly and format wise, most of the now over a million objects are images, but we're quickly aggregating more and more audio, video, even data sets. So you can look for those to come online. And this website was totally redesigned in 2015. So it looks pretty good, I think. And as I mentioned, we're over a million objects. Now we just recently hit that mark and that's from we had when we did the redesign. There were 400,000 objects. We as part of the redesign, we we redid how people can contribute objects to the site. So it's now easier. It's more user friendly for contributing institutions than it was. We basically will accept way more metadata formats. And we have many contributors, including the San Francisco Public Library, the LA Public Library, the Oklahoma Museum. And there's big contributors coming online right now, like the University of Southern California, the Getty. So there's tons and tons of material in there to check out. So once you are into the site, you can search by keyword. So here, for example, you search by San Francisco earthquake, you can see that there's many thousands of items that come up. In order to refine your search, you can filter by the item type. So, like I said, most of the image, most of the items are images, but you can also filter by decade by the institution that contributed the collection also by collection. So you see at the top right, there are links for contributing institution, collection, and then at exhibitions, which I'll talk about in a little bit. So you can make use of all these various bits of functionality to narrow your search. And like I said, the site mainly contains images at the moment, but one very exciting thing is that we're collecting more audio visual material. And recently, we got a video of the filming of the Planet of the Apes at UC Irvine. So you could check out all kinds of things. I'm constantly amazed at the diversity of materials that are on the site. So as I mentioned, we also have something called exhibitions on Callisphere. This is the more sort of interpretive part of the site. These are curated by contributors, so librarians, archivists, historians, and they cover a wide array of topics about California and California history, both by time period. Also, there's a lot on there from a project called California Cultures. So I encourage you to check that out. There's essays accompanying these exhibits as well. So for example, we have a group of exhibits that are on social reform from the 1950s to the 1970s. And this contains then six exhibitions, including things like the Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement, the Watts Rebellion, and so on. So you can click into here and get into all kinds of images and some essays as well. And so you probably are here wondering, okay, what about for my research? Where does, how do I access this stuff? So in terms of, there's always the question of terms of use and copyright. We have a page up that gives you some basic information. It's applicable from the top right hand corner of the site always. One thing to know is that anybody is welcome to view any page on the site and also link to any page on the site without any further permission. So you can, for example, link to a particular page within the site from your own website. No permission needed. There's information on here about how to site digital items. There are as downloading the material. So if you wanted to download an image, some images are downloadable directly from the site. These are the ones that we host locally at the CDL. And you'll see here that thing will pop up saying that there's a limited resolution image that you're getting. So that's freely available to you. Now if you wanted to get a better image, so a higher resolution image, you need to contact the institution that contributed the image. So in this case, I believe this might actually be the SFPL. So we aggregate materials from hundreds of institutions across the state. Each one has different terms, different copyright conditions. So unfortunately, you would have to contact each one to figure out what their terms are in terms of using a higher resolution image or audio or video for your research. So another thing to note is I was just talking to Susan about. We also contribute, we have a pipeline that funnels all of our objects on Callisphere to the Digital Public Library of America. And this is basically analogous to Callisphere but on a nationwide level. So as you can see there are over 21 million objects here. And this is a real treasure trove of research material for you. I encourage you to check it out. This site was also recently redesigned. And similarly to Callisphere you can browse by keyword, you can also browse by topic. They have exhibitions up there. And really I'm always amazed at the diversity of material that's there. And there's more and more coming online all the time. So I encourage you to check that out. And that was what I had to show you. Thank you very much for having me. These are the URLs for the sites that I mentioned. You can email me if you have any questions and we'll have a question and answer period. Thanks.


UX design oversaturated in 2023. I've hired UI UX designers before and I teach online UI UX course so I know what basically you need to do to get that job. So when you apply for a job, the most important thing there are two things that you need. So the first thing is you need a relevant qualification. That is to essentially get you in the door and to get an interview. And what hiring managers are looking for in a portfolio is it's made up of case studies and if you're hiring a UX designer, you're basically looking for as many UX tasks in those case studies as possible. And the reason I say it's not that important that it's oversaturated is that you're actually going to do more work than everyone else. This is the most important job to get on the ladder, which is the junior role.


Hey everyone, this is Dan with my first video on Tesla. For full disclosure purposes, I'd like to let you know that I bought some Tesla shares a couple days ago. My opinions, therefore, might be biased. The good news is that for those of you who have been watching my videos and following my Twitter messages, you know that I don't ever do pump and dump, and I don't believe in a diamond hand approach. If I see trouble in the company, I will sell the stock and I'll tell you by way of my Twitter messages or YouTube videos that I believe the company is in trouble, either due to the broad market or due to internal issues within the company. I will also tell you by way of my Twitter messages when I buy and sell Tesla stocks in the near future. In this video, I will tell you what's so good about Tesla. I will also tell you what's so bad about Tesla. I will let you know what I will be watching to safeguard the money that I have already invested in Tesla. Let's get into the exciting details. First of all, let's look at how the stock price of Tesla has been moving in the last three years. The candlestick chart here is for Tesla. As you can see, it went up by an impressive 1870% in the last three years. If you look at the broad market as represented by QQQ and SPY, they went up by about 60% to 70%. Impressive, but nowhere nearly as good as Tesla. Of course, the big news about Tesla in the last few days was that after market closed on April 20th, Tesla announced their first quarter earnings. And according to Barron, they crushed the earning estimate and Wall Street is speechless. They locked at a very impressive automotive margins of 32.9%, which is almost unheard of in the automotive business. The reason why they can command such a high margin is because of the very attractive vehicles that they are offering to the customers. The Tesla share went up the following day and then by the time the market closed on the 21st, it went down a little bit because the broad market was going down. On that day, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Mr. Jerome Power, made a statement that they would be raising interest rates more aggressively for the rest of the year and that certainly brought down the market. Subsequently, S&P closed down 1.5% and Dow Jones down 1.1% on that day. Nevertheless, Tesla was still up 3.2% and that tells you about the strength of the Tesla stock. And that's one of the reasons why I'm bullish about Tesla. If you look at the last 5 days, on Wednesday after market closed, Tesla announced their earnings and as you can see the stock price jumped up and it continued to go up overnight and then it reached the short-term peak of $10.92 and then it started to drift down as the broad market was heading down. Again for the long term, I'm still bullish about Tesla. Let's look at their products. Currently Tesla sells Model S, Model 3, Model X and Model Y. As you can see, they're pretty attractive modern looking vehicles. If you look at their sales, they started out very slowly from 2012 all the way through 2017 and part of 2018 then they started to pick up quickly. Also the last quarters of 2021, they reached 300,000 vehicles a quarter and of course the first quarter of 2022, they exceeded 300,000 vehicles a quarter. That's very impressive growth. If you like what you've seen so far, I'd like to encourage you to click the like, subscribe and notification button that'll enable you to receive notification when I post my next video in the future. It'll also encourage me to make more videos like this. Thank you very much. Let's continue. We have a lot of interesting things to cover. The reason why Tesla sales and production have been going up so quickly is because they have very attractive products and also because they've been expanding their manufacturing facilities very aggressively. They started out with just one factory in 2010 in Fremont, California. Then they built a factory in Nevada in 2016 to produce batteries. Then in 2017, they bought this factory as they bought the solar business. Then in 2019, they completed the factory in Shanghai which has been producing Model 3 and Model Y vehicles. This year, they recently opened the Gigafactories in Berlin and in Texas. In Texas, they have lots and lots of land to continue to expand in the near future. Then of course, they will continue to build more Gigafactories on a less needed basis. As I already mentioned, they're not only in the car business, they're also in the business of providing solar panels and batteries to buildings. Although this part of the business only make up about 5% of their total revenues. We'll talk a little bit more about that later on. In the next two, three years, they will be launching the Cybertruck which is a very futuristic vehicle and of course, that's another EV, electric vehicle. They will be introducing the Tesla Roaster, a high-performance vehicle, again an EV. They will be producing the Tesla Semi-Truck, another EV. A very interesting development is that they are designing their own chips to build the supercomputer, what they name Dojo, which will be dedicated to artificial intelligence training. The supercomputer when it's completed within about a year or so, and what I heard will be the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world, but it will most likely be the fastest supercomputer dedicated to artificial intelligence training. This is what I consider to be the moat around the Tesla businesses. As you know, the moat is the body of water surrounding a medieval castle back in the medieval days so that the owner of the castle could easily defend the castle against invading enemies. Likewise, the artificial intelligence development and the Dojo supercomputer will provide the type of protection Tesla will need to fend off competitors in the future. I will explain more. As of January of this year, about three months ago, Tesla already have 60,000 volunteer customers who voluntarily allow their driving data to be uploaded to the Tesla computer system as part of the beta test for the Tesla full cell driving system. And that means every mile they drive will be analyzed by the Tesla computers. Any driver reaction will be bounced off against the computer algorithm that has been developed so far, and that means continuous improvements will be made to the algorithm. I believe up until this point among all the people who are developing the autopilot system that Tesla has the most number of miles locked by these test drivers. The closest runner up is probably Waymo by Google, but I don't think Waymo has locked nearly as many miles as Tesla. With these artificial intelligence systems, the more data you feed to the system, the more experience and the smarter the system will become. I will not be surprised if the Tesla autopilot system is the most experienced and the smartest system in the world. And if Tesla sells more cars and a lot more mileage, then this system will just be so much better than the rest of the pack. And that's how the protection, the mode will be built and reinforced for Tesla in the next few years. As of April 1st, 2022, they started to pilot the RoboTaxi service in Las Vegas. During the third quarter of 2021, Tesla published their safety data related to the autopilot system. On the bottom here, the dark blue line is a national average published by the US government, as measured in millions of miles driven per accident. Of course, the higher the number, the better. So the national average, for example, during the first quarter of 2021 is .484. And with Tesla cars, even with our autopilot and with our active safety features, it's already better than the national average at .978. But with our autopilot and with active safety features and a Tesla vehicle is 2.05. That's substantially better than the national average. And then with autopilot, it's 4.19, definitely much better. Of course, you might not believe in these numbers. Actually most of the auto insurance companies don't believe these numbers. But the Tesla engineers and Elon Musk know their numbers and they believe in them. And that's why it is a business opportunity and a profit opportunity for Tesla. They have introduced their own version of auto insurance. If you are a Tesla driver and you can purchase auto insurance from Tesla. As you might know, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway derives a lot of its profit from insurance businesses, including auto insurance. And that's why this will be a very important revenue stream and income stream for Tesla in the future. Recently, Elon Musk announced that the Tesla robot will probably be in production within a year or so. The preliminary specifications say the robot is going to have a height of 5 feet 8 inches and it will weight 125 pounds and it can lift 45 pounds. It will only walk at a speed of 5 miles per hour so that it's not threatening. I'm pretty sure they can make the robot fast if they wanted to, but initially they want to make the robot to be non-threatening. That's why it has limited strength and limited speed. Even with these limitations, based on how smart the automotive driving system is from Tesla, I believe it will be very easy to implement the same type of algorithm, not on the roads of the entire world, but just apply the algorithm to your house. Which is going to be a much more confined area than the whole wide world. And that's why it should be very easy to train the Tesla robot to navigate within your house. And along that line I believe, these are my wild guesses that the robot can easily, for example, make coffee with minimal amount of training, clean windows, fetch things for you, find your car keys in the morning, walk the dog, clean the cat litter, mop the floor, take the garbage out, watch the house when you're not there because it's got eight cameras. So it can watch a lot of things, as well as fetching information for you, who might say, well, tell me who won the Super Bowl in 1976, for example, they're just a walking computer. It will listen and it might even talk to you. So these are the exciting possibilities of the Tesla robot and that's why Elon Musk recently in the interview said the Tesla robot will be even bigger than the Tesla cars. And I won't be surprised if it does generate more revenues and net income than the car business for Tesla in the next few years. This is very exciting. Now had you told me three years ago that Elon Musk would build a robot, I wouldn't have believed you. But after what he has done with SpaceX and what he has done with Starlink and the accomplishment they have achieved with the autopilot system, I firmly believe that a Tesla robot will be possible and it will be available within the next couple years. There are several businesses that are not financially linked to Tesla but they are under Elon Musk's management and I'm pretty sure in the future there will be joint projects and synergy among these companies. They include SpaceX, Loring Company that has been drilling tunnels below Los Angeles and a few other major cities to provide public transportation effectively and efficiently, Neuralink that has the potential of allowing people who are paraplegic to be able to walk again, for example, among other things and Starlink, the satellite company. And recently you might have heard that Tesla is in the process of acquiring Twitter and by the way I bought some Twitter shares and found this news. I want to be honest with you, not everything is rosy with Tesla. There are some dangers ahead. For example, these are the dangers. According to the Inside EVs online magazine, there are already 107 vehicles in the market in the US in 2022 competing against Tesla's EVs. Just a few years ago, there were only a handful of vehicles or EVs that competed with Tesla. Now we have 107 of them and of course in China they also have a lot of competitors and in Europe many competitors. If you look at these vehicles, they're made by Audi, BMW, Cadillac, Ford, Kia, Hyundai, Mercedes, Nissan, all these major manufacturers including Porsche, high performance vehicles. So they will be facing some pretty formidable competition. Although, as I mentioned previously, there's a mode around the Tesla business, which is their artificial intelligence system, the autopilot system. And hopefully that'll ensure Tesla will have a healthy piece of the market share in the next few years in spite of all the competitions that are coming into the market. And that's why for me to continue to hold on to Tesla shares or even buy more Tesla shares, I would definitely be monitoring the Tesla sales and market share very diligently in the next few months and in the next few years. Let's talk about valuation. This is from their 2021 10k report, the annual report, they filed with the SEC. If you look at the revenues, they derive from the automotive segment and from the solar segment. They derive 95% of their revenues from the automotive business and only 5% from the solar business. And that's why the auto business is really the main business. Geographically, in 2021, they derive 45% of the revenues from the US, 26% from China and 29% from other regions in the world. Now 26% of China, that's a high percentage. That means they will be exposed to some geopolitical risks in the future. And I'll be monitoring that very carefully as well. If you look at the first quarter financial statements, they generated the net income of $3.28 billion. Thus of 2021, they generated $5 billion for the entire year. For the first quarter of $3.28 billion, if you just multiply that by four, they could possibly make $13 billion for 2022 or even more since their sales and revenues have been growing in the last few quarters. I will just be very conservative and assume that they will be generating $10 billion in net income for 2022. And I'll use $10 billion in my calculations in the next couple of minutes. So let's talk to $10 billion in the back of our mind for now. I'll show you some charts from the Better Investing Stock Selection Guide database. This chart shows the annual sales of Tesla. As you can see, ever since 2013, the sales has been growing pretty much along the straight line. And the slope of the straight line is a little bit better than 50%. That's why Elon Musk recently said they will be growing at 50% rate for the foreseeable future and based on the historical performance, I believe him. If you look at their earnings per share, they have been having negative earnings until 2020. And then after that, their earnings have been picking up quickly. Based on the first quarter earnings for 2022, they might end 2022 at this point. That means it will probably allow us to draw a trajectory like this. But for now, I'm just taking a very conservative assumption. And I will assume that the earnings will be growing at 39% per year for the next three to five years. But actually, they will most likely be growing faster than that with the EPS. The debt-to-equity ratio looks pretty good. They've been paying off the debts very aggressively since 2019. As you can see, of course, the lower the number, the better. If you line them up against the competitors, if you look at the legends here, they're definitely better than Toyota, better than General Motors, better than VW, and better than the industry average. So Tesla is a very strong company with their fundamentals. If you look at the return on equity, they started out low. Now they are doing a little bit better than industry average. Overall, Tesla's financials look pretty strong. Let's get to the calculations. First, I look at the top automotive companies and compare their market cap and PE ratios. As you can see, Tesla has by far the largest market cap at a little more than a trillion dollars. The next run up is Toyota with only about a quarter of the market cap of Tesla. And the main reason why is because Tesla has very high PE ratio of 205. And actually, that's another potential danger. That's a very high PE number and the reason why the PE number has been so high is because Tesla has been growing rapidly. And with the products that they've lined up, I believe they will continue to grow very impressively and will continue to be able to support a high PE ratio. Now if you look at Toyota, for example, it has a PE ratio of only 9.81 and Salantas, a PE ratio of only 2.88, which is really low. I'll probably be buying Salantas share pretty soon. But that will be another video. For now, let's focus on Tesla. For the rest of my calculations, I'm taking a little bit more conservative approach. I'm assuming that the PE ratio of Tesla will be just at 140 for 2022 and 2023. And as I mentioned about a minute ago, I assume the annual earnings growth of 39%, which is another conservative estimate. And then I use the current figures for 2021. I remember that I was going to assume that they can generate a net income of $10 billion for 2022, but when in fact, they could probably generate more than $13 billion. But that's because, conservative for now, use a $10 billion of net income for 2022. PE ratio assumption of 140. And with those, I calculated the stock price of about $1354. And then based on the 39% annual growth, I calculated the figures for 2023 and arrive at a stock price for 1882 for 2023. And out of this range, I decided to set my target at a very conservative number of $1,200 a share to be reached by the end of April 2023, about a year from now. The main reason why is because I believe the market is going to go down a little bit due to the rate hikes from the Federal Reserve Banks. But after that, hopefully inflation will go down and the market will start bouncing back again. And that's why I'm not taking these very aggressive numbers for my target for the Tesla stock. Let's look at the other annual subpoenas. Again, the Tesla price as of last business day, it closed at $1,005. My target is $1,200 by the end of April next year. So that'll be about a 20% increase from today's price, which is pretty good. And Yahoo Business gives them a buy rating, $2.5 out of $5. High target is $1,620. Average target, $980. And low target is $6,700. TipsRang.com, moderate buy, high target of $1,580. Average target, $1060. And low target, $6,700. TheStreet.com gives them only a C-plus hold rating without any target price. I'm comfortable with the $1,200 target. And you'll start a calculation. And I've taken some very conservative assumptions at this point. Let's recap. My target is $1,200 a share to be achieved by the end of April 2023. And the all-time high for Tesla was $1,243. At this point, I'd like to encourage you to also subscribe to my Twitter account in addition to subscribing to my YouTube channel. For example, on March 17th, I tweeted that I bought TMV shares. And as of today, it's up 26% already. On April 20th, I tweeted that I bought Tesla shares. And actually up until now, it's down about 1.8%. But I'm not worried it will eventually bounce back up because Tesla has all the competitive advantages that we looked at in the last few minutes. And then on April 22nd, I said I sold LUV shares and locked in 6% of profit for batch of shares. I bought on January 4th and locked in 10% profit for another batch of shares I bought on March 16th. I'm still bullish on LUV, which is Southwest Airlines, except because of the bearishness of the market in the last couple of days, I decided that I would lock in my profit for now. And then I will expect to buy LUV again in the next few days at a lower price. And that's fairly typical when I do swing trading with some of the stocks that I have kept in my portfolio. And I will most likely do the same with Tesla. And of course, when I buy or sell Tesla shares in the near future, I will share that information with you by way of my Twitter messages. Again, I'd like to encourage you to click the like, subscribe and notification button. You can like what you're seeing. And as usual, I will very much appreciate your comments, questions and suggestions. I'd like to remind you that I'm not a financial advisor. Share my stock trading strategies and analyses for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you want to buy or sell stocks, you should make your own decisions and you should definitely consult with your financial advisors before you do so. This wraps up my video for now. I will chat with you again in the next few days. In the meanwhile, I'd like to wish you the very best of luck with your financial investments.


Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering IBM Edge 2015, brought to you by IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for IBM Edge 2015. This is theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest, Jamie Thomas, general manager of the storage and software-defined group at IBM. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you. Great to see you guys. So this is a hot area storage. You guys had a good quarter. You guys got great momentum. The software-defined message and products are rolling out. What's the new update? What's going on? Well, first of all, it's great to see you guys and have you at the Edge conference again. Well, we just kicked off Edge in a big way. We had a very large attendance for our storage session this morning to focus on storage for an hour and a half with all the clients, partners, and analysts that are here. And last time we spoke, we really spoke about some key announcements we had just made, particularly around IBM Spectrum and our Flash system family. So we're continuing that journey here at the Edge conference. So we're making some additional spectrum announcements. Those are focused on the continuation of our ability to support cloud, big data, as well as some of our enhanced virtualization support. But another key element of what we're announcing is just moving the control layer, if you will, making that easier for clients to get access to it and the analytics associated with it to software. So that's another key announcement that we're making around the family. And that's a big part of what you bring to the group as a software executive. Maybe talk about sort of how that's evolving and sort of what your vision is for software to fund. Yeah. Well, first of all, the Spectrum storage family includes storage management and optimization. So as we spoke last time, it's really focused on data protection, control, and archival, as well as the ability to support these different models, virtualization, scaled out data, and cloud. But our vision is we're really creating an open ecosystem. We're creating an environment and a set of capabilities that have APIs that allow others to integrate with them more fully to provide value added solutions. And I think you've had some of our ISV partners here perhaps have taught with you today about some of the things that they're doing. So I think that through the evolution of Spectrum, combined with the power of the ISVs, we can actually bring more value to clients and much more rapid speed. I mean, that's one of the key elements of what we're really wanting to have happen here is to create a vibrant ecosystem. So it's safe to say the vast majority of your R&D spend goes into software development. I mean, it probably did anyway, but now it's heightened, isn't it? That was a substantial part of our investment. We've clearly announced publicly that we spent a billion dollars on Flash and we are spending a billion dollars over the next five years on Spectrum. But clearly a lot of the value in the existing appliances that we have today are really manifested as part of the software that comes with those appliances. So I don't think that fundamentally has not changed. It's just that as we go forward and we create some of these new capabilities that I think are much more effective in these dynamic environments, particularly in cloud, you can expect that that's going to increase over time. So customers come to this session, they're interested obviously in Spectrum, software defined, the other Flash obviously is hot, but just sticking on software defined for a second, what is it that's motivating them? What are customers telling you? Is it the flexibility? Is there a new economics model? Talk about that. I think it's both. So if you look at a lot of the new workloads that clients are implementing, and analytics is clearly a big tip of that sphere, but if you also look at what's happening around these new development models, things like BlueMix, and how those services will be managed from an operational context, the architectures are fundamentally shifting. And so clients are wanting to be able to support those new models, support those new workloads effectively with a much more agile infrastructure. And yes, there's an economic advantage too. So if there are clients that are worried about OPEX versus CAPEX, if they're thinking about what are longer term depreciation models mean to me, then having the flexibility to buy the products differently is a benefit to them. So you bring up the point, I just asked Tom Rosemilia, which is talk about the difference between traction and transformational in terms of products out there and what you guys are working on, because you can have traction, it's a nice product, people are using it, good uptake versus transformational. You mentioned that shifts happening. Can you give some examples of differences between a product that is solutionous to traction, one that's transformational? Well, I think we have a lot of products that we would say are very well established to help clients modernize what I would think of as more traditional systems of record, right? And that is an element of transformation, but probably not as dramatic perhaps as what I'm talking about when I'm talking about these new workload environments. Because in those environments, you need to have an architecture that can more easily scale out and scale back. So it's going to require a difference in terms of how you think about the hardware dimension. That's why power eight is announced, some new hardware form factors to really allow them to be more effective in those kind of environments. But you also have to then marry that with a software architecture that I think allows you to be a lot more flexible. Okay, so follow up on that would be, okay, something that's operationally proven products that will help keep the lights on. And you mentioned operationalizing new stuff. That's the challenge. What areas do you see that right now where customers are really focusing on the new operationalizing products? For lack of a better word, like something that has been operated before. This is software. So can you give an example of these new areas? Well, I think the biggest area is really that we see, particularly with software defined, storage is all rooted around analytics. But analytics is very diverse. So I could be talking about retail-based analytics. I could be talking about financial services analytics, which is like credit risk analysis, fraud detection, Monte Carlo simulation. I think we've spoken about some of these things before. I could be talking about industrial modeling because I'm a manufacturing concern. These analytics-based systems are in every industry, and they do really require a different model. And in many cases, what we've seen too is a lot of the departments in these organizations have kind of spun up their own skunkworks. And so they've created what we call and talk about as islands of data. So one of the other jobs I think we have in hand here is to bring these islands of data together effectively and allow the client to be able to deal with the unpredictability of bringing in huge sets of social data depending on what they're actually executing. Because maybe I'm looking at social data. I could certainly look at it from a retail perspective, but I may be using social data too in my financial risk analysis. So then how do I deal with these spikes of data coming in? Those are different dimensions that these clients are having to think about. And a lot of the islands of data, Jamie, have been created by the technology industry. They see an opportunity, somebody creates a product. Hey, that's a very product-focused and a lot of stovepipes. And pretty much every large vendor has to have multiple products or else you can't participate. Does software-defined change that? Does it change the integration points? I mean, it's a complaint of customers and yet they continue, you talk to customers, they have one of everything. Does software-defined change that? Well, we do think that it helps us in particular because what it allows us to do is to create a software asset that has predictable behavior. But I can take the software asset, I can ship it standalone, I can then partner it in an appliance-based form factor or I can run it on software and I can have different price points. Now, you have to have the right kind of software assets and run on software effectively. But if you design it appropriately, it does give you a lot of flexibility. The other thing that we're able to do then is take some of these software assets and then combine them in the future with our flash system in different ways. But the net of it is that software asset has got the same characteristics as it has from the very first instantiation. And that, we believe, is a benefit. It's a benefit to the clients and it's a benefit to us because by reusing that effectively, we get better quality and better outcomes, I think, for the customer. So, let's talk about flash a little bit. It's a hot area. You guys made an acquisition. You had a strategy to leverage your sand volume controller stack and now you've brought together that stack in a single product. Doing well in the marketplace. Gartner just came up with numbers. You guys were in the top three. Are you happy where you are? Do you think you can get accelerated momentum? What's your take on that? Well, I mean, listen, we're very pleased that we were named as a leader in capacity units shipped and capacity, total capacity that clients have actually purchased. I mean, that to us, we want clients to get benefit out of this. We don't want, quote, shelf wear. But we're never happy with where we are and we think that we could actually do more with flash and that's our goal. Flash is still predominantly being used for a tier zero base solution and we think that economics are definitely approaching the bar, if you will, for tier one storage. And you look at the total TCO cost in terms of the space savings, the energy savings, the other parameters that I think are pretty important when you think about a flash system and we start to really see that price point be much more effective. Do you think the all flash data center is a pipe dream or is it a reality that's going to happen in the next five years or so? We think it's a reality. A lot of the clients will tell me that as well. They think particularly the, depending on what geography they're located in and the size of the client, that many of them say, I don't really think about energy as much as I should. In some cases, the operational team doesn't directly pay for the energy bill, but just things like energy and space are really critical issues for a lot of these clients over the longer haul. How has the integration of all the different solutions affected your job internally at IBM? Obviously GM of storage, it sounds monolithic, it sounds siloed, but you guys are taking a much more horizontal approach. We hear smart cities up on stage, mayor of Nashville, grant award, Twitter data, Facebook data. I mean, this is like, it's not a storage conference. This is like, it's bigger. So how has it affected your job and share with the folks out there who are watching what's it like now managing in this new era of computing digital transformation? Well, when you think about it, data is the natural resource that all of those efforts are totally dependent on. And you can't have effective data without effective storage. So what's really interesting and I think exciting about storage right now is that we're a major player in the overall agenda that IBM's embarked on, cloud analytics, mobile social, and the internet of things. Because all of those efforts, if you will, or all of those agendas drive enormous growth in data. So our job is really to provide the best mechanisms for the clients to be able to deal with this phenomenon. I think it gives us a lot of opportunity. It also has given us a lot of opportunity to work with other parts of IBM. So we are not an island. We do extensive work with IBM services. We do extensive work with the folks that are doing things like internet of things, the analytics teams, because as analytics evolves and our teams create new offerings around things like big insights and what's in analytics, they have to be integrated with an effective storage layer and effective infrastructure layer to really to their results.  Yes, we do. Well, there's some synergies there. You mentioned storage, right? I mean, storage, you store internet of things. You got low latency edge storage. All that's going to be controlled by software. So in a way, storage kind of conversation drops down under the covers, right? Exactly, storage is a critical aspect of many of those killer applications doing what they need to do effectively. So if you go to the solution center, you can see a lot of this in action. You can see our latest evolution, if you will, of our platform computing scheduling. For instance, working with Spark. So Spark is really hot out there. You can see the demonstration event. It's really important that as we look at storage, we have to understand how it affects the broader IBM business. How does it affect what our services teams are doing and helping them be more efficient, helping our outsourced clients get to flash and software to find? How do we work effectively with all of these other units that where data is just a critical resource for them? Well, and it seems like data traverses those units. And Mike, I want to ask a question on M&A. I know you're not going to specifically talk about who you look at, but IBM's always been a very good acquirer of companies. You've got a competence there. You tend not to overpay. I say, you're sharp. You know how to, you know, bluewash is the sort of term we always use. So in thinking about M&A, do you feel like you guys have your swim lanes down as these things change? More software, more analytics across. Have you sorted that out internally and externally? Well, you know, clearly with something like storage where the industry is going through dramatic shifts, your point of view today could change in six months, right? So you always have to keep that in mind. Whenever I look at M&A and activity, and we have quite a few people that come to us for discussions and evaluations, I have to make sure it's a long-term thread, if you will, that it's a long-term asset that's really going to be sustainable for us. A good example of that is when we look at Flash, we're clearly seeing the benefits of that and what we've been able to do, both around the hardware engineering when we are acquired in the software engineering. If I look at something like XIV, the reason why it's been so valuable to us is it had both enormous hardware and software benefits because we've been able to abstract that software now and create yet a new offering. So when we look at the M&A activity, we're looking for gaps that we perhaps have as we always have done, and we're looking for sustainability. So is it just a flash in the pan, interesting thing that's gonna be here for a year or two, or is it a much longer opportunity? So XIV was kind of a gap in the portfolio, and you filled it, and then you look at two other acquisitions, well, store-wise, and TMS, I guess TMS was a gap, too, but store-wise is sort of a competitive, but you're right, in all three of those cases, you had, all three had legs. Yeah, and that's what, given our experience with acquisitions and IBM, what makes some much more successful than others? Yeah, but this is a real opportunity, I mean, XIV was a couple of years ago, but now you mentioned the shifts. There's a lot of startups that aren't going to get that escape velocity, whereas Taiwan is in the cube, even the pure storage of the world has a billion dollar valuation, but global economy, sales force requirements, and the product teams are shifting, so an acquisition for hiring could be a great strategy as well. Exactly, well, you have to go into it with your eyes open. Clearly, I understand when I acquire companies that there's parts of the world in geographies where people stay with us longer than they do in others. And we have to look at other dimensions, like I said, is the technology going to be something that's going to carry us into the future, or is it overvalued? One of the things we see is quite high valuations for a lot of the startups, where there's very little revenue and very, very high acquisition price, and you have to make sure you're going to get, that we would get our return on investment, of course. Yeah, and that's risky, right? You've got to get it in. Yeah, you've got to get it in early. You've got to get it in early, and then you've got to figure it out. A lot of the VCs can price themselves out of the market because they do the higher rounds and there's no sales or... Well, that's kind of where Pure is right now. I mean, Pure's got one choice of an exit, it's IPO, I mean. Well, even a venture-backed company, it's on a series C, you know, 500 million dollar valuations, like, you've got 20 guys. And when you look at the revenue, you have to be able to understand realistic scaling of that revenue. Despite the power and size of an IBM, we're pretty adept now in understanding how we could scale that revenue and at what base. CMS is a great example of that. It's a relatively small company. Didn't have the sales and marketing capability. You bring them in for, it was good price for them, but it wasn't ridiculous, and now you're just seeing a rocket ship. It is a great example of one that's been very successful for us. Jamie, it's always great to have you on theCUBE, you're a pro. We'd love talking with you, great conversations, always. Final word, share with the folks out there. What's the big news here at Edge? What's the vibe? You got your reorganizing under your belt. You're integrating with other parts of IBM. What's the vibe here? What's the key takeaway for the folks who are not here? I think the key takeaway that I would share with the audience that's not here is that this is really a significant continuation of a journey that we just started last year as a glimmer in our eye. We talked about a different IBM storage business that was really founded on principles of software to find and flash, and now we believe we've realized that in a big way. Fundamentally, with these announcements we've made around our next generation flash system and this IBM Spectrum Storage family, and the extensions we're making to that family here as part of the core announcements this week. We really think we're on a great path, not just to advantage those particular offerings, but if you think about it, we're infusing these capabilities in our entire product line. We're infusing flash across the product line, our high-end storage, et cetera. Our tape is advantaged by our software to fund strategy as well in terms of- And we didn't talk about tape. Big data and how clients can more effectively take advantage of tape as part of this. We're really excited that we are where we are and we're happy to have 6,000 clients to talk with this week. Great assets and the vectoring in the right market place. It's a very disruptive opportunity to try to transformational. Jamie Thomas here inside theCUBE. Always great to see you. We'll be right back after this short break. This is theCUBE, live in Las Vegas for IBM Edge 2015. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back.


There is a toxin in plain white button mushrooms called agaratein, which may be carcinogenic.  They're all the exact same mushroom. It's like cow green bell peppers or just unripe red bell peppers. But you can reduce the amount of agaratein in these shrooms through cooking, frying, microwaving, boiling, or even just freezing and thawing lowers the levels. It's therefore recommended to cook mushrooms before consumption, something I noted in a video that's now more than a decade old. But if you look at the various cooking methods, the agaratein isn't completely destroyed. Take dry baking. For example, 10 minutes at about 400 degrees Fahrenheit, basically how you'd make a pizza, only cuts the agaratein levels by about a quarter, so 77% still remains. Boiling looks better, appearing to wipe out over half of the toxin after just 5 minutes, but it's not actually wiped out. Instead, it's just transferred to the cooking water. So yes, levels within the mushrooms drop by about half at 5 minutes and 90% after an hour, but that's mostly because it's leaching into the broth. So if you're making super something, 5 minutes of boiling is no better than the pizza, and even after an hour, about half remains. Frying for 5 to 10 minutes wipes out a lot, but microwaving is a more helpful way to cook, and it works even better. Just one minute in the microwave reduces the agaratein content of fresh sliced mushrooms by 65%, and only 30 seconds wipes out about half. So microwaving is probably the easiest way to reduce agaratein levels in fresh mushrooms. What I do with dried mushrooms is throw them into pasta water when I'm making spaghetti. Between the 20% drop from the drying and the 60% drop from boiling for 10 minutes and straining, more than 90% is wiped out. Should we be concerned about the residual agaratein? Should we skip mushroom pizza? If you're eating pizza, mushrooms are probably the last thing you need to worry about, but seriously, should we be concerned about agaratein? According to a review paid for by the mushroom industry, not at all. The available evidence to date suggests agaratein from consumption of mushrooms poses no known toxicological risk to healthy humans. The researchers acknowledge it's considered a potential carcinogen in mice, but then you have to extrapolate that data to human health outcomes. For example, the Swiss Institute of Technology estimated the average mushroom consumption in the country would be expected to cause about two cases of cancer per 100,000 people. That's actually similar to U.S. consumption, so one could theoretically expect about 20 cancer deaths per million lives from mushroom consumption. Now, typically with a new chemical pesticide or food additive, we'd like to see less than one in a million cancer risk. By this approach, the average mushroom consumption would be 20-fold too high to be acceptable. To get it down to one in a million, you could only eat about a half cup serving once every 250 days or something to remain under the quote-unquote tolerable limit. But to put that into perspective, even if you were eating a single serving every single day, the resulting additional cancer risk would only be about one in 10,000. In other words, if 10,000 people consumed a mushroom meal daily for 70 years, then in addition to the 3,000 cancer cases arising from other factors, one more case could be attributed to consuming mushrooms. But again, this is all based on the presumption that results in mouse models are valid in humans. This is all just extrapolating from mice. What we need is a huge prospective study to examine the association between mushroom consumption and cancer risk in people, but there weren't any such studies until now. Mushroom consumption and risk of cancer, two large Harvard cohorts, and no association between mushroom intake and cancer. Eating raw or undercooked shiitake mushrooms can cause something else, though. Shiitake mushroom flagellate dermatitis, flagellate as in flagellation, whipping, flogging. Check out this crazy rash. You break out in a rash that makes it look as if you've been whipped. Doesn't it look wild? That's just how you break out. It's thought to be caused by a compound in shiitake mushrooms called lentinin, but because heat denatures it, it only seems to be a problem with raw or undercooked mushrooms. Now, it's rare. Only about one in 50 people are even susceptible, and it goes away on its own in a week or two. Interestingly, it can strike as many as 10 days after you eat them, which is why people may not make the connection. One poor guy suffered on and off for 16 years before a diagnosis. Hopefully, a lot of doctors will watch this video, and if they ever see a rash like this, they'll tell their patients to cook their shiitake.


This is Colonel Rick Adams in the 36th Combat Aviation Brigade from Kuwait. To all the moms out there, we'd like to say...


Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today, with help from my friend Jade and some math, I'm going to spell some things out for you. When I was a kid, I really struggled with spelling. Other kids seemed to pick it up so easily, and I was told to just memorize lists of words. But no one would ever tell me why words were spelled the way they were. It was only when I learned some history of the language in university that it finally started to make sense. At first glance, English seems to have a downright chaotic spelling system, causing difficulties for young native speakers and adult second language speakers alike. Why is it circus and not circus? Why are we so confused about whether it's gif or gif? And why can a rough dough-faced plowman stride coughing thoughtfully through the streets of Scarborough? Can't we just simplify English spelling? Well, as we'll see, English may not be quite as irregular as it seems, and there may actually be some benefits to those peculiarities. And maybe the problem isn't so much the spelling as the way it's taught, unconnected to the fascinating story of its development. Now, that's a fairly complicated story, so I'm going to pick a few key examples, and I'll also be filling in a lot of details later with some other videos about specific letters and sound changes. But for now, let me try to help make things make sense for you, as they finally do for me. What is spelling anyway? Well, it's putting the letters of words in the so-called right order. But what does that mean? You might be surprised to know that the word spelling didn't have that meaning until the early modern period, which is when spelling first really started to be standardized in English. Before that, you just wrote words the way you said them, depending on your own particular dialect or accent. The old English verb speleon from the Proto-Indo-European root spell, say aloud or recite, meant to tell or speak, and the noun spell meant narrative or story, as well as message or news. That sense is clear in the second element of the word gospel, which literally means Spell could also refer to a magical incantation, a sense we still have today, but the Germanic root that lies behind the word spell also made it into French via the francs, and there it took on a new meaning. Anglo-Norman and old French forms of the word espeler and espeler meant to read out loud, as well as read out letter by letter. After the Norman conquest of England, the French and British words merged, and it's from the French senses that we get the modern sense of spelling. But spelling isn't the only language word that has magical connotations. The word grammar comes from the Proto-Indo-European root garb, meaning to scratch, and in fact also gives us the word carve, as well as graph, the idea being that writing was originally carved into wood or stone. From the word grammar, we also get the word glamour, first appearing in Scott's English, which originally implied magic, meaning enchantment or spell, from the notion of arcane learning. Glamour then gains its modern sense from the idea that someone who is glamorous kind of casts a spell on people. So I suppose it's not surprising that I found the English spelling system mystifying. So one big problem is that there isn't a consistent letter-to-sound one-to-one correspondence in the English writing system. Some sounds require multiple letters, like the th in thin or the o in oak, and some letters or letter combinations can make multiple sounds, as in the words streak and stake, now and no, here and there. This makes English spelling harder to learn, so why haven't we got rid of them to make things easier? Part of the answer, surprisingly, has to do with the mathematics of information, but you'll have to head over to my friend Jade's channel up in Adam to get the full story on that and why redundancies are really useful information. In the meantime, in order to see how those redundancies and complexities of spelling came about in the first place, we need to look at the history of the alphabet. So an alphabet is a writing system in which individual characters, at least theoretically, represent individual distinct sounds. By the way, that word character comes from another proto-Indian root that implies the original carving or writing, gare, meaning scrape or scratch, which came into Greek as charasane, to make sharp, and character, which, after passing through Latin and French, give us not only the word character, but also gash. The word letter, on the other hand, is a bit of a mystery. It comes through French from Latin litera letter, but before that it's uncertain. One suggestion is that it came through Etruscan, and we'll be talking about that language in a minute, from Greek diphthera, writing tablet, originally prepared hide, or piece of leather, which I suppose might suggest another medium for writing with ink on animal skin. Interestingly, this Greek word makes it into French and English again, as a more direct borrowing from Greek, when physician Pierre Bretonot named the disease diphtheria on account of the leathery false membrane, which forms in the throat of someone who has the disease. But as I was saying, an alphabetic writing system theoretically can have a one-to-one sound to letter correspondence, but obviously that isn't the case in English, and to understand why, we have to take a look at the journey the alphabet took to get to English. And when I say the alphabet, I really do mean THE alphabet. With only a few exceptions, such as the Hangul script of Korea, which was developed independently, all the alphabets used today descend from one original alphabet. The story starts in Egypt with their famous hieroglyphics. This was a logographic system in which characters represented words. However, sometimes the hieroglyphs could be used phonetically to represent the consonants of the word the picture depicted, and this could be particularly useful for writing things like foreign names. Around 2000 BCE, a Semitic group in Egypt borrowed from the Egyptians the idea of using pictures to represent individual consonant sounds. They borrowed the pictures from the hieroglyphs, such as a hand, but ignored the Egyptian word they represented, substituting their own Semitic word for hand, in this case, calf, and used that character to represent the consonants at the beginning of that word, in this case, the K sound. And that hand character eventually became our letter K. Now at this point, there were only letters for the consonants, which is why the Semitic alphabet is sometimes referred to as an abjad, an acronym made from the names of the first four letters of the Arabic alphabet, rather than a full alphabet with consonants and vowels. This was fine for Semitic languages, which tended to have relatively more consonants than vowels. So writing down the consonants is generally enough to tell you the word, and this is basically still how the writing systems work in modern Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic. And this was the beginning of the alphabet's journey to English, because another closely related Semitic group, known as the Phoenicians, picked it up. Not that they called themselves Phoenicians, that's the Greek word for them, literally meaning purple people, because they were the source of a prize purple dye extracted from Semolusks, which they sailed around the Mediterranean selling, and also, it seems, spreading their alphabet. And that's how the Greeks picked it up. Now Greek was a very different language from Phoenician, not a Semitic language, but from the completely unrelated Indo-European language family, and it had many more vowels and fewer consonants. So what the Greeks did was use some of the letters that represented consonants they didn't use for their vowel sounds, like the first letter of the alphabet. The Phoenicians called it aleph, which meant ox, and the letter form was meant to represent the head of an ox with its two horns. It also stood for a consonant sound that wasn't used in Greek, but they needed to represent the vowel a, so that letter became Greek alpha, and eventually English's letter a. To round things off, the next letter in the Phoenician alphabet, bait, meaning house, and representing b, became Greek beta and English b, and together those first two letters, alpha and beta, give us the word alphabet, appropriate since the Greek alphabet is the first full alphabet including vowels as well as consonants. The next stop for the alphabet was the Etruscans, a group of people who lived in the part of Italy known today as Tuscany. The Etruscan language is not Indo-European, and in fact is not related to any known language, what linguists call a language isolate. So again, this language had a rather different sound system compared to Greek, and so some adaptations had to be made to fit the letters to the language. And from there, the alphabet rolled down into Rome, where it became the basis of the Latin alphabet, which in turn sped around Europe, and ended up as what we write English with today, with a few extra letters added in, and some tweaks to the sounds some of the letters make. And that's why the English alphabet is often called the Roman alphabet. Now why is it so important to know all of this to understand English spelling? Well, each time the alphabet moved from one language to another, it produced redundancies and quirks in the letter to sound correspondences. For example, the k sound. As we saw before, this was represented in the original Semitic alphabet as kaf, but the Semitic languages had more varieties of consonants produced at the back of the throat than Greek did, so the Greek alphabet didn't need all those distinct characters. Kaf it kept, which became kappa and later English k. The Greeks also initially kept the letter koth, forerunner of our letter q, although it was redundant for them, and they later dropped it. The Phoenicians also had a g letter called gimel, which became Greek gamma. G and k are similar sounds, but it's important distinction in Greek as it is in English, but in Etruscan it wasn't, although that language had a number of other varieties of back of the throat sounds. So they didn't need that Greek gamma and assigned another type of k sound to that letter, in addition to keeping both k and q from early Greek. And notice that gamma looks a lot like the letter c? Well, that's how we got the letter c, making a k sound, not the hard g sound of Greek gamma. And then when the Romans got their hands on the alphabet, there was no longer a letter to represent the g sound, which Latin did have, so initially they used the letter c to represent both k and g. They eventually invented the letter g by putting an extra stroke onto a c, but that was only later. That's why the common Roman named Gaius was abbreviated with a letter c. For whatever reason, the Romans didn't use the letter k very much, though it hung around as a quaint redundancy. As for the letter q, for the Romans, it also represented a k sound, but was restricted to the letter combination qu, followed by a vowel sound, which was common in Latin. And that's why English has the redundant letters k, c, and q, often the target of those who complain about the English spelling system. We'll come back to the letter c in the multiple sounds it can make in modern English later. Now this problem of new languages using this old system came up again when old English speakers started to use the Latin alphabet to write down their Germanic language, which has sounds not present or distinguished in Latin. The Anglo-Saxon scribes coped by adding some letters from their own earlier Runic writing system, or modifying existing letters in the Latin alphabet. Later on, after Viking invaders conquered and settled in large parts of the country, there was an influx of Norse loanwords. At least old Norse and old English were related languages, but there are some significant differences which led to further adaptations of the spelling system. But the biggest shake-up came after the French-speaking Normans conquered the country. In addition to the vast amount of French vocabulary with its own sounds and spellings that came into the language, the Norman scribes didn't like the barbaric old English spelling conventions and began spelling the Germanic-derived English words in new ways. So it's this mash-up of different spelling conventions and a bunch of snooty scribes that made my life so hard as a kid. For example, dj, a sound not in Latin, had been spelled in old English as cg, as in the word edge, but under the Normans was now spelled dge, as in the modern spelling. And that convention was eventually carried over to some words of French origin as well, such as judge. But what about the dj sound at the beginning of that word? What about the letter j? Well, it hadn't really been invented yet. In fact, it's the most recent addition to the English alphabet. In Latin, the letter i did double duty, representing both the vowel e sound and the closely related consonant ya. But as the various local dialects began transforming into what would become the Romance languages, that ya sound began to shift to a dj sound in early French. But it was still spelled with the letter i. So Latin Jupiter became Jupiter, though still spelled with an i. The j letter form did grow out of the letter i, but it wasn't at first used to differentiate between the two sounds. It was really just a fancy way of writing the same letter. It wasn't until 16th century French that the letter j started to be used systematically, and not until the 17th century did it arrive in English. In fact, as late as the 18th century, when Samuel Johnson wrote his famous dictionary, though he did use the letter j, he interfiled all the i and j words together. It wasn't until later lexicographers, such as Noah Webster, that the letter j got its own section in the dictionaries. So that explains the two j sounds in judge, which came from Latin Udex. If only they'd taught me etymologies in school, I would have won all the spelling bees. Not that I'm judging. But you could also spell j with a g. So what's up with that? Well, in Latin, the letter g always made the so-called hard g sound. But again, as French developed out of Latin, the letter g when it came before a front vowel, that is vowels produced towards the front of the mouth, such as e and a, came to be pronounced g. A similar sound change had already happened in Old English, with g in some context becoming y, which Norman scribes started to spell with the letter y, as in yard. Confused yet? Don't worry, it gets worse. So we see French loanwords in English like gentle, following our hard g soft g rule that were taught in elementary school. But there are exceptions, I hear you say. What about words like get and give? Well, here's where we see the influence of Old Norse. Get was a loanword from Old Norse, where g hadn't changed at all. And though give did exist in Old English with that y sound as yefan, and should have become yiv, the word also existed in a related Old Norse form in the north of England with a hard g, and therefore give has the pronunciation it does today. So neither word is subject to the hard g soft g rule derived from French, and you can generally identify a word as coming from or influenced by Old Norse if it breaks that rule. So the important question is, gif or gif? Norse or French? Well, as far as I'm concerned, it's an English word, so it should be pronounced yif. Now Old English did of course have a hard g sound, so that mapped easily onto the Roman letter g. But it also had a couple of guttural sounds that didn't exist in Latin, which the English scribes spelled with either h or g, in addition to still using those letters for their previous Latin sounds. The Norman scribes turned their noses up at that double use of letters, and instead often used the combination gh to represent those guttural sounds. But why then is gh pronounced in so many different ways in modern English? Well, first of all there were actually three slightly different guttural sounds in Old English, and the sounds diverged in different ways, and some scribes changed the spellings to reflect that, and some didn't. In some contexts the guttural sound became a w sound, and came to be spelled w in modern English, as in the Old English word But notice that Old English plur, sometimes spelled with a g, and sometimes with an h, is spelled in modern English as either plow or plow. Similarly, we have modern English words with a gh spelling, like do and bow, which were spelled with a g in Old English, and through and though, which were spelled with an h in Old English. In some cases, such as when following a front vowel, the guttural sound of gh just disappeared, as in high and night. And in one surprising sound change, the guttural sound became f as in rough, particularly in Northern dialects of English. This one's so weird, I'll have to cover it in a separate video. As for the different vowel sounds of the various words spelled ough, they often represented quite different vowels in Old English, which all got lumped together under the one's spelling, and therefore developed in very different ways. So to summarize, this trainwreck is the result of the shifting spelling conventions in Middle English and subsequent sound changes that happened. Unfortunately, the gh spellings became standard even though we no longer pronounce those guttural sounds. Now let's return to the letter c again and consider another sound it makes. Why do we have soft c and hard c? Well, this is a sound ship that happened as Latin became French. In Latin, c always indicated c, but as the various romance languages developed out of Latin, as with the letter g, when c came before a front vowel, it changed, eventually becoming s, and the French-speaking Normans brought that with them to England. So we now have the hard c, soft c rule. And these are just some of the different spelling conventions that influenced English spelling. English has also grappled with spellings from Greek, filtered through the Latin system of transliterating Greek words, as well as loanwords from languages from around the world, such as Dutch, Hindi, and Arabic. But that's a journey for another video. For now, let's look at another source of my linguistic struggles, namely the sound changes in English itself. Sound changes are of course a natural part of all languages over time, so this is always a potential problem for phonetic writing systems. If you have a one-for-one letter for sound correspondence, then over time, you either have to change the way you spell things, or live with the fact that the letters stop matching the sounds. We've talked about a number of changes that have happened to consonants so far, and there have been a lot of changes to vowels, too. But I'm going to focus on the most important one in terms of its effect on spelling, which has to do with the short and long vowels. Originally, short and long vowels in Old English, as in Latin, were just that, short and long in terms of duration, with the quality of the vowel sound more or less the same.  The letter a represented a, and was pronounced quickly, a, or held longer, a. So it wasn't too much of a problem representing both the long and short versions of the vowel with the same letter. And if you speak other continental European languages, like French or Italian, you know that's roughly true in them. But something weird happened in English right around the time that Middle English was becoming Early Modern English, gradually changing the sounds of those long vowels over a few hundred years. But it didn't affect the short vowels. So we ended up with the vowel letters representing quite different sounds. Again, I'm simplifying a bit here as there were some more minor sound changes that did affect the short vowels in Middle English. So the short a in swan remains basically the same from Old English to Modern English. But the long a in Middle English nama became name in Modern English. This sound change is called the great vowel shift because it affected the whole system of long vowels with each vowel in turn moving in its position in the mouth. So a became a, a became e, e eventually became i, and so forth. And again, I swear I'm simplifying here. But that's why today we often say to children learning to spell that the long vowels say their name, a-e-i-o-u. This is also why it's become more important in Modern English to indicate long and short vowels in the spelling system. There actually had been earlier attempts at that well before the great vowel shift. In the 12th century, a little while after the Norman invasion, a monk named Orm, who is now only remembered for his spellings, not the literary quality of his work, yes it's that boring, was unhappy with the way people were pronouncing English and developed his own system of spelling. This included using a double consonant to indicate that the preceding vowel was pronounced short. We do that today as in the words right and written, but we don't do it because of Orm. No one actually picked up on Orm's spelling reforms, but the same idea was reinvented by later scribes, poor Orm. Also in the Middle English period, many of the old English inflectional endings, basically word endings that indicated the grammatical function of words, began to become reduced or disappear altogether, with the different vowel sounds becoming an indistinct uh or schwa sound, spelled simply with the letter E, and over time, those E's stop being pronounced altogether. But they stuck around as the so-called silent E, useful for marking the preceding vowel sound as long. But what's really crucial here is the timing of the great vowel shift, along with the other sound shifts that were taking place at the end of the Middle English period, since this was right around when standard spelling started to be fixed. Since the pronunciation of English at that time was so radically influx, the spellings that became fixed reflected sometimes older, sometimes newer forms, leaving us with the mixed bag of spellings we have today. There had been earlier attempts at standardized spellings, but in the 15th century, there were two factors that fundamentally influenced the standard spellings that we have today. The first is the development of the so-called Chancery Standard, which was used in official government writings in the first half of the 15th century. It actually started with King Henry V, who in August of 1417, decided to communicate with his officials in English rather than French. The signet office, which was in charge of his personal communications, developed standard spellings based on the Central East Midland and London dialects. From there, it spread to the other government offices, and as official documents were sent around the country, other professional scribes began to adopt this standard. The other major factor is the arrival of the printing press. William Caxton, born in Kent, relocated to Bruges, in what is now Belgium, working in the textile industry. He wrote an English translation of a French account of the Trojan War, and after he picked up the technique of printing during a trip to Cologne printed the first book in English, his own translation in 1475. Then in 1476, he moved back to England and set up his printing press in Westminster near all those government offices, and began his printing business. Caxton was well aware of the problems posed by the variety of dialects around England. For his books to sell, they had to be widely understandable. In the prologue of one of his books, he tells a story which really shows the scope of the problem. A certain merchant from the north of England, visiting London, tries to buy eggs from a local Southern woman. He asks for eggs and the woman replies that she can't understand him because she doesn't speak French. The merchant gets upset, his egg craving being unsatisfied since he also could speak no French, until a bystander steps in to translate telling the woman that he wanted Aeron. This slapstick comedy story of a food order gone wrong is based on the fact that the Northern form eggs, which comes from Old Norse, and the Southern form Aeron, which comes from Old English, are so different. And if you can't do something as simple as order some eggs, how are you going to publish books understandable by all? Caxton's solution was to publish in the London Standard rather than his own Kentish dialect, which he considered crude, and other printers soon merged this with Chancery English and spread those spellings even further. Of course, it wasn't all smooth sailing. Early printed books were often inconsistent in their spellings such as the silent E being dropped or added to equalized line lengths, and odd things sometimes crept in like the letter H in the spelling of Ghost from the influence of Flemish printers, possibly introduced by Caxton himself. But in the end, Chancery English and the printing press give us the modern English spelling system we're stuck with today. There have been many attempts and proposals over the years at reforming the English spelling system, in fact, almost since standard spellings arose. An early one worth noting is Sir Thomas Smiths, who in 1568 proposed a system involving a 34 character alphabet, which for instance reassigned the redundant C to the ch sound, added letters, and used diacritics or accent marks to show short and long vowels. Others were more conservative such as William Bullocker's 1580 proposal, which stuck to only the already existing characters plus diacritics. He also wanted to drop unnecessary doubled consonants and silent E's and objected to the so called etymologically based spelling. This is when, for instance, the silent letter B is added to words like debt and doubt because it shows they came from the Latin words debitum and dubitare, even though they were never pronounced that way in English. In another example, the S was added to island because of the mistaken belief that it was connected to the Latin derived word aisle from Latin insula, when in fact, island came from the unrelated old English iland and never had an S in there to begin with. I'll admit that if only this one suggestion had been taken up my life would have been much easier. But spelling reformers over the years more or less split into either conservatives or radicals, either tidying up the worst inconsistencies or reforming the whole system. What the more conservative reformers realized was that the radical proposals were unlikely to be accepted and would create the difficulty of learning a whole new system. That didn't stop the proposals. The two individuals most influential on English spelling standards were the dictionary writers Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster. Dr. Johnson started out initially as a language reformer but soon realized this was impractical and his ultimate conservative spellings used in his great dictionary served to further entrench existing standards. The American Noah Webster on the other hand ended up being the only successful reformer of the English spelling system. In the various editions of his dictionary of American English and spelling books he started out rather conservative in his reforms. Then later radicalized and then gradually became more and more conservative again. But he is why the American spelling system to this day differs from the British system which has in fact made things harder for all of us. Now I know I said I wished some of these reforms had happened but what I really wish is that I've been taught some of this history way back in school because I think there are some real benefits to the spelling system as it now stands. First of all it tells us so much about the history of the language and there are some advantages to having a spelling system that doesn't have a simple one to one letter to sound correspondence. It helps us distinguish between the rights of the church and the rights of the church or more recently between fishing and fishing. And how would a strictly phonetic writing system work with the many different accents around the English speaking world? If you based your system on only one of these accents it would be a highly political decision favoring some and disadvantaging others. And it would obscure the relationship between many words such as nature and natural which currently use the letter a to represent quite different sounds. And finally a somewhat illogical spelling system gives so much scope for creativity from brand names like flicker to text speak like great to the unpronounceable own. Pwn? Pwn? Leave a comment or use the community tab to tell me about your most hated English spellings and maybe I'll try to explain some of them in a follow-up video. I'll also be doing some videos exploring the detailed linguistics and phonology of some of the letters and sound changes I covered here as well as some others I didn't have time to include probably in the summer. Thanks for watching if you've enjoyed these animalogical explorations and cultural connections please subscribe and click on the little bell to be notified of every new episode and check out our Patreon where you can make a contribution to help me make more videos. I'm at alliterative on Twitter and you can visit our website alliterative.net for more language and connections in our podcast blog and more.


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