Assalamu alaikum and welcome to Making House a Home with myself Sana Arraji and our guest Fahima Muhammad who is a qualified life coach and an NLP practitioner. Assalamu alaikum Fahima. Alaykum Salam. Now today we're going to be discussing the subject of bridging the gap between the older and the younger generation, how we can do that, what steps to take forward. Can you just briefly explain with regards to the subject for us? This is not just a topic let's just come up because we realize that you know there is much of a generation gap and there are definitely importance placed on it not just from a psychological perspective or not just from living in this day and age because you know people are living you know longer but the thing is Islamically as well you know there's lots of benefits to it and Imam Sadiq al-Islam states in one of the hadith to say that you know to honor your elderly and make bond of kinship and it's the best way is to make bond is to avoid annoying them because there is a difference in mindset we have to obviously be aware of that regardless of the times that we're in when there's a huge gap in between the ages there is a different sense of experience and what we face and how we take that forward and how we see things and we always look even now you hear a lot oh teenagers are not grateful they don't appreciate they got things easy we had to work harder or you know we have the youngsters talking like saying that you know the older generation don't understand us they don't appreciate us they look at us as all as being someone who is actually not working hard and not striving so you know there's a lot of generalizations but actually between the both they need to come together and realize and see that you know with both sides there is definitely you know benefits to having that sort of you know connection closer and not just within families but just generally you know I know a lot of young people that have grown up in their families that they've hung out with their older brothers or and they've you know surrounded themselves with the older generation and it has made a difference in an impact to their lives and how they see things in a very positive way so there is very much benefits you know benefits to it and also you know we need to have mercy within each other Imam Ali alaihi salam states and in one of his sermons that let your youngsters be good with the elderly and let your elderly have mercy upon your youngsters so there needs to be an allowance to give each other a chance to do certain things even though you think they're not capable but each of us brings something a learning a lesson a teaching you know the experience you can get from both and you have to be whatever age you are you have to be current but at the same time you know we need support so that we have a variety of information to us you know and even though we have knowledge and information from books and you know the internet and whatever it may be but having experience by listening to somebody going through something I think it's so much more vital and I think you can you can learn a lot more a lot more deeper because it's actually more realistic yeah so when you listen to people's stories you know that you can probably relate to more so because the the books are theory in it you know in essence and a lot of it is you know things that doesn't most people say well it's not reality and I cannot practice it and I cannot conform in that way and I cannot do certain things but when people are talking about the way in which they live or they've lived then you know that is a teaching and a learning that another generation can use for themselves for real it's really vital subhan Allah and you know now I feel like with social media and like so many things coming out on tv that parents who are older than their children don't seem to understand like how to monitor their children with these things so that can be an issue do you think parents if they are which nowadays a lot of parents are having children a lot older yes like before yes so the gap is is big between the child and them and the parents do you think they need to take steps to educate themselves to get with the time absolutely in order it's not just being aware and to be friends but to know what they're getting up to so that you can be on one step ahead of them and you need to be you know let's just be real about it you know kids are a lot more smarter they are on the internet even with parental guidance control whatever it may be they can still override that and it's not because you know you want to stop them from having fun or doing what activities and games they might be playing but you actually will be protecting them you know if you are aware of their you know ways of being because they're still not much awareness even from youngsters when they put themselves in those situations when they are you know even chatting online or making friends and whatever and there's a lot of you know friendships that are being made online and they don't know who they're speaking to and parents need to be you know aware of how to intervene how to be able to look ahead of that but they cannot do that if firstly they don't think that they're they're children are actually doing that or capable of doing it or overriding them and don't just take their word for it it's not about not having the trust but because at the same time you know the children teenagers themselves they just don't look at it as harmful again because they have the lack of experience you know having that age behind you is not just wisdom the wisdom comes because of the experience a lot of kids are aware of and have all the information as adults do if not more but they don't know how to use it or they do not have the experience and the youngsters need to understand that so they appreciate that I know more than even my parents do but I don't necessarily know how to use it and parents need to know that yes kids are more aware and they are more knowledgeable but at the same time I need to keep up to that level or beyond and you know at the same time you know we need to protect them from that knowledge because it's so much knowledge they don't know how to absorb it they don't know how to use it and you know it can be dangerous in in any form yeah sure and and also when you're an older parent you might have different techniques that you would use with your child that actually don't work exactly in age definitely so you might be in conflict with your child because they don't understand how you're trying to explain to them or to to discipline them or to guide them but they need more emotional support or they need other techniques that the parent doesn't know isn't aware of how would you go you know along with those lines as a as a parent who's older to bridge the gap between the generation well you know you have to also have a different mindset and mentality because the issue is ageism there and obviously you know that should be something where needs to be corrected and they need to be like intergenerational programs where you know people are sort of reaching out to different age groups and bringing them together so we need to take responsibility as a community to do that right even with parenting you don't have to be parents to be a great role model you can be a young man or woman in the community and wanting to give out and share information same like that if you're older or younger and you know bring groups together so that we can actually learn from one another and you know have workshops within you know your community your center you know your mosques or whatever and yes we have certain you know we do segregate a lot because we have for the young and different age and stages but sometimes mix it up a bit okay I mean in schools now they do that I've just heard recently for secondary schools that in the tutor groups they've got different ages so that they can learn from each other and have the experience so that is a very good way of knowing that they're doing that now in certain secondary schools where you're not just with your own form and your own year you are actually mixing with different year groups in your form tutor but then when you go for the actual lessons individually then you are in your own ability and groups or whatever it may be and that alone is showing how that generation gap even between those few years makes a difference with the learning yeah sure so we could use the same technique with the generations that are here within our families and the roles that we play and each one has a value to give you know whether they're young or old and that's the thing if you think you're young and you know too much or you think you're old and you know even more whatever it may be or there's not enough information just keep that out of your head and just be open and you know set up these sort of groups which is nothing to do with you know segregating by age and stage because we have enough of that already we need to now mix and integrate a little bit more so we can have further learning and sometimes our own people when we stick in the same way we cannot move forward again you know having your friendship groups even as a teenager I know teenagers that sometimes they might do a paper round or they might have jobs in the local shop and they will become friends with the owner and they will continue that friendship later on and they'll go in there and see them even if they're not working because they've learned things they've listened to conversations and it's taking that interest to know that you know I did this job and this is how it was also it becomes you could become grateful as to in this generation how things can be easy and readily available whereas time and you know technologies you know improved whereas we didn't have any of that and things took longer and you know things were really you know appreciated a lot more because you had to work harder and you know we need to realize that as youngsters because you're not understanding how much the world around you is actually accommodating you so easily and as humans we adapt and when we adapt we get used to it and then we don't become grateful and all we do is want more. Yeah very true I mean some would even say that with the older generation yes they tend to be quick to judge judgmental yes the old mindset yeah thinking well you know in my day that wasn't acceptable they don't want to come to terms with today they want to live very true in the past and how it was so when they are observing perhaps a young girl who it might be married very young or a teenage pregnancy for them I mean I know on many occasions where you know there has been teenage girls on the bus who are in my city where I'm from where they've had babies at such a young age and you just feel this eerie feeling when from the older generation like the way they're looking at them making judgment whereas they don't know the situation there are some cases where girls unfortunately are raped and get pregnant you can't jump into kind of you can't understand them unless you're going through what they're going through so I feel sometimes they are a bit critical to be fair that's not necessarily even with the elderly that's just people in general being so judgmental and we do tend to judge but obviously being in an old mindset it's harder for you to change and adapt so you know especially for the older generation don't be also resistant and sometimes it's also a feeling that well we did it you know and we had it tough so you guys also have to suffer instead of accepting that you know times change people evolve things evolve and you know let's just get with it let's just appreciate that even though it's fast forward and they have things easy but there are other things that are now you know that they have to suffer for in that sense so you know they again it's it's all about perspective it's all about learning it's all about being open and you have to have the psychology for that and at the same time you know we need to work with younger people and older people because there's so many skills out there in the way in which you know even things that were done in the past you know need to actually come into this into play now because we rely so much on technology and we look at even if we want to do business we just want to send an email but then the old way is you know what let's go out and actually have a conversation or meet them and then we can build that rapport that they will be in business with us for generations because not everyone does that and that could be helpful so you know techniques like that can still work I'm just giving that as an example there must be various more but that's how and I'm talking that in a business perspective so at the same time in Britain we do have you know an issue where there are a lot of people living for longer so it is a strain to a certain extent especially with the culture in Britain where you know this you know the health the whatever the services the public services are being stretched and they don't have the necessary the culture which we are brought up with where we would keep our generations in one home and look after our parents so in that sense we do you know have that advantage where it's not seen to be wrong to be living with your family and you're not you know going to be judged in a particular way if you're older or if you're married and you keep your parents with you if they're not able but at the same time I have had cases where you know it's a problem now even in our cultures where they don't want the in-laws that they don't want the grandparents living in their own homes and you know it's it's a very touchy subject and obviously it depends on the circumstances and you know obviously with how they get along and if they become a burden they seem to be a certain things but it's the way you look at it again and when you are in a marriage and you have to have to live with your in-laws or if you're in a marriage and you've got your grandparents you know your parents living with you and they become the grandparents of your children you know there are pros and cons to that you know so there's lots of issues but at the same time it's taking every situation that you're in and building it into an advantage and hopefully whatever is negative sort of like fizzles away because of the way in which you're looking at it and you work on those positives and you can change those ways so it's important for generations to get together from an Islamic point of view as well as from a business point of view and especially in the home there's a lot of benefits in learning and wisdom and experience there's a lot of you know help can be provided I mean the young can gain wisdom whereas the old can gain the strength that they don't have anymore for example there's so many things another gap that just came to my mom was when you're married to someone who is a lot older than you bridging the gap between the husband and the wife the spouse that I've seen in many examples in my life where that can be difficult because where one mindset is another isn't yes that is also a lot of compromise there compromise between the two different you know age gaps because there are some gaps that are 15 years 20 years so you know it depends and that's really common where the man is older the man is older but now it's actually turning around where women are marrying younger men yes yeah and even to that age limit to a certain extent you know ten eight years you know younger than them it is happening because some men you know will prefer someone who is a lot more stronger stable and you know want a woman with you know that is a little bit more confident or wherever it may be that comes with age so there is definitely issues that do come with it but in life there's always issues and it depends which one you want to take on and which one you want to overcome so don't think that you can't overcome these and it cannot happen and it cannot work but a lot of times we're influenced by society and cultural norms but in Islam there's definitely no you know problems with you know even older women getting married to younger men as we know as our Prophet peace be upon him and his family did himself yes but it's it's looked down upon I know young girls are not getting married because the guy's only two three years younger and they're thinking oh the mindset's not there the thing but in the end you're delaying your marriage and you're not even moving forward you're not even trying to work at it you just got this perception you've got the set mindset which is fixed and you're not moving forward your life's not moving forward and you're missing out on years ahead just from that yeah definitely thank you so much for that Rahim and inshallah you've even lighted the viewers with this topic unfortunately we do need to go for a break and we'll come back and answer the viewers questions so we'll see you soon As-salamu alaykum As-salamu alaykum and welcome back to the second part of making a house a home where we've been discussing the topic of bridging the gap between the older and the younger generation now we're going to answer some questions from our viewers if you can answer that for us Rahima so we have Hossein and the question he's asking is my parents are quite old and finding it difficult to manage living by themselves and I worry all the time as I cannot be there so often however I want them to live with us but my wife is very resistant and it's a constant issue and sometimes an argument how do I get her to understand and accept this it is a case where there has to come to a point where they both understand what is the reason and the meaning behind it again now you have to come up with logical answers for this and a lot of the time it's about emotion it's about also people like to look into the future assuming things may happen if something was to happen and that stops them and that also creates fear right so we need to be present and we need to know our responsibilities and our duties even if it's not our parents or anyone else's parents and you need to sit and have a conversation logically as to why exactly and is it realistic what he's asking for is it just an assumption that he's making that his parents need to come and stay with him and that's what he feels because sometimes these parents nowadays even they want their independency but I don't want to live with my son and my daughter and their family and become a babysitter you know I've heard this you know whatever it may be or left or they might be like I'd love to do that because I'd want to be part of the family again because now I'm left by myself so you've got to make sure that that is clear secondly to make the wife understand you know it could be turned around it could be her parents the following year or months later and not necessarily where the woman would have her parents live with her but regardless there might be times where she needs to visit more they can live closer whatever it may be but logic needs to come into it as to why this has to be and there has to be real meaning and reason behind it and for real situations and scenarios don't just assume and presume parties need to sit together and what are the implications and the impact of them living together with regards to themselves as having relationships with the children you know there are advantages and disadvantages to it you know there are a lot of cases that I come across that you know families do complain and they don't want to be you know part of you know the extended family living in under or under one roof but in some cultures within the Muslim you know communities it is a masters it's accepted expected and it's accepted you know unwillingly and you have to understand you know are you able to tolerate that and to what extent and what changes do you have to make to see it differently if it's something you can't get out of it's not something that you and I can make a decision for and say which is right and wrong there is no right or wrong each circumstance and situation will have to be according to that particular way there is no right or wrong answer we cannot say that no you shouldn't and you should live with your parents or not or your in-laws there's no such thing each one has to figure out for themselves and how to make it work and for some people it works and for some people it doesn't and even it's trial and error in some circumstances but you've got to prepare for it I know it's a big commitment but you have to be open because we are all growing exactly we're all going to be parents we're all going to be grandparents you know we're not going to stay like this forever we want someone to show us that mercy and that understanding as well and sometimes we need to sacrifice and all that gives us challenges that we have to face we've got to take it we've got to put up with it as as Muslims we have a duty towards our parents and I know it's easier to say it than to do it but with this one the parents are very old yeah now we don't know they could be unwell they might not have long we don't know but we do have a duty towards them and I guess at this point this this comes down to the to the husband to put his foot down if his parents are being a bit intolerable so he if his parents yes from both sides yeah from both sides if if it's his parents and he sees that they're doing something wrong or being disrespectful to his wife absolutely that's the point where he needs to not allow that he needs to put his foot down and make his wife understand that I will bring it up if my parents are disrespectful to you so that they know if that was the issue if that was the issue but there are cases where sons do not do that and daughters don't do that and then they just expect yeah exactly so inshallah hopefully you know yeah no they need to address it quite openly yeah handle that inshallah our next viewer is Manar and the question is my in-laws come from abroad to visit once a year and they stay for at least two months I do respect them but we are a very we are very different and we come from different backgrounds as I am Hoja and my husband is from Pakistan we do get along but their way of living does disrupt the house in many ways and it now and it's now becoming a time I really do not look forward to how do I cope and deal with this situation it's quite similar to the one before it's about learning to adapt and accept and you know what yes we have different cultures and different way of being and we'd all like it ourselves the same way but you married into something different in the first place and unfortunately you know we don't just accept our spouses we accept their families too and you know when you're considering marriage these things need to be considered in the future as to what you need to put up with you know in times like this and for her it is only two three times three you know two three months in the year however maybe and yes it may be disruptive and it might be whatever but again you need to address it as to which part is being played and who's taking responsibility and the husband needs to stand up the wife needs to stand up they need to sit together come to some sort of like arrangement you know we'd all love to have big houses where we have this you know the space where we can have our independence and obviously that needs to be taken into consideration that it's not like that and not all the time that family will consider your practicalities daily practicals that's happening all they want is to see their son or their daughter and spend time with them so you got to understand the underlying issue there that you need to put up sometimes and you know keep up with these things or make plans to make it more comfortable in the future we plan for everything else we plan for holidays maybe taking time out to plan for something that we can make it more spacious for us you know I know people that have actually moved and I know you know turned turned a study into a room for them when it comes or you know turned the I don't know an extra space just that they can have that I'm not saying to like build a outward garden or whatever annex but you know it can be done but at the same time again we need to learn that we are going to be faced with different challenges and again there's a lot of it when it comes to in-laws and you know different generations from different families and yes there are different cultures with different ways of being but there's nothing wrong in staying like that the foundations are the same we have to all you know pray and eat certain foods from different cultures and enjoy it embrace it and the difficulties work through it inshallah thank you very much I hope you leave that explanation can help our viewer our next viewer is Huda my children are taken care of by the grandparents which I am grateful for as I work full-time there is an issue with the upbringing as I feel that my children do not listen to me or respect my rules because they are taught differently when with their grandparents and are actually given more freedom than I would like can you suggest ways to make the grandparents understand that it's not good for the children or me without offending me yes offending them sorry yeah that is very very vital because I'm really like strong on you know raising children a particular way and even if you're not there it's very easy to tell someone that you're paying that's from outside I have these set rules and regulations and you follow it when it comes to members of family looking after your child they're not necessarily gonna like you know do it your way they don't feel that they have to yeah but you need to build that relationship with the person that you he's looking after your child you get to know each other you've got to build that relationship between the two of you and talk it out and it's going to take time and you're going to show them your techniques and tell them why you're doing it and it's going to help them the children and yourself when you're coming home so that you're not always you know telling them things differently and depending on the age as well you know you also got to allow your children to experience different types of you know learning and teaching that if you were at Beebe's house for example you know she lets you do certain things and I'm okay with that but when you come home I have my rules and you're going to be help you know doing it my way and they have to adapt to it and adjust to it so there's various ways in which you can deal with that but you need to build that relationship with that person that's looking after your child whether they are relative or not because that's your child no matter what you need to have that close contact and connections that you know that when you're not around you know whether you're sending a text or whether or not you're there or you're having outings with the person that's looking after your child especially if they're your relative to show them that you know I have these ways of bringing them up not because I think I'm better and my way is better there's benefit to it there's reason for it a lot of the times people are doing it their way because they're trying to say that you know my way is the way to go so understand why they're doing it and maybe improve on it or accept it because maybe you haven't thought of it so it's a way in which you're seeing it as well you're not trying to you know put the authority on them because this is my kid or this is my son's you know okay you're the mother but this is my son's kid as well for example and I'm gonna bring him up bring you my grandchildren up the way I brought my son up and you know they're all these sort of thoughts coming to play because you know everyone wants to take that lead but for the wrong reasons the main concern are the children of course is this for their benefit realistically in this day and age what am I doing whoever's they are parents grandparents babysitters whoever nannies they all need to consider what's beneficial for the child when you put the child first and take into consideration the modern way of thinking and believing and you know the current way because that's what they need to grow to develop to change you know and basically you know help themselves even because you're there to assist them so that they don't need that reliance even on us as adults then you look at it from a different perspective you say it to them and eventually that will actually work it really does inshallah thank you so much for that and we'll move on to the next viewer and it's mosa and he says I want to spend as much time with my parents as possibly possible sorry especially at their age but my wife wants more time with hers or just us as a family with our kids only and the weekends are getting more complicated how do I manage the time so I can balance this where everyone gets what they want and be happy with no issues time management organization skills you know while I guess you know having your rotor like you so like using schedule no I mean to be honest a lot of the time again we make assumptions as to we need to spend more time we need to spend less time we're not having enough time and that quality time needs to be quality time when you have quality time with people it's not about not having the time it's about even having a conversation with someone on your way home from work whether it's talking to your wife or your parents can build that connection and bond that you don't feel the stress and even if you don't see them for like a few days it's not a problem so you got to use the different methods and you know we can use technology to our advantage even if you're sitting at home tired it's not because all your wife doesn't want you to go I'm tired I come late from work I'm gonna FaceTime my parents I'm gonna let them see my face you know or I'm actually gonna go out there out of my way on my own and I'm gonna see them at a time that you know it's not going to take away my family time with just the family and you got to switch it up where it's going to be you know constant you know change balance and each one's going to get something and at the same time we assume that people need certain things but we need to get to the bottom as to what's really available what's really needed and it's not about even just giving the time it's about really caring when you care these things don't really matter time doesn't matter so when you care for somebody it's shown in so many ways and just having to spend time don't think that oh because you could be sit there a lot of families they sit together I'm giving you time but I'm only watching tv and I'm on my phone I'm on my laptop and I'm not actually there with you you want to be there with somebody you be there with someone properly you know mindfully then it wouldn't matter with the time you know in a sense of you know looking at you know I've got this weekend free I don't have it free and I can't put everyone in and I just want family together it wouldn't matter you know when you're at work you give it a hundred percent when you're at home you give it a hundred percent when you with your wife you give it a hundred percent when you with your children you give it a hundred percent that's how you got to be that's mindfulness for you being present and not feeling overwhelmed because that people have to accept that you know you know everyone has you know limitations everyone has you know even me time just for myself we need all of that so just just don't be too hard on yourself you can't do everything and anything and you need to prioritize and yes time is short with your parents but I'm sure if you have a word with them that you can alternate certain days or you can bring family occasions together well that's there's so many occasions where there's birthdays and anniversaries where everyone gets together or there are times where you have weekends and say you know I'm going to go out with my wife just only or just family on our own and it's all okay it doesn't have to be weekly it could be monthly even it depends on your situation some parents and older parents they can be a bit demanding because they have the time yeah they have the time so they don't have the expectations that they they expect their children to do certain things even though they have maybe a hectic house or home if you're stuck in the middle between your parents and your spouse and your sandwich in the middle how can you you're being torn from both sides basically you're in a really bad situation because you're having to please everyone else except for yourself again like I was just trying to explain it's it's it depends how you are giving that time it can be given in so many ways and you can be smart about it there's different strategies and techniques where you can talk to somebody give them time give them energy give them yourself and when you do that in various ways it doesn't mean you physically going out there right you know you do it in different ways different techniques different styles you know just sending them your mom a bunch of flowers on the odd day don't just wait for mother's day you know she might just disregard seeing you because she might just think my son really thought about me when he doesn't even have to people don't think like that go out of the norm and the routine and just thinking that I'm going there you know or just surprise her or even your wife there's so many ways of doing things and when you do it even sometimes the old-fashioned way it can work a lot more stronger and powerful very true yeah so that's why we need to learn from the old and the old needs to learn from the you and blend it and hopefully we'll have a huge massive beautiful concoction yeah it's that it's that balance isn't it of both worlds but being smart being clever and you know you can you know sit at home and you know flowers are sent she's loving it yeah there you go job done exactly yeah and also the children can learn they'll be like if you have younger children they can see how you're adapting to the older generation as well as them they're so children they're so observant like I had said before so everything you do impacts your children and eventually they'll start building maybe some skills of how they will treat their grandparents how they will adapt to the way their grandparents are and how their parents are so when they go to their grandparents house they might react in a different way yeah or the way they show respect might be different exactly and we are all about routine and doing the same things and sometimes we need to step out of that routine if we don't see our you know and spend time just with the family with the wife and the children on one weekend it's not a bad deal because you've done something else to compensate for it during the week okay so that's another way you know be smart again you've got to use your you know you've got to use your mind to innovate and create things which is out of the norm so that people don't complain about wanting the norm even though that norm is actually not that necessary when it's just routine anyway you've got to make sure that you give love attention time and respect in various ways so that when you don't have the physical time and the ability it doesn't matter again I'm looking deeper again I'm looking at something so different again I'm not looking at something which is just surface so you need to you know come up with different ways of being a certain way that you can show love time and attention to somebody and they feel it back without you physically being there yeah definitely and would you say communication seems to be the key in all of this as in you're coming back to always yeah but that communication is so widely used and people don't realize the amount of ways in which we communicate how we communicate the way in which we use language the way in which you know we sit looking at each other and even frowning or having a facial expression that's communication so if you have the right intention and you do things with heart with passion with real want then all of that shows in every form not just through your words and people can feel it they can sense it and they won't be demanding more of you because they know that you're there for them you've given them the support whether it's your wife from the one end or your parents from the other you can balance it all definitely I mean I know some families where they the the daughter-in-law thinks that she isn't liked by the in-laws but sometimes I I think well what is it that that person's doing to make them act like that maybe with the the communication that we were saying the facial expressions the eye contact the body language the gestures all these things play a role so if you're just not giving them eye contact or frowning like you had said maybe closed arm not open arms not hugging embracing signals and messages that those signals are reaching them and so they are responding with the same similar signals to you so you think you're not liked but yet you're not showing them that you like them as much do you think that happens sometimes of course it happens a lot and you actually made me think about something else because we as humans we make a lot of assumptions and we generalize and we distort information and we take one scenario that's happened we create our own meaning and our own story we run with it instead of trying to really think okay my mother-in-law just had a bad day and she didn't talk to me not because she you know I walked into the house and she stopped talking you know because that's what happens we'll make that assumption from one incident and that's it I'm not going there again you know why put me in that situation instead of assessing she was tired or it could be vice versa where the mother-in-law thinks that of the daughter-in-law for example you know we have these scenarios all the time and we will run with that story on one incident make it a whole big deal and you know it means something it does something without even having you know communicated or even giving them benefit of doubt if you don't want to address it and keep going and keep you know seeing how that is you know being relayed over time and you might realize it's actually it's nothing or it's just their way and if it is personal you can sit down and have a conversation with them or show them who you are without even addressing it that I'm still there to love you and care for you even if I'm not your real daughter I'm your daughter-in-law for example it's all about who you are and I work with people to transform them so that they can transform themselves and the people around them and it all starts with you thank you very much a good good note to end on thank you very much Fahima and inshallah our viewers have benefited from the discussion but unfortunately we need to come to an end of the show and inshallah we'll see you soon assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wabarakatuh


This paper examines the use of various machine learning algorithms to accurately estimate the above-ground biomass, AGB, of four different forest types in Yunnan province, China. The authors found that random forest, RF, was the best model for all four forest types, with an overall R2 value of 0.503 and an average RMSE of 52.335 megagrams Ha-1. Additionally, they determined that the most important variables for each type of forest differed significantly, with DEM being the most important variable for coniferous forests, evergreen broadleaves, and mixed forests, while the vegetation index was the most important variable for deciduous broadleaves. This article was authored by Tianbao Huang, Guanglong O, Yongwu, and others.


Good morning. Just waiting for a little bit, maybe some other folks join. I think we can get started. So Yannis, thank you for taking the time to present today. I'm excited to hear about Qflow. One of the projects or project areas that SIG is actually being looking at and reaching out to is MLops. So that's SIG runtime and how you run workloads in the cloud. I think MLops is one of the the up-and-coming areas in Qflow is one of the projects that it actually covers the whole scope of M2N and how you deploy machine learning workloads in a cloud-native environment. So with that, I'll just let you take it away. So they have presented my screen? No, you don't see your screen. I asked if I should start presenting, so I guess I should. Sure, sure, sure. Everything is ready. So let's get started. Hi everyone, I'm Yannis. I'm a software engineer at RITTO and I'm also a contributor at Qflow and I lead for the Manifest Working Group and the Notebook Working Group. So in this talk, I want to give you an idea of what Qflow is and the potential that it holds as a Kubernetes native ML solution. So first of all, let's talk a bit about what Qflow is. Qflow is a machine learning platform built on top of Kubernetes and Qflow is dedicated to making deployment of machine learning workloads on Kubernetes simply portable and scalable. And many people, when they think about machine learning and what you do in a machine learning project, they think that most of the time you spend defining a novel model architecture, training it and iterating on that. But the truth is more complicated. Usually, in reality, most of the effort needed is infrastructure and DevOps effort to address the various difficulties of the workflows of data science present. Configuration management, pipelines, reproducibility, serving, scalability, hyperparameter tuning are all hard problems that all machine learning projects will face. And Qflow extends to Bernatis to natively support ML workflows in order to solve these hard DevOps problems and provide the cloud native platform for machine learning. Now, Qflow is an open source project, as you know, and a product of many companies collaboration. You can get involved by joining our Slack, our community meeting, or a specific working group you're interested in. So I feel that the best way to show you what Qflow is about is to actually present a quick demo of a machine learning workflow using Qflow. So in this demo, it's a live demo, we will put ourselves in the shoes of a data scientist starting a new machine learning project. We will start with the open vaccine cargo problem, which was a challenge to find the stable molecular structures for the COVID-19 vaccine. And we will first start with a Jupyter notebook and choose a machine learning algorithm to train our model. Then we will experiment with our data and run a reproducible ML Ops pipeline. Then we will take that pipeline and run it with different parameters to perform what's called hyperparameter tuning to get the best model with the best accuracy. And finally, we will take the best model that we train and serve it using Qflow's serverless machine learning serving solution, which is called KF serving. So let's start with the first part of our demo. So let me actually switch to my browser. As a data scientist, I want to start a new experiment. I'm going to the Qflow website, my Qflow deployment website. I'm graded with a login page. So I'm going to begin. And immediately I see the Qflow central dashboard. I want to start experimenting. So I probably want to create a new Jupyter notebook and load my code, load my data and get going. So I'm going to go to the notebooks tab and actually create a new Jupyter notebook server in this form. In order to not wait for the server to start, in this demo, I have prepared one beforehand here called Seagrant Time Demo. So all I'm going to do is connect to it. And once we recite the Jupyter lab environment, what I have done here is actually clone a specific key repository and open the open vaccine example. So in the Jupyter notebook here, you can see there is a number of steps from installing packages, to loading and preprocessing the data, to defining a model, evaluating the model, and producing a final CSV file for submission. So as a data scientist, we have a Jupyter notebook where we experiment. We do things like that. And at some point, we are satisfied with the code that we have. And we want to actually run this code at a bigger scale. Because a Jupyter notebook environment doesn't really scale that well. What we would like to have ideally is a pipeline which we can scale and parallelize and actually have something reproducible. So how do we go from having a Jupyter notebook to having an ML of pipeline? Well, there is a tool called K, which is a Python SDK and a Jupyter lab extension. And K is a project that aims to provide a seamless experience to the data scientist. So whether we can easily go from running our code locally to running a reproducible ML Ops Jupyter pipeline. So to enable K, we simply click on the sidebar, on the K button, and we click enable. Now you will see some colors over each cell. And this has some special meaning. So in K, the data scientist goes to each cell and annotates it. So a group of cells becomes actually a pipeline step. And the data scientist can also declare dependencies on other pipeline steps. So without changing any of the actual code, we have gone from a Jupyter notebook to defining a pipeline structure. Now all we have to do is click compile and run. All we have to do now is click compile and run. And K will parse the notebook and generate a couple of pipeline, which it will then submit. So I will do that to demonstrate now. And in addition, K ensures reproducibility by logging metadata about its pipeline steps, inputs and outputs, and also taking a snapshot of the notebook's volumes using ROK's CSI Compatible Data Management capabilities. ROK is a CSI Compatible Data Management software by Arikto. And finally, Kale gives us a link to the pipeline, which we can open and track its progress in the Qflow pipeline UI. So this was the first step of our demo. Now let's continue with our presentation. So as a data scientist, we have gone from experimenting with a Jupyter notebook to actually having a reproducible MLOps pipeline. Now we want to perform a procedure called hyperparameter tuning, where we run the same pipeline multiple times with slightly different parameters in order to optimize the actual performance of our model. So in order to do that, we will use a Qflow component called Kati, which enables us to do hyperparameter tunings natively into Bernatis. Again, Kale will help us by providing a very QT UX for that. So going back to our notebook, let's say now we want to do hyperparameter tuning. How do we do hyperparameter tuning? We need two things. The first thing we need is to actually declare what the hyperparameters are, what are the knobs that Kati will turn and see what happens. Those are defined in special types of sale, which is called pipeline parameters. And the data scientist selects it from the UI like so. Then we need another thing, which is the actual objective. What is Kati optimizing? When it's turning a knob, what should it see to evaluate if the result was better or worse? In this case, we optimize for validation loss. And to do that, we simply print the validation loss and tag the sale as pipeline metrics. Note that we have done these two things. We can enable HQ tuning with Kati into the Kale deployment panel. Then click on setup Kati job to tune the various parameters. And once we are satisfied with it, we click on compile and run Kati job. And Kale will actually again take care of creating the Kati experiment and running all of those pipelines in order to perform the hyperparameter tuning. Now, as before, Kale will actually give us a link to the Kati experiment where we can track its progress in the UI. Because for the purpose of this demo, the experiment would take a long time, I have prepared one beforehand again. So I'm going to fill in this one. Okay, so let's continue. Now we have created an azupter notebook with our code, converted it to a reproduced Kulemilux pipeline, and produced the best model by performing hyperparameter tuning. Finally, we should simply take the best model and serve it. This is the serving part. So as I said before, the hyperparameter tuning process will take a long time. So I have prepared an experiment beforehand. So if I go to HQ tuning, this is my experiment. As you can see, this tuning UI provides an intuitive UI to see how all of your trials went. And you can also see a coupling leaf of the trials. And the best one is highlighted in yellow. So to serve this model, we will navigate to the pipeline that produced it by clicking on the little pipeline icon next to it. I have a question. Why is that the most optimal? That's a great question. So in our notebook, we defined some knobs, some parameters for cutting to tune, and we also defined an objective, which was the validation loss. So what this means is that this trial has the best validation loss. I see. Got it. So that's what the UI highlights in this case. So that's the lowest value, the lowest value, 0.69, basically. Exactly. Got it. Thanks. So we can go, so from the experiment, we easily find the best trial and we go to the pipeline that produced it by clicking on the little pipeline icon. Now, to actually serve the model, we will restore the state of the notebook in this last step, the model evaluation. To do that, we will use actually what is Kubernetes CSI capabilities. In this case, we have a rock implementing them, which is directed to the management layer. So to do that, we will copy the snapshot URL and create a new notebook server, which will actually go to the state of that step. Let's name this serving demo. And we'll launch it. And this will actually restore the notebook to the state of the last step of the pipeline. Now, this will take a bit, so I have prepared again a notebook server that is ready for this. To reiterate, the state of the notebook right now is at the last step of the best pipeline run. We actually have our model in a variable hold model. And we go to our notebook and try to serve it. So to serve our model, we will use kf-serving, which is qplus-serving-solution. And ktips-sdk will make it easier for us to serve the model without having to know everything about kf-serving. So what we'll do is, from the kf-sdk, we'll import the serve function. And then we will define a kf-serving server by giving it the model and the preprocessing function. So in machine learning serving workloads, it's common to have a preprocessing function before we... Yannis, I think the audio went off. Okay. Yeah, I think we can hear you now. Great. Okay. So moving on, we define a preprocessing function and give it also the model. So what kf-serving will do is it will create a server for preprocessing and another one for predicting. But the data scientist doesn't need to know all of that. They just give the preprocessing function and the model in Python. So we run this cell and in the background, K will take care of creating all the necessary kf-serving API resources to actually serve that model. So now we will wait a tiny bit and wait while K is actually doing all of this work and we'll see the server in action. So while this is happening, are there any quick questions? So you're using the built-in Qflow server mechanism, right? So you can have also other server mechanisms if you like to, right? Yeah. So essentially, kf-serving is more of an infrastructure side. It doesn't enforce a particular framework, for example, it can work with TensorFlow, with PyTorps or with everything basically. It uses a serverless model and supports scaling to zero and uses actually k-native underneath to do that. And yes, it's pretty generic. It doesn't enforce any particular framework for massively learning or anything like that. All right. Thank you. So now we're waiting for the inference service is an object from the kf-serving API and K is waiting for it to be ready, which should happen any second now. If there is another quick question, we can also do it now while the inference service becomes ready. How long does it usually take to run or it depends? It's usually faster, but if you remember earlier, we submitted the pipeline, and this is not a cloud environment, let's say. It's a restricted environment. So I suspect it's putting a bit of a strain on the cluster, and that's why it's taking longer than usual. Go ahead. No, no, no. Please continue. I interrupted you. No, no, no. So I was just curious. Let's say it runs low. What are the ways to tune it on the infrastructural level? Like adding more resources to the nodes or to speed up the... I didn't get the question, sorry. Yeah. So what is the way to tune the performance of the run to reduce the time? Like you mentioned, running in the cloud is usually faster. Is there anything else you can do on an infrastructural level to speed it up? Yeah. Add more nodes would help very much. Pretty much that. This is a one-note deployment. This is why it's putting so much strain on the cluster. So that's the sign of... I can actually help it out a bit. If I go... If the run is still running, no, it's not still running. Okay. Then it should be good to go. Okay. It's a bit longer than usual. So does it depend on the size of the data too? If the data is bigger, then it's going to take longer? Yeah, of course. Of course. It depends on the size of the data as well. In this particular instance, I guess it's the thing we say that everything works right until the left demo. But it's okay. Let's give this a little bit of time to see if it gets better and let's continue with the presentation. So moving on and I will come back to this later. Okay. So what we saw was the whole end-to-end data science workflow from Jupyter Notebook to a compiled scalable and reproducible ML of pipeline to running multiples of those pipelines to tune for the best hyper parameters to serving the actual model we will see in the end. And in all of this process, this is reproducible because we use MLMD, which is a metadata database by Google, which logs each pipeline steps, inputs and outputs. So you know what came from where. And in addition, we snapshot each step using a CSI compatible provider like Rogue in this case. And in this way, I was hoping to present you how actually the various components of Kubeflow would be combined to give the data scientist a unified workflow. Now, moving on to another subject that I wanted to touch in this presentation is a program called configuration management. In this part, I will introduce customized GitOps and explain how customized and implicit GitOps workflows for Kubeflow. Now, one of the hardest problems in Kubernetes, as I'm sure you know, is configuration management. And there is no separate bullet and there are many tools available right now targeting this problem. Kubeflow in particular started out with case on it, which had a really high barrier of entry. And we ended up moving away from it. Whatever tool we had, we chose had to be configurable, readable, extensible, and work well with GitOps workflows. So right now, after a lot of discussions and effort, Kubeflow uses customized for this. So I want to give a bit of an intro to customize so that we are all on the same page. Customizing is a configuration management of Kubernetes, which avoids templating and domain-specific languages. Instead, it encourages writing configurations as actually Kubernetes elements, like Kubernetes is the output here. Modifications are done with patches and transformations. So to give you a reason why we didn't choose a solution like Helm, it was because charts ended up looking like this example, which is an actual chart of Grafana from the Helm charts repo. Now, I will briefly explain how customized works so that we're on the same page. The user writes configuration as Kubernetes jamblin. For example, the user here defines deployment, a service, and a config map for Red is database. And then the user writes a customization jamblin file, which imports these resources. We call this, in this situation, the base customization. Then to render the final configuration, the user calls the customize build command. Now, let's assume that another user wants to also deploy Red is, but in a different environment, and wants to change the settings a bit. To achieve that, the user will create another customization called overlays deploy in this case, this folder, and import the base customization and also use a patch to change the deployment's number of replicas. And again, the other user will use customize build to render the final configuration, which, as you can see, is a mix of the base and the overlay. However, if the final configuration is a mix of the user's desired state, each of the users actually defines their configurations in totally separate files and folder. And this is important for what comes later in GitOps workflows. Now, we saw what customize is. Let's talk a little bit about GitOps. So what is GitOps? Here's the player on our left-hand side and the Kubernetes cluster on the right, we're going to deploy to flow. Now, GitOps is all about a Git repository. It sits in the middle and the deployer commits their desired state of the cluster and then apply only committed manifest to the Kubernetes cluster. So the state of their infrastructure is in the Git repo. But this is the basic, basic configuration. But most of the times what actually happens is that there are vendors which have their own manifests for deploying to flow or any application and their consumers or customers who want to use these manifests, but don't update them and keep up to date. So in the visual case, where the manifests come from a vendor, here's what happens. For example, let's see the following example. Arex Excel implements GitOps and we publish generic vendor manifests in a vendor repository, which is the blue one here. The deployer the deployer clones the vendor repository into a local repository. And then the deployer creates and then the deployer creates deployment specific commits, which we call customization. On top of the vendor commits and eventually the deployer wants to combine these manifests into the final desired state and apply it. So let's see now why customize helps the GitOps process and how the actual upgrade process happens. So one of the hardest things to do in this scenario is to answer, how do you upgrade? Because the deployer wants to have their own commits on top and the vendor wants to keep adding commits to upgrade their manifests. So how do you reconcile the two? For our GitOps workflows, what we do is we use Git rebase. So let's assume the vendor is at version v2 and the deployer has committed another deployment specific commit v1. At some point in time, the vendor produces v3, another commit. The deployer pulls and rebates their changes so they can now sit on top of v3 and thus upgrade their infrastructure while also keeping their own deployment specific changes. And customize is important here because as we said before, it separates the changes of the deployer from the changes of the vendor. So their base yields no conflict. The Git rebase, that's the key point here of how customize enables us to do this workflow. So after this upgrade, the deployer just has to reapply to upgrade their cluster with a new version from the vendor. Finally, I want to talk about the fact that it's not all good. There are some pain points in customize. I've highlighted two here. First of all, there is a feature called vars that is it kind of breaks the encapsulation of customize. And the customized team actually wants to be deprecated, but there hasn't been a solution yet since last year when the planned deprecation was announced. And second, which is more like kind of the fundamental way that customize works versus something like Helm, is that in Helm, all the power is with the Char developer. The Char developer exposes knobs in the virus.yaml file that the consumer can tune. On the other hand, in customize, the consumer has all the power. They can use patches and literally change anything in what they get from the vendor. But on the other hand, the vendor, the developer of the customization doesn't actually have a standardized way to expose things to the consumer like what Helm has. So it's a bit difficult to produce an easy way for consumers to actually customize their deployment, even though customize actually gives you a ton of power. So in order to find some middle ground for our workflows at least, we thought it would be helpful to show that our solution was to build our own installation tool on top of the customized manifest. So I have a small video here. You can see what it looks like. On the right are our docs. On the left is the rock deploy tool. It's what we call it.  And the tool is actually responsible for converting these questions to actual customized configuration and committing them to your GitHub's repo. So we're still using all of the nice things we said we were using before. We just have added a nice UI to it so that it's much more usable. And I wanted to show what this looks like. Maybe someone else has a similar problem. I have a question. So this is the GitOps. Basically this is you're deploying your serving part or what is your whole pipeline, building your whole pipeline and basically deploying it. So do you have a CICD workflow? So this is mainly about this is separate to the CICD workflow. It's about initializing a deployment. So when you actually take a product into your hands or a software, let's say MySQL or Grafana, you're usually given some knobs to tune, some settings. What I'm saying is that while customized gives you an unlimited power to change whatever you want, it's a bit difficult to find the actual way to do it. You have to have knowledge of the whole thing. So we have built, this is a small direction tab that actually asks you a few questions and produces the extra customized configuration necessary to achieve those settings. After, in addition to producing it, it also commits it to the GitOps repo. So it actually follows the GitOps process. After committing it to the GitOps repo, you can hand it off to whatever CICD tool you want to perform the actual reconciling with the Kubernetes classic. I see. Okay. So yeah, what I was trying to think in was about how you tie these together with your models and how you create your models, you build your models and then you deploy them to serve them. And basically, as I understand, this actually makes it easier for your cluster to be set up for your whole environment with all the different components that you need to have to set up GitOps. Yes, exactly. So this is a bit of a different audience. The previous workflow we showed, where you had the K less decay in Python, which allowed you to easily serve models. This was for the data scientist to use. The second section of the talk about customizing GitOps is more for the DevOps team, let's say, the cluster deployer team, the team that is responsible for the infrastructure. Got it. Got it. Thank you. So I wanted to kind of show the two sides of the problem. And closing with this, thank you for giving me this opportunity. This is some contact information if you want to get in touch. And also you can try to demo yourself using this link. It was performed using something called MiniKF. It's a deployment on GCP. It's just click to deploy one button. So if you want, you can also do this yourself. And we have instructions in this link. Did the demo actually complete for serving? Oh, yes. I forgot about it. Oh, yes, it completed. Here it is. So let me actually deliver my promise and show you. So what I will do first is I will do a prediction for this model server. So first I define some data here and then to actually hit the model, I call the method predict of the KF server object. So actually Kail takes care of doing all the HTTP requests, et cetera, underneath and the data scientist doesn't have to think about anything. And this, what I'm going to show you is scale to zero. Right now there is nothing grounded. There is no server. So once I hit enter, what actually happens is that KF serving buffers the request and spins up a pod in the background. And once the pod is ready, then it will respond to my request. And in order to make this a bit more usable for the data scientist, we have actually added a UI for the model serving. So if you print the KF server object, you will get a link for viewing the model. If I click the link, it will take me to the model UI where I can see an overview of the model server, some details, some metrics of what is happening. So this is a direct connection to Grafana. Loves from inside the pod. Here are the process data that I would note. And if you're an advanced user, the whole family that was used to make this server. So that's the grace that I want to show you around model serving. Yeah. And so one question is, if you're actually setting up this in a repetitive way, you want to serve this in... I mean, this is for data scientists where they actually try and build the models, right? But then sometimes you want this to be more repeatable, like how these releases happen. So does Kubeflow provide a mechanism for that? Or not just going through notebooks or just different steps like you're describing here, but more like just a push of a button and then just deploy the serving mechanism. Does that make sense? I think so, yes. So at the moment, we don't have a UI for deploying and the deploying is actually done through the Python SDK. So right now, we are satisfying the people who use Python a lot. But yet, we don't have a UI for deploying the model. We have the UI for viewing the models and metrics around them, etc. The one we showed here. But yes, what you said is actually, I think we're working on. It is something that is sort of to be present in the later versions of Kubeflow. It's usually called... I think what you're describing is usually called the model registry. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, maybe you have a registry and then you just pull that model there and then you're like, okay, I just deploy this and serve this model. It sounds a little bit like what you have with a container registry where you build the container registry or the container and then you publish that in the container registry. And then when you deploy, you just deploy that container image. In this case, will be more like the model image that you're deploying to a production environment. Exactly. We have a weekly meeting in Kubeflow called the SIG meta data. I think that is looking hard into this problem. So even if one is interested in this particular thing, I would encourage you to join this specific meeting because it is doing work directly on the section you talked about. Got it, got it. Yeah, thank you. All right. So yeah, this was great. A lot of information. For me, myself, this is kind of like the first time I see the kind of end-to-end workflow. And yeah, one more question about those components. You have the ROC component. That's an open source project. But is that... ROC is not an open source project but it is connected, it connects through an open source interface. Like how S3 is not an open source project, but it connects through the S3 protocol that you can use an open source project for. Got it, got it. Okay. And so you would not actually necessarily need that if you wanted to create your pipeline, right? Yes, exactly. ROC is about providing reproducibility and making workflows much easier. Got it. Anybody else have any questions? Anything? Thank you for the great presentation. Kubeflow is a great project. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thank you all. I'll give you back another, what, 15 minutes or 12 minutes. So, all right. Bye, guys.


Hello guys, and welcome to Brains Applied. My name is Willem, and this is my very first book review that I'm doing on this channel.  A counter-intuitive approach to living a good life. Now before I start off, I want to say a few things. The first one being, yeah, if my voice sounds a bit weird, or if you hear me sniffing, I'm really sorry, but I slept a bit too little the last few days and partied a bit too much. So yeah, now I'm having a cold. Also, I'm actually recording this video for the second time because I first recorded it yesterday, and I wanted to edit it today, and then I was like dude, I look sooo crappy and sleepy and messed up. So I'm recording it again. Also, what I did is actually I changed some of the camera settings because if you've seen my previous video, which I recorded with my camera, most of them looked pretty crappy and like the video encoding of YouTube doesn't really help either. So I actually tweaked the settings a bit, thanks to Google, and now actually the quality is going to be way much better. So hey, I hope you enjoy it. Last thing that I wanted to say is I decided to make my videos a bit less scripted. So well, I actually just wrote down a few points that I wanted to say, but I don't have an entire script. So this is going to be a bit more natural. This video is going to cost me less editing, but it might happen that I actually need some more time to think about something or that I make some pronunciation or other mistakes, because English is not my mother tongue. So that might have quite an influence. Now, if you like it or if you don't like it, just drop a comment below and just tell me why you don't like this new style of me presenting something. So let's get started with the book review.  Let's start with the design and the cover. The thing is Mark Manson is a blogger. If you've never read any work of him, I'll put the link to his blog in the description. And this is actually what you really notice in the book. For example, with the title, it's very catchy because the internet is filled with distractions and well, you need to have a catchy title and you need to catch the attention of your readers. And he does that with a book and it actually does a good job. It caught my attention as well. But you also notice it in his writing style that he actually is a blogger. Now, there's one thing which actually bothers me about the cover. If it's like a very neat design, but if you look closely, you can probably see it on the camera. Let me just check it. No, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, OK, you see there a bit. So all the letters of the cover are printed in matte black ink. However, the stain here is printed in glossy black ink. And you actually notice quite a difference and I don't know why they did it. But it is really bothering my OCD. But hey, that's just my opinion now on to the content. In his book, Mark Manson actually makes one major point. And that is that people, whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, can set their own goals in life. And to live a happy life, they should do it according to their own identity, to their own values. For example, let's say your parents want you to become a doctor. If you try, if you said being a doctor as your goal, but you don't really want to do it, you're probably never going to become happy. And he also gives an example in his book about social media nowadays and celebrities. Because on social media, we see a lot of celebrities being famous, being fancy, having a lot of fans, being rich, being pretty, that kind of stuff. And well, the thing is, especially with millennials nowadays, now in this case, everyone wants to become like a celebrity, being like, you know, the Instagram influencers go, go drink your daily Starbucks, going on a lot of trips, always wearing the latest fashion, that kind of stuff. And people said it as a goal, but it's not good. Because if you, for example, want to become a celebrity, you should enjoy the process of getting there and not the end result. You shouldn't do stuff just because you like the end result. You should do stuff because you actually like the process. For example, being a rock star, everyone at one point in his life wanted to become a rock star, having thousands of fans, having really cool, large, major concerts.  However, I didn't want to go through the process of playing for empty venues. I didn't want to go through the process of dragging your band's equipment everywhere and just doing it for days and days. And I didn't want to go through the idea of probably not making a proper living for years and years and not being sure whether you you will ever become famous or rich or whatever you want to achieve. So, yeah, that's the thing. If you want to become happy, you should set your own values, what you like and you should do it because you like the process and not just the end result. So that is the major idea of this book. And I think that Mark Manson does have a really, really, really good point here. And what I also like about the book is the writing style. As I said, it's very much like a blog. It's very nice. It's very easy. It's very light and open. But also it's sometimes a bit like crude and maybe you can even call it a bit profane. So that's pretty weird. It's pretty interesting writing style and also it's actually a pretty negative book. He's like, yeah, you know what? I don't care about you, but I just want to tell you my message. It's not like one of these self-help books where he's just like giving you that feel good idea.  And even though it's a pretty negative book in the end, I actually felt that pretty optimistic and pretty positive about like what it said. I was like, yeah, you know what? He's right. I can actually do this. So, yeah, that's about the content of the book. There is, however, one or two things which I didn't really like. So this book is written like a blog post. The problem is that it is a two hundred pages long blog post. And like for the first half of the book, you're like, oh, this is so cool. And he tells all kinds of anecdotes and stories to to support his idea. But like halfway through the book, you become a bit like, yeah, you know, it's cool, but this is like more repetition. The book was, in my opinion, a bit sorry, a bit too repetitive. And I think he could have added some more, some newer insights in the second half as well. What I also missed is that I'm very much of a psychological and sciency guy. And while this book was more philosophical, so I missed a bit of like the background idea of our of sorry, of how our human psychology works and there was not included in the book. So that's a pity, in my opinion. Would I advise you to buy this book? I think I would. The thing is, it's like 15 euros. It's not too thick. It's it's easy to read. It's very nice to read. And especially if you're new to the field of like self development, especially if you're like stuck a bit in some kind of like victim mentality, you know, where you always blame others for the stuff that goes wrong in your life. I think this book might actually teach you a few things about life. So really buy this book or not buy it, but read it, just find it somewhere, go to the library, maybe maybe they have it over there. But yeah, you should read this book. That's it for today. I hope you like my very first book review. If you have any feedback, just drop a comment below, share this video with your friends. Also, follow me on social media. I have Twitter and Instagram. I'm especially active on Instagram. And one last thing is, of course, if you liked it, I will be posting a new video every Friday from now on. So press the subscribe button and the bell icon. And in that case, you will receive a notification when you when I sorry, when I upload a new video. So I think I will see you guys later. Oh, and don't forget to check out my previous videos. See you guys later.


This study used Sentinel-1 satellite imagery to assess and monitor rice production in Myanmar. The satellite data provided detailed information about the rice growing season, including the amount of inundation, growth stages, and overall extent of the crop. This allowed for accurate estimates of the total area of rice cultivation, which was compared to official government census data. The results showed strong correlation between the two datasets, indicating that Sentinel-1 data could be used to accurately estimate rice production in Myanmar. This article was authored by Nathan Torbic, Dya Chowdhury, William Salas, and others.


Glossaries allow you to create and maintain a list of definitions similar to a dictionary. To add a glossary to your course, navigate to the section you wish to add your glossary to and select Add an activity or resource. Select Glossary. Select Add. Name your glossary. Add a description to your glossary if required. You have the option to make your glossary global. Global glossaries are available throughout the Moodle site. From the glossary type drop-down menu, select either Main Glossary or Secondary Glossary. You can only have one main glossary per course. The glossary system will allow you to export entries from the secondary glossary into the main glossary of the course. You have the option to approve all glossary entries by default. Alternatively, you can change to the setting to ensure that trainers approve all glossary entries. Always allow editing, controls whether or not a learner can continue to make changes to their glossary entry. When no is selected, learners are only able to make changes to the entry for a particular time period. Select whether you wish to allow duplicate entries and comments on entries. You also have the option to automatically link glossary entries. Select your preferred display format. You can configure the appearance of your glossary as required. Should you wish to set a passing grade for the glossary, you can do so here. Should you wish to associate activity completion or a conditional activity to the glossary, you can do so here. There are further customization settings available, which you can use as required. Once you're happy with the settings you have selected, select Save and return to course. Your glossary now appears on your course page. Select the glossary. You can now begin adding entries to your glossary. Enter in the concept name. Enter in your definition. Add any relevant keywords and attachments. Should you wish to allow auto-linking, select it here. Once you're happy with your entry, select Save changes. Your entry now appears within the glossary.


Hello, Jb's! Today is February 21st. Do you know what day is today? It's... International Mother Language Day. Many people commented me, can you make this? Actually, it's not the famous day in Korea. So honestly, I didn't know either. In Korea, we celebrate Hangul Day, October 9th, instead of this. It's the day Hangul Alphabet was created by King Sejong. Let's look at this. The statue of King Sejong. It's located in Gwanghwamun Plaza in Central Seoul. And you can see him in 1001 too. Yes, it's him. He is number one respected person in Korea with General Isung Shin. So as you can see, Koreans are really proud of their own language. So I was interested in this topic. International Mother Language Day. So where does this come from? Let's see. At first, UNESCO made this day at 1999. But why did they make that? I will tell you about the background. It's really interesting. The story is come from Bangladesh. Last time I talked about why Pakistan and Bangladesh were separated. Actually, there were so many complex reasons that I even couldn't understand. But the beginning was language. After Pakistan separated from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh was one country. But Pakistan forced Bangladesh use Urdu. Not their own language, Bengali. But of course, Bangladesh didn't accept that. They fought to keep their language. Finally, a massive protest happened in Bangladesh. Many, many people including university students in Bangladesh fought for their language. And sadly, some of them were sacrificed while the protest. But because of this sacrifice, they could use their language again. So that's why UNESCO made this day to remember them. Yeah, it's really impressive. I think language is not just language. Each language has their own story, culture and spirit of people. So make them stop to speak their own language. It's like stealing the person's soul. Actually, Koreans also couldn't use our own language for a while. After Korea became a Japanese colony, we couldn't use our language. School taught students in Japanese. And even every Korean should change their name to Japanese. Like Doraemon Kim or Naruto Kim. Naruto Kim? It's good. Korean newspaper company closed. And many Korean language scholars, poets or novelists went to jail. Because they struggled to keep Hangul against them. For example, the best poet of Korean history, Yoon Dong-joo. He died just before Korean independence. But because of their efforts, Korea can protect our own language. Like Bangladesh. We're similar at that point. Maybe we should be brother country too. Anyway, the language has people's history, culture, spirit, pride and even their identity. It's that important. That's why we fought for that. So I'm really proud that our ancestor kept our Hangul like Bangladesh. When I was young, I wanted that Korea use English. Because I didn't want to study. But now I like that we have our own language. According to UNESCO, there are at least 7,000 languages in the world. But they guessed more than half of language will disappear in a few decades. I think if the language disappears, the memories of people also disappear. So I hope people love and keep their own language. Even if it's a minority language. Yeah, I really want that. So I'm done. What language do you use? And do you love that?


Welcome to weather analysis for hedgehogs. So I moved my place and from now on this will be my new Melville fighting lab. In the last couple of days I got several remarks and comments saying something along the lines of you need to ride Melville to become a good weather analyst. Let's check this out. So here's one of those, the only one I got in English actually. It says I would suggest to spend a year or two learning to ride Melville, practice releasing it in the wild, get really good at being a blackhead, build a large resume of exploits and then use that for experience. Just be honest with the interviewer they can hire you or hire someone else to try and stop you. Each other self-motivated go-getters. And the German ones, I will show them in case you know German, but yeah it basically the question is how closely related are Mavarners and Mavic creators. And the second one said I also wrote a trojan in my youth. I pretended to be 12 year old in the chat and it the trojan was not detected by any of the antivirus programs. I binded it with JPEG files and I could have could have extorted people but it wasn't my humor. And I'm proud of that. I want to know that this is advantageous for cyber security. So there are actually several questions. Let's start with the easiest first. That's does HR human resources like to see people who say they have experience riding Melville? That's a clear no from me. Of course I can only speak for the company I work for and for our hiring practices. But I assume that for all antivirus companies at least this is the same. There is this conspiracy theory that antivirus companies only that they ride Melville so they can get better cells. It's like similar to the conspiracy that the pharmacy industry creates illnesses to sell their medications. That's actually just to be clear. It's not true. It's a conspiracy. We don't need to do that simply because there's enough Melville out there without us doing anything. So why would we spend our time with writing something well what we have plenty of. So it doesn't make sense. But just because this myth always comes up and also because the antivirus companies do not want to add fuel to the fire or get a bad reputation they will never hire anyone who openly boasts about having written Melville. So if you are I mean how would people get to know that you hire such people. That is if you have someone in the company who openly talks about it because they are proud of it. And yeah that's exactly a reason not to hire you. It would be a red flag actually. And the other thing that I would as a someone who employs people I would think well they are doing unethical things. They are doing criminal things. Why should I take the risk and hire them and then maybe they do something criminal in my company. So they could let's say use this internal knowledge to do something bad. So no I totally would not do that. So I don't know why people get the idea that this is like beneficial for HR to hear that you did black hat stuff. So it's not.  I mean this person who said they wrote Melville as a teenager I told them the same and they said something like you are bigoted to believe that no one in your company has written Melville before. Now there's a huge difference in my opinion between writing Melville without releasing it to the wild. So and just to have some exercise going on and writing Melville and infecting systems with it and being proud of it. The proud aspect is actually killing me. Did we employ people who wrote Melville? Yeah we had a student who wrote a Melville and simultaneously wrote the entitle to it. So he let's say he explored a certain technique to evade antivirus detection and the way but the way this is usually done is you know that you do not write actual malicious code but you can use something like iCar which is an antivirus test file and put that into the final payload so that your creation isn't actually malicious but detected by all antivirus programs so you can test if your evasion technique works so that the payload is not detected. Yeah we had such people we had with an intern like that but that's an entirely different thing. The other question that was asked in here was like along the lines of is this advantageous or are the skills advantageous to become a malvernomist? Can you like this person who said they did this at 12 year old they said something like yeah I would be an awesome malvernomist because I had this experience in the past. Now the things that the skill overlap for writing malware and reversing malware is actually quite small surprisingly small like yeah you know you need to know like maybe types generally how antiviruses detect malware how malware evades antiviruses in general but then as a malware writer you only need to know a few of these things you need to know one language and how to write code in it you actually don't need to know any of the ways to make malware undetected if you just buy a binder packer protector or crypto whatever you can buy that if you don't know anything about it so but I guess if you want to write very good malware you might also get into like Windows internals topics but now imagine what's the ideal skill set of a malware analyst. The ideal malware analyst knows every operating system every compiler and every language because no matter what malware you throw at them they can reverse engineer it and that's a little bit the reality actually because no one will you get all kinds of malware there's no sorting into like you only do the .NET stuff or you only do the C++ malware that doesn't happen in at least not an Aura company like you need to know you need to be able to pick up everything of course no person knows how to read every programming language how to read every assembly code that exists so your main skill set is in being able to pick up things quite fast if you need them so you teach it to yourself you need to know how to learn on a relatively fast pace and that's the challenging part about malware analysis like this is so interdisciplinary you have so many potential things that could be beneficial to know that it's really hard to say like this is the skill set that a malware analyst has because everything could be potentially across your way and be of help to have a skill in that so yeah it's not that simple and if you write malware you you're not automatically someone who can reverse engineer anything that's actually think this through using an example what do you need to know to write ransomware one that's like where you have basic quality standards to it being a not decryptable not decryptable by third parties so if you want to write ransomware you would need to know how to use at least one programming language to write coding and you would need to know the basics of cryptography to use cryptographic functions in a way that they cannot be broken and also you would need to know some basics in psychology how to extort someone effectively so that they pay how do I make them pay how do I make the the likelihood that they pay higher there are certain tricks used like there's put some sense of urgency there's they would try to scare people sometimes ransomware posed as even the FBI and saying if you don't pay us we will put you into jail so they they have some set of trying to appear as an authority like Europol or the FBI and yeah so there are certain certain tricks being used to raise the likelihood that someone pays so these are the skills you need now if you want to analyze ransomware on the other hand what you want to achieve is firstly you will probably want to write detection signatures depending what your goal is and you will probably want to tell the the the customers the the persons who asked you for help hey can I decrypt my files so you would want to know what encryption algorithm was used and is this crackable so that's a an entirely different level of cryptography knowledge that you need there because there's using it is easy but cracking it on the other hand that requires a little bit more than that actually a lot more because the ideal analyst the ideal male analyst knows all of the cryptographic algorithms and can recognize them if he or she sees them in the code yeah of course that does not exist but that's like the skill set that kind that's kind of expected of you and that's really whereas if you just write ransomware one of the algorithms is enough one that's sufficient one that's secure that cannot be cracked whereas you as the mother notice you need to know all of them especially the unsafe ones that you can crack and you need to go into the field of crypt analysis and not only cryptography like knowing how to find weaknesses in the encryption procedures so I think that highlights a bit how useful this knowledge of writing ransomware really is when you are on the other side not that much also you don't need to write ransomware to learn the cryptography part that you need for male analysis you can not do the extortion thing and use cryptography for something good and learn the same and to the question how closely related I'm matter creator matter analyst my answer is not really related because anyone who's a software developer is much much closer when it comes to this skill set than a matter creator no no then a matter analyst to a matter creator so matter creation is nothing else than software development if you think about it it's just software development and everyone who's a software developer could write a matter that wraps it up for the day if you have any questions about my job please ask and I hope I didn't scare you with the matter analysis requirements it's you know that was just an ideal analyst but I think it highlights how interdisciplinary the field actually is so yeah see you next time and thanks for watching


Have you been trying volleyball over there? My only one. Who's the best napchat? No, it was the weekend thing. But the next time you're here, you're here. So how do people down there?  So, hey, Asian people? Asian people. Yeah. Yo, let's get closer and talk about that. Yeah. So clean. So the subway, then people stand in it. Like Singapore? Yep. He was like, this is me at the club. He's sitting there with a can of beer. If the quality is bad, I'm going to go live stream on Instagram. Do you want me to keep going? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you positive? There's nothing I can do about the quality. There's nothing I can do about the quality. Like, I have no Wi-Fi. So, okay. I'm going to keep it on. We will see what will happen. I'm going to disengagerate on my bag. Okay. Sorry about the quality. My bad. This is a secret live stream. Which means, except for the people I tell them, this is my first time that I've played with these people. So, they're announced on the February 14th. About to play the live stream again later. Changing courts. So that requires me to go to a part that I can't film on. Sorry about the quality. I apologize about that. There's not much I can do about that. But, I will try to find Wi-Fi next time.