Good afternoon everyone and thank you for staying around till the bitter bitter end. I thought it's been a really interesting and productive session so far and I'd just like to thank the organizers again for all of the work that you've done over the multiple months leading up to this and it's been a really great session so thank you very much for that. Today I'm going to be speaking to you about some ongoing research that's being done as part of the after the plague project under the umbrella of that and John Robb introduced that earlier today so we're just going to jump right in. So there are a lot of different reasons that have been talked about today for why an individual may experience a period of immobilization or have some kind of incident that would alter their gait. Congenital malformations for example, fractures to the lower leg have all been discussed and we are working as part of this project to try to come up with a way to understand what's happening in the bones a little bit better. So what we're trying to do by taking this biomechanical approach is explore the trabecular bone which is not something that has really been done so far. So just in case there's any non-bone people in here there are two types of bone tissue in the human body you have cortical bone and trabecular bone. Cortical bone is the dense outer surface and it protects the internal cavity which is where the trabecular bone lives and it's also called spongy bone and you can see it on the image here and we're assisted in the trabeculate. So generally within biomechanical studies physical impairment has been restricted to pretty much cortical bone and not a lot has been done on the trabecular bone because we don't as biologists know very much about it. What we do know about it is that it is highly plastic in response to loading history. Trabecular bone turnover rate is much higher than that of cortical bone so because the surface to volume ratio is much higher so that's why the trabecular bone remodels quicker than cortical bone. So as part of this project we've theorized that this higher remodeling rate of the trabecular bone may enable us to detect adaptations in mechanical loading that occur closer to the time of death and it might be closer to the time of injury so we can see not only that an individual has had some kind of traumatic event but also how the body has responded to this event. So if you've had some period of disuse you should be able to see it in the trabecular bone and hopefully we're still working on this we're going to start looking at the potential of trabecular bone to reconstructing activity that would have followed these types of traumatic events. So the aim of my talk today is to just talk about our understanding of physical impairment in medieval societies and how we're doing our CT scans to improve the biomechanical analysis of the trabecular bone and what potential ramifications that could have to studies of physical impairment and disability specifically within the medieval period. So for this course of this project I have analyzed 327 individuals from the center close enough to Medieval Cambridge so the individuals that we're going to be talking about today are either coming from an Augustinian friary, a parish cemetery or the hospital of St. John's the evangelist and again like I said before there's 12 people working on this project I did not do all this work myself. Bram Mulder our PhD student has done all of the CT scans Sarah and Skip and I sit in the lab all day working on skeletons so again this is very much a team effort. So in the course of this process we have analyzed four we found 14 individuals that had anti-mortem fractures to the lower limb or a musculoskeletal deformity and because we are running a tight ship on time today we're only going to talk about two of them we had an elderly female that had an intercapsular fracture which we're going to talk about and then a gentleman that had a tibial plateau fracture and they're going to be our poster children for this method so what we did was once we identified these individuals as having a traumatic injury or some kind of physical impairment we believe we took plain x-rays which were used to determine the degree of angulation the rotation of overlap of the fracture and if there are any secondary or complications of that fracture we then use micro CT scans to analyze the trabecular and cortical bone architecture of the femurs so we have 14 individuals that have been completely scanned so far so our two pathological individuals and then our 12 control samples that we're using to map a variation within the bone so cortical geometry was analyzed at the mid shaft and then the trabecular bone structure was quantified in two volumes of interest that were placed at the proximal and distal femur and you can see the areas on the screen the red is your proximal there and then the green is your distal area so what does all this mean we analyzed these individuals using a number of different parameters absolute cortical area bone shape so the ratio between the short and the long access cortical bone thickness curvature of the bone but for the sake of this presentation we are going to talk about the three most straightforward and most promising parameters that we are using to identify asymmetry that was caused by the periods of disuse so only focusing on three they are j values the relative cortical area and the bone volume fraction so there's definitions of these things are i'm just going to give you the j value and the bone volume fraction for now because they're they're the most interesting we think so the j value is the most common indicator of cortical bone quality and it's used to record things like loading history however it remains largely unchanged after an individual reaches peak bone mass so that usually occurs in the late 20s and early 30s a bone volume fraction is the key characteristic that we use to quantify trabecular bone strength and it's a it's a it's a good way to hopefully look at the more rapid adaptations that occur over the course of a person's life so our first individual is a mature adult female who is buried at the hospital of st john's the evangelist her psn number is 335 this individual presented with a healed intercaptural femur fracture on the right side and then secondary ankylosis of the hip joint and you can see the posterior view up on the screen and then the x-ray where you can kind of see how the the epithesis has slipped and you can see the line of the fracture as well so based on the macroscopic examination of the x-rays we hypothesize that this individual would very likely have evidence of asymmetry in the trabecular and the cortical bone which resulted of her not being able to load that right leg properly you can't tell but this this hip has essentially fused at a 45 degree angle making it pretty much it's pretty pretty unlikely that she would have been able to exert a lot of force through that limb which is why we chose her as our very first sample so these graphs show the j values and the relative cortical area of the pathological individuals and then compare it to the control so we can see that 335 is well outside the two standard deviations in terms of j values so this indicates their substantial asymmetry suggestive of disuse atrophy so she wasn't loading her right side essentially is what that is when we look at the trabecular bone these are actually quite quite drastic reduction in bone mass this is more than 10 standard deviations outside of the norm so this is this is pretty solid evidence that our our method is is working to at least be able to identify the differences in trabecular bone certainly in within the same individual so we don't see the drastic difference in asymmetry in the distal femur which is really interesting so if you look at the graph oh good it's used to stick so this is where we have in the proximal so this is the femur of the femoral head this is the distal portion but this is perfectly within our our our natural variation and we can't really explain why this is so forthcoming research is going to have to enlighten us but for now we we don't know why it would only show up in the proximal and not in the distal part of the bone but when you look at these cross sections here you can see that more than twice the amount of trabecular bone exists in the left side when you compare it to the right so this is still overwhelming evidence that the right side was largely unloaded for an extended period of time and then you can also just take a look here at the gradual reduction of the trabecular bone and everyone agrees there's a lot less on the right side so great the method works we think we're going to move on to our next individual seven two three he's an old adult male he was buried at a parish cemetery uh called Holy Saints by the castle we also called Converse Place he had a left tibia that was five centimeters shorter than the right side because he had a growth plate fracture that occurred on that left side at some point during his adolescence this is why it resulted in it being five centimeters shorter so for this individual we hypothesized that we would see evidence of uneven loading because he's probably not able to again exert as much force through that left side as is the right there's certainly would have been a situation where this individual would have presented with an altered gait he would have had he would have had a noticeable length when we looked at this the cortical bone and the j values were completely normal which is not at all what we anticipated that we would find but the relative cortical area which is on this side over here is an outlier and this is really interesting because the relative cortical area offers insights into remodeling after the individual reaches peak bone mass which again is in your late 20s into your early 30s well with this case that tibial plateau fracture would have occurred much earlier than this so I have a theory about this because we're among friends I'm going to tell you about in just a minute so when we look at the trapecular bone again we don't really see any asymmetry in the loading so this again is unusual because it means that during childhood and up to the point of skeletal maturity he was loading his legs relatively evenly which again because this fracture occurred in adolescence it shouldn't be the case so I thought about this for a while and if we accept the trapecular bone is reflective of the last couple of years of life before this individual died one possible interpretation of this data is that this individual would have been using some kind of device like an elevated shoe for example to achieve equal loading of his legs so I went into the medieval literature and there are a number of depictions of walking aids in the medieval period I have not yet found any kind of platform shoe maybe somebody has come across one if you do email after the play project and let us know but it is clearly common practice certainly in the medieval period to have these kinds of walking aids we saw a number before from the from the Dutch painting so it is perfectly possible that some kind of device was used by this individual which would result in his legs being loaded evenly so in conclusion I think that both corticobone and trapecular bone can be changed as a response to altered loading conditions and there seem to be telling different parts of the same story so we could potentially start looking at different aspects of impairment that occurred or changes in circumstances that changed over the course of an individual's life so the study of both trapecular bone and corticobone together should be able to give us a more sensitive tool for detecting cases of fiscal change in the past rather than just relying on the corticobone which has been done up until this point I'd just like to thank everybody again for coming to this session and also all of the people who have helped us with this research the welcome trust for funding it and thank you very much


If you are looking for a home or a business security system, chances are you're comparing the Qolsys IQ Panel 2 and the 2GIG GC3 wireless security and automation systems. Today we'll be going in depth comparing and contrasting these two systems and their features. Please if you have any comments questions or concerns, feel free to leave them below in the comments box. We do respond promptly and keep in mind, we can actually take over your existing security systems so we can save you time and money. The IQ Panel 2 boasts the smallest 7 inch touchscreen display ever created and the leading screen resolution of 1280 by 800. IQ Panel 2 has upgraded to an industry best 5 megapixel front mounted camera directly on the touchscreen. This front camera will send clients who have alarm.com interactive monitoring services activated a text and or email notification when the panel is disarmed. A Qualcomm Snapdragon quad core processor and Android 5 plus software has been added which helps announce custom words, makes using the menu driven navigation system more user friendly and allows for more customization. This panel offers a 24 hour backup battery from factory. Some of the other panels on our list do allow for 24 hour backup battery but will set you back about $30 to $40. A whole new line of security sensors were added called S line sensors. These sensors offer end users encryption, the best wireless signal range nominally at 600 feet and an average battery life between 5 to 8 years. These next features are really what sets apart the IQ Panel 2 from the others and the one word that comes to mind is innovation. IQ Panel 2 is the first security system ever to include a built in glass break detector and a motion sensor. This saves both time and money to the end user. A built in Bluetooth LTE 4.0 module has been installed directly to the panel. This allows for end users to pair up to 5 smart devices so when they come within 30 to 40 feet of the panel it will automatically disarm the system without touching anything. A built in router, if a client has a bunch of other devices such as video games or other streaming devices on the wifi network, the IQ Panel 2's built in router will divert some of the bandwidth so you don't see any laps in the connection speeds. The IQ Panel 2 is one of the first panels ever to offer Z-Wave Plus technology. Z-Wave Plus improves speed, security and range compared to standard Z-Wave devices. The IQ Panel 2 has all of its communicators, modules and backup battery built directly in all an end user needs to do to begin installing and programming the IQ Panel 2 is to plug in the power supply and decide whether they want a wall or desk mount the actual panel. The only downsides to the Qolsys IQ Panel 2 that we can find were 1. You cannot view IP cameras directly on the touch screen. 2. Qolsys has decreased the decibel level of their siren from their previous IQ Panel. The 2GIG GC3 Wireless Security and Automation Systems With 2GIG being a well-respected company in the industry with their previous GC2 system, other companies began to release more modern and robust systems which meant it was time for 2GIG to release the GC3 system. GC3 moved to a much larger 7-inch touch screen display with a screen resolution of 800 by 480. The navigational software has been upgraded to allow for much easier user interactions which has been a huge addition. Installation of the GC3 Panel is very user-friendly.  Two points that we discovered about the GC3 that stand out from the other contenders are the GC3 has the loudest stock siren coming in at 105 decibels. The GC3 can handle more Z-Wave home automation devices than any of the other panels on our list coming in at 232 total devices. The most expensive panel on our list and it falls short to some of the feature categories such as limited monitoring abilities even though the GC3 has an internal Wi-Fi card at this point it's not quite activated which limits its overall communication patterns. Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube page and click the show more tab underneath the video where you can view valuable links pertaining to this product, similar how-to videos and our low-cost no-contract alarm monitoring services.


Thank you very much, Ambassador Park. It's a great honor and privilege to come here to share with you some of my thoughts. As Ambassador Park mentioned, I was lucky enough to be invited to, not to participate, but actually to watch the opening and the closing ceremony of the 19th Party Congress as a member of the CPPCC, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, Standing Committee of that organization. And why did he spend three and a half hours? I think this is a special occasion. And he wanted to enunciate or explain his systematically, his thoughts in a systematic way. Now that thought has been included into the Party Charter and probably early next year will be included into the Constitution. Maybe they will revive a little bit the Constitution to insert the Xi's thought on socialism of Chinese characteristics in the new era. That clause probably will be inserted into the Chinese Constitution next year when the Chinese People's Congress is held. So he needs the time to explain his views. And also there are a lot of things in his report. I think he deserves a careful study. I was sitting there trying to understand what's going on and I was quite impressed. A lot of things were mentioned in the report. One of the things probably we should pay attention to is that he talked about the principle contradiction facing Chinese society. Now he says it's between the unbalanced and inadequate development and people's ever-growing needs for a better life. So this is the central problem that the Chinese Communist Party is supposed to deal with in the years ahead. In the past it was something like something like a backward level of economic development versus the socialist social relations or something like that. How do we put it? I can't remember. The people's pursuit for better life, the contradiction between the people's pursuit for better life and the backward productive. Backward productive. Now he thinks that China is no longer that backward. But then China's economic development is inadequate and unbalanced to meet the ever-changing demands of the people for a better life. And also he talked about the change of the way of development which means less emphasis on GDP growth and more emphasis on the quality of economic growth. It sounds great. And also he talks about the environment. He says green mountains and clear waters are better than mountains of gold and silver. And of course he also talked about the necessity of rule of law. Chinese understanding of rule of law is somewhat different from what is understood here. And also democracy. Some people regard CPPCC, the organization to which I belong, is something special in the Chinese democracy. CPPCC is an organization like a Senate without legislative power. It's a consultative body, orderly consultation to help involving different democratic parties. We have eight democratic parties. And a lot of social organizations are represented in that institution. They are supposed to help the Chinese Communist Party to rule by voicing criticisms in a constructive way rather than trying to take over. And also on foreign policy he talks about the common, trying to build a community of common destiny. In other words, I think he believes that we are in the same boat, we should help each other. Our interests are not zero sum, you know, our competition. We can have competition, but it's where our relationship is not a zero sum relationship. We can through our efforts to achieve a winging outcome. And he spent a lot of time talking about how to run the party, how to make the party more clean and more effective. On foreign policy, we find both continuity and change in China's foreign, in the foreign, in the policy. On the continuity side, you know, he has been talking about non-zero sum game as China's approach to its relationship with the outside world. I remember years ago, probably six years ago, when he was the vice president of the PRC, he gave a speech at Tsinghua University. He said, if you want to develop, you should let other countries develop. If you want to have security, you should make sure that other countries have security. If you want to have a better life, you should make sure that other countries have a better life. I think he has adhered to this kind of reasoning and approach on China's relationship with the outside world. And the community of common destiny is a concept that he has been using for some time. And also, he talked about multilateral cooperation as a way to deal with international and global problems. And also, he also talked about China should assume great power responsibilities in dealing with world affairs. In terms of change, I think if you read the report very carefully, I mean the foreign policy section, he talked about at one place that China should help maintain the world order. In the past, you know, Chinese government, you know, Chinese Communist parties always talked about how to reform the world order to make it more just and fair. Now, he's still talking about trying to make the world order more just and fair, but at the same time, he talked about maintaining the world order. So clearly, I think it means two things. One is China has benefited from the world order, and now China look at the world order from a stakeholder's perspective. The second is as China rises, China increasingly becomes a superpower. A superpower cannot take a free ride in the world order. It has to take care of the world order. If you take a free ride, the bus collapses. So that, to some extent, is something new, I think. And also, he talked about China's successful developmental experience represent another option to other developing countries when they try to develop. This has cost a lot of repercussion in other countries. Some people say that the Chinese Communist Party is coming up with alternative to the American or Western approach to development. But this is probably for a long time, for the first time, that the Chinese Communist Party is talking about the so-called Chinese approach in dealing with growth as something with international implications. In other words, it can be a frame of reference for other countries to think about how to develop their own countries. I think in general, the foreign policy section sounds very positive. I think if these views accept the point on the approach to development as another option, if these views were presented by Donald Trump, probably the world would be exhilarated given the fact that he's talking about America first rather than a multilateral cooperation. The second point is one should not regard Xi's claim that China's developmental experience provides another option to developing countries as the beginning of Chinese efforts to push for the so-called China model. Actually, the Chinese model, I don't know whether there is a Chinese model. Basically, we are talking about socialism with Chinese characteristics. If you talk about Chinese characteristics, it is not supposed to be replicated. But basically, so there is no Chinese model in a universal sense. China officially labels the approach as socialism with Chinese characteristics. It stresses on the uniqueness rather than universality of the China's developmental experience. That is to say, there is no universal model for development. Every country should adopt their own approach to development according to their own country's unique conditions. In other words, you don't have to follow the western approach in your development. Find your own approach on the basis of your situation. China has been successful in this regard. You can be successful too. That's the message, I think. So what we expect in the next five years, I think will have more continuity than change in China's foreign policy. Second, Chinese foreign policy would have more Xi's imprint. In other words, if during the past five years, certain institutions in China conducting foreign policy, they have more leeways. Now in the days to come, probably they have already learned Xi's ideas as to how to conduct foreign policy. Probably there will be more uniform approach. And also, probably Chinese foreign policy would be more nuanced and pragmatic given the fact that Xi and the new team have five years to learn how to deal with international relations and perfect their skills. Yeah, let me stop here. I think I've talked long enough. Another round. Before I invite our second panelist from China, I will have some, based on what you presented, I will give some very quick questions, but you don't have to reply right now, maybe. The first question will be why President Xi did not appoint his heir apparent? As previous President did. Second, will he, there's many speculation that he will definitely extend his stay in powers after five years later. So maybe officially or with some other indirect way. And you mentioned that there will be more continuity than change. But in accordance with his phrase, I mean, gradual step-by-step approaches, these outside observers have some conviction that in the year of 2050, China will arbitre in Asia Pacific vision in politically or in the military. So maybe there is another concern. And also, you know, we expect the future China during the next five years will be more assertive than before, based on what achieved during the first Xi Jinping's, you know, the, you know, some satisfactory achievement. As we saw the same assertiveness foreign policies which just in the wake of Beijing's Olympic Games 2008.  So we have some similar analogy could be made, you know, based on past observation. So maybe I'd like to expect your answers. And also you mentioned the developing countries, you know, based on Chinese model. But we have to very carefully watch out that the most of the current Chinese, you know, cooperation based on loan, not based on grant. So this principle is very difficult from the, you know, OECD attacks, you know, the practice. So, you know, so I don't know why, you know, China tried this very, very independent unique model.


So several weeks ago, I started on this game project of a game. I call churse CH RSS like chess but with a typo and The core idea is it's like a chess game hybrid with a card game That is the concept and so here I've loaded up a new match This is my dev version of the page. So it's showing both sides of playing the game This is the white players perspective and this is the black players perspective. So normally you don't see this repeated but anyway, so I'm gonna play both sides and The nature of the game is you have four special pieces You have a king and his vassals the the rook bishop and the knight those are the vassals and These pieces are special in that to win you kill the enemy's king or you kill two of the enemy vassals and so that's why you see their HP up here is because you want to know what their current state is and The way the game is played is in rounds First thing every round is you place your king down if the king is not already on the board So here my white player I'm gonna place my king down and the black player will also place their king down in the opposite corner and Having placed your kings down Then you and your opponent take turns playing cards and these are your cards I have a long list of cards right now because in dev mode it just gives me all the possible cards Normally you would have to draw like several cards rather than all these Anyway, so you have your vassal cards which you can place Here I'll have the black player What do they want to play they will play their knight and so you can see the Information on the pieces they have their attack power in the top left the green and then the red and the top right is the their HP and This negative 14 means that the this pawn right now is being hit for 14 damage points Or at least it will be when combat happens combat does not happen until both Players pass in succession. So white passes and then black immediately passes after or vice versa That is when the the card playing of the round ends and then the combat is performed then the pieces hit each other Based upon their targeting and their positioning So like this pawn is hitting this diagonally pieced diagonally placed other pawn in front of it just like in chess So you don't attack by moving We're not gonna move pieces around. We're just gonna play them and put them down Okay, so that's how they target each other I'm just gonna show I'll have the white pass and then black will pass nearly after So you can see all those pieces that had a skull icon indicating that they were gonna get killed They got removed at the board So the last thing you do in the round though is you have an option to reclaim up to two pieces You can pick zero one or two pieces. I'll pick for the white. I'll pick the rook and The king and reclaim them now It's waiting for the opponent for black to do the same to pick pieces and they'll pick a king and a And a pawn just reality making choices here When you reclaim your king, you'll just put them back down first thing next round So the reason you reclaim your king is to move it and you also Pick up your vassals because you want to move them as well.  I have to put my king down first Excuse me. Now I can now it's black's turn So when you reclaim kings and vassals you get them back in your hand They don't disappear, but if you reclaim any other kind of piece, they just get wiped out They just get destroyed So the reason you reclaim something other than a king or vassals just because you want to get it out of your way Really, that's the only reason to do so So again, you do three things in a round you place your king if it's not already on the board You take turns playing cards until both players pass in succession and then you optionally can reclaim up to two pieces The full rule though for every round is some things happen automatically first your man as replenished Ponds will spawn according to a set of rules I can talk about and then you draw cards then you place your kings then you play cards And then the combats resolved automatically and last thing is you reclaim pieces So that currently is how the game is played and I have about 25 cards implemented obviously a card game you want to have generally a lot of cards like a hundred plus if not more So there's quite a bit more to add into the game But right now as it stands, I'm worried about two things about the game I'm worried first if the game is too complicated both in just its general rules and also all the logic of choices that you make and I'm worried that the game might be too random Because a lot of these abilities only actually have two cards currently that represent Pieces to place down other than the standard ones you can place a queen You can place a jester and other than that is just your vassals and your king So all the other abilities are things that Do actions or like casting spells in a sense like for example I can amplify the damage output by This pawn and now he's a status effect that is affecting his attack on this other pawn the white pawn So most of the cards right now are that I'm thinking where I want to go is because the the core idea of the game The interesting thing is the targeting about The pieces hitting each other according to the lines of attack and all that stuff That's the interesting thing. So I'm thinking where I want to go with the game is adding Many more kinds of pieces to place down and as of yet, there's no deck building aspect to this game That's usually what you have in card games If I ever were to have such an aspect in the game Then you would build your deck primarily around what kinds of Pieces are in your deck and there could be a variety of different kinds of ways of targeting and special effects for those Pieces so for example, I have this just your piece one of the only Interesting pieces in the games so far you place them down and everyone immediately in front of two sides In that everything occupying that square is Distracted meaning they they don't attack this round So he doesn't do any damage himself, but he stops other units from attacking So a lot of interesting things you can do with peace ideas So that's where I want to focus instead of all these spell effects I mean, I won't take out the spell effects So I'll keep them in and add some new ones, but that's my current thinking This is just not enough emphasis on interesting pieces as for complexity This is all too complicated these seven steps So first thing I'm going to do as I'm going to get rid of the entire concept of mana right now it shows you your current mana up here in the scoreboard and It starts out three in the first round increases every round and it's it's cribbed straight from artifact and And hearthstone the concept of mana that escalates because it effectively is just a simple way to Make sure the round escalates so the more interesting big cards in the big plays come out later in the in the match So that's a good idea. I'm thinking instead of mana Cards will simply just have a rank. They'll have a level number and in early rounds when you draw cards You only get cards that are of a certain rank and as the match progresses every round you get every every round you get higher rank cards That you can draw Something like that. I'm thinking that's a better solution and because right as it is you have too many choices to think about you have too many possible cards you might get drawn and You know a lot of these cards. There's a lot of choices about Which piece to select so there's just a lot of stuff going on just even in this simplified Notice the six by six grid chess, of course is on the eight by eight grid even on six by six board It just feels already like we just have too many possibilities too many complications So we get rid of mana. We just give the cards a rank and draw based on their rank number or their level number Whatever you want to call it Other thing to do spawn pawns. I think that's basically okay as it is the rules are kind of complicated the way it works is first round you get four pawns randomly placed on your side of the board and Every round after you get an additional pawn up to the total of five And if you have zero pawns of the start of the round you get two as a special case and their placement They're never placed in the back row so they would never go back here and They're never placed in a call they're never placed in the same column as each other and they're never placed in a column where there's Something in either the front or middle row so they can be something in the back row but that as long as these first two squares of A column are unoccupied then a column then a pawn might spawn spawn there Yeah, so they're kind of complicated rules about that But I I think it's basically the right choice there because the role of the pawns is to sort of randomize things up They serve as obstacles so you're not dealing with the exact same board every single time Yeah, they're they're an important randomization element Even though I'm worried about the game being too random It's not terribly clear what impact your your choices are gonna make where I think they're the whole pawn placement This is actually not a big problem though Okay, so We'll keep the whole King placement business It's important that you are required to put your King down because the whole point of the game is to kill your enemy King And if your enemy King is not on the board you would have nothing no goal to to attack So it's important that the King has to go down first thing in every round. That's fine Unless you're playing cards, I think the whole concept of passing is actually maybe Well, not the passing itself The problem is you don't know how long the round is going to go on like you have no idea how many play How many cards your your opponent has left? Well, you kind of know based on their mana, but like it's just you don't know if I've passed now How many more moves does my enemy have that that can You just can't predict enough about what your enemy might do. I think it's part of the problem So I'm thinking you we should just have a fixed number of turns in every round I'm thinking five at the moment, and I'm also thinking as a rule That you're required to play two vessels So every round you always play two vessels plus three other cards place your King down play two vessels and plus three other cards That's what you do every round and then there's no Reclaiming phase instead of having the reclaiming phase where you make a choice of what to pick off the board It just automatically reclaims your King and your vassals and so Because originally the whole reclaim concept the idea was otherwise Then it's mostly just ponds on the board and the ponds themselves don't give enough continuity from one round to the next But now I'm thinking if I add in a bunch of other pieces like this Jester and the Queen and other new other pieces That stay permanently until they're killed Then you get continuity on the board Regardless of whether the King and the vassals get reclaimed every round. So that is my thinking And also it's just nice to cut down on the length of the match just having to that reclaim phase It's just another extra step Just need to simplify there in that respect So get getting rid of the mana getting rid of the concept of Manually reclaiming pieces those two things would cut down on the match length considerably in complexity Oh, and the last thing I'm considering doing is again the game might just feel a bit too random Like you don't have enough control or you're not really able to anticipate what might happen I'm thinking that maybe it should just show you your enemy's cards So in addition to showing you your cards here your list of cards It would show you also your enemy cards right now. That's that's kept private so the player can't see what cards enemy has but the games maybe just complicated enough that That it would it would make the game too solvable if you can see your enemies cards.  It's running on port 5,000 and so now you can navigate to that in your browser If you're curious about the code, maybe want to modify play around with yourself or something There are four main files. It's about 4500 lines of code. I think at the moment There's the main file here, which is all the the kicking off the server business and managing of matches and and serving the pages and all that Not terribly complicated stuff here It's where we establish the the web socket connections You you navigate to the page and establishes for both players that establishes a web socket That's where all the communication with the server happens Here's the types definitions all in this one file. That's the thing I like to do is put my type definitions all in one file and The logic is about 2,000 lines. Yeah, it's about 2,000 lines So this is where most of the magic happens This is the game logic and then you have about another 600 lines of AI code. Yeah, this is AI stuff. The AI is currently very very crude. Let's see.  I think partly just because of bugs it can also be a little disorienting because You make a move and then black just automatically makes a move immediately And so it's kind of disorienting because you don't see what they're doing. There is the log down here It's it so it can kind of give you a hint sometimes if it if something happens. It's a little perplexing So I'm just gonna place my work down the way that I currently works is it's um it doesn't think ahead at all really it just looks at all its possible moves all the cards they can play and It gives the current state of the board a score And then all the possible moves it might makes also get scores for what the state of the board would be after that play and and the score is based on like The whether its own pieces are getting hit and whether any pieces are getting hit and for how much and that is how it Computes a score and so it decided that of the moves it can make this is the most damaging move it can make but it's not doesn't it's not thinking about like Where to place pieces that in a less exposed fashion like it's reckless about putting pieces where they can get hit by Your own pieces so it doesn't think about that at all at the moment so that's something obviously to work on but you know I'm gonna do all those logic changes first and then worry more about an AI it's Just nice to have something that right now can Can just we can have some Basic crude matches I can I can at least try the game to some extent without having to play with someone So that's the AI and that's the game. That's really all there is to say at this point though Obviously, I mean right now this is all just programmer art Once I get the game in a shape where it seems reasonably balanced and fun, of course Once there is an actual game then I'll think about investing the time to like actually Make some decent art make it look better have some animations because especially without the animations and the AI like you make a Move and the enemy makes a move and you don't even see them making the move so that's not very Usable it kind of makes it hard to follow what's going on and also makes the game a bit confusing I think for learners But anyway, that's something to put off into the future once we actually have a proper game


Hello, this is Scott Kanoki. I'm with the Benson County Extension Service and I'm in Minnewack in North Dakota today and I just wanted to do a short demonstration on pruning an apple tree and at this time it's it's late March early spring so it's the time that we want to be pruning before we get a lot of growth and stuff coming on and that way we can decrease any disease spread. What you'll need is just a regular pruners and for some of the bigger branches if you really want to get after it we have some a big lopper and then also a sweetie saw for taking off some branches and many times you can take the biggest bigger branches off with the big lopper and then and then use a sweetie saw to get up close on that branch collar but what I'm trying to do is to open up this this canopy I've been working on this tree for a couple of years and just trying to open it up a little bit so we decrease the amount of disease and stuff and what I don't like sometimes and some of our trees get so awfully tall so I'm trying to train this one to have lateral branches coming out and you can kind of see what I've done in the past a little bit here and and some of these are you know they want to grow right up right up to the heavens and pretty soon you're gonna need a an apparatus with a basket on just just to get your apples so I'm gonna prune out some of these branches that that go awfully high up up into the air and there again if they're growing into the canopy you want to remove them because eventually they will cause rubbing on each other's branches and you can create a wound and that's just a perfect spot for disease to take a foothold and and and get started we've had a lot of fire blight these last couple of years especially in some of the ornamental crabs and one particular one a zestar had quite a bit in it so by keeping this canopy open we can certainly keep that disease potential down and increase the airflow I just like to give you an example of cut I made here when I when I make these cuts I don't want to dig into the branch itself I just want to be you know right on that branch collar and then it'll have a nice cut that it it'll help heal and you won't even know what's there in time you can see down here there was there was a cut here a prior year and it healed up and is doing just fine I talk about some of these branches growing inside here you kind of want to thin them out a little bit there again for added circulation and one thing Tom Kelb told me when I first started pulling trees he said you show that tree who's boss you're not going to kill the tree but one thing he did caution me on was don't cut off more than 25 percent of the branches in one particular year otherwise it's a bit of a shock to the tree and it takes a little more time to recover so if you just keep up up at it annually you can you can keep it clean