Worlds without number have I created, wrote Joseph Smith in a revelation on the creation, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God. These worlds are reflected not only in the night sky, but also in numerous stories and narratives that humans have recounted to one another from their earliest beginnings. Only aware of their own vulnerability and solitude in an ever-expanding universe, they have pondered on the nature of their existence and their relationship to beings both lesser and greater than themselves, adjusting these theologies as they gained greater awareness. Humanity has constantly looked beyond, imagining novel ways of interacting with its environment, new possibilities of being, and summoning its creative powers to articulate these visions in compelling ways. What stories are we now telling, and what do they say about how we view ourselves and our place in the universe? What stories will we tell, and how will they shape our environment, our future, and the nature of our existence, for good or ill? What stories is it possible to tell, and what innumerable worlds will emerge from them? We encourage all our speakers to tie their remarks into this theme, and I have the privilege of being the first speaker. There is a danger in a purely technological approach to the world, namely that the world and everything in it is to be turned into a tool to be dissected, manipulated, and used. Technology is all about applying human ingenuity to solve particular problems, or achieve particular goals. And the prevalent reductionism in the scientific sphere dissects what it is examining, and in so doing runs a real risk of killing it. One might say of reductionism, as we sometimes hear about democracy, that it is the worst approach to understanding the world, except for all the others we've tried. In the MTA, we often include human social organizations and efforts, such as religion and politics, in our definition of technology. And here, in a purely technological approach, we run an even greater risk of treating people as objects for achieving our aims. And this is a potentially strong critique of transhumanism that is directed toward a particular vision of the future. The effect of instrumentalizing the world is an increasingly detached individualism bordering on solipsism. And I believe we are seeing the evidence of this in the world around us. How do we in the MTA respond to this critique, one that I believe is quite justified? Well, one proposed approach is to shun or avoid technology or technological approaches to the world. However, obviously, I think this is a kind of nihilism. Technology and the approaches that enable it are inevitable, as they enable us to survive and thrive in the world. The best response to this problem is to complement the technological approach with another approach, one that is explicitly religious. It is to complement the technological approach by cultivating the experience of relation, empathy, and charity. It is to recognize that the world and its inhabitants transcend our efforts to comprehend them, that is, to subsume them into our individual being. Hence we have a Mormon transhumanist association and not simply a Utah transhumanist association. The Austrian philosopher Martin Buber wrote a seminal work in 1923 entitled Ich und Du, I and Thou in English, in which he poetically addresses this issue. He contrasts the inevitable and essential subject-object instrumentalizing of other people and the world, which he calls I-it relationships, with non-analytical subject-to-subject relationships, which he calls I-thou relationships. The English word thou is a relic of its Germanic roots. In German, different forms of address are used with people depending on our relationship to them. Distant or formal relationships use the form z that eventually became dominant in English, nearly replacing all other forms of address. We know it as the common everyday form u in English. But intimate relationships between friends and family use the form du, which is translated in English as thou. As a side note, sometimes we hear encouragement from LDS church leaders to use thou language in prayer in order to show formal respect, strangely enough to a being we dare call father. This is precisely backward. The form thou is the familiar, meaning family relationship form, the one we use when talking to daddy or mommy. For Buber and I-thou relationship is characterized by two aspects, an intense unity and a resistance. And Adam Miller, an MTA keynote speaker a couple of years ago, has done some great philosophical work in the field of object-oriented ontology in his book Speculative Grace, relating this simultaneous connection and resistance to the concept of grace. My talk at last year's conference focused on an attempt to answer a common question directed to the MTA and articulated by Richard Bushman after his own keynote address to us. Where is there room in Mormon transhumanism for grace? And I hope to elaborate a bit further on this today. I love to sing, especially choral music and especially sacred choral music. There's something amazing that happens when a group of people sing together. One choral work that I particularly enjoy listening to is written by John Rudder and entitled Open Thou Mine Eyes, and it begins with a prayer, Open Thou Mine Eyes and I Shall See. In Acts 9 we read, And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven, and he fell to the earth and heard a voice sing unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecuteest thou me? And Saul arose from the earth, and when his eyes were opened he saw no man. But they led him by the hand and brought him to Damascus. And there was a certain disciple at Damascus named Ananias, and Ananias entered the house and putting his hands on him said, Brother Saul, the Lord, that appeared to thee in the way as thou cameest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight and be filled with the Holy Ghost. And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales, and he received sight forthwith. John 9. And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from birth, and his disciples asked him saying, Master, who did sin? This man or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, neither hath this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world, that they which see not might see. Both Saul and the blind man were healed of their physical blindness, but Jesus extends this to spiritual blindness. That is spiritual blindness. Among other things, I believe it can be a consequence of a purely technological approach to the world. This is a world in which everything is in it, and nothing is a thou. In fact, we may lose the very thought of a thou. Why was this man born blind? Not his sin or that of his parents, but that the glory of God might be made manifest. Now we usually read this as meaning that the glory of God was manifest because Jesus healed him and thereby demonstrated his divine power. However, I think another reading could be that in opening his eyes, the glory of God could be manifest to him. The glory and grace of God that saturates the world. We have a challenge as disciples of Christ to see as Christ sees and to relate to each other and the world as God does. One shall God say to them on the right hand, Come ye blessed, inherit the kingdom, prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was unhungered and ye gave me meat. I was thirsty and ye gave me drink. I was a stranger and ye took me in, naked and ye clothed me. I was sick and ye visited me, in prison and ye came unto me. I was poor and ye gave of your substance, lame and ye healed me, blind and ye gave me sight, weak and ye strengthened me.  Then shall the righteous answer say, When saw me ye unhungered and fed thee, or thirsty and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger and took thee in, or naked and clothed thee? When saw we thee sick or in prison and came unto thee? When saw we thee poor and gave thee of our substance, or lame and healed thee, or blind and gave thee sight? When saw we thee weak and strengthened thee? Or when saw we thee sick unto death and raised thee to life? When God shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, In as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, My brethren and sisters, ye have done it unto me. In the words of C. S. Lewis, It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter. It is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load or burden of my neighbor's glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship. All day long we are in some degree helping each other to one of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities. It is with the awe and circumspection proper to them that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Next to the blessed sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ ver elatitat or is hiding. The glorifier and the glorified glory himself is truly hidden. I think Lewis is wrong on this last point. When Jesus taught that what we do to one of the least of these we do to God, he did not restrict it to his followers. Seeing our fellow human beings in this way requires that our eyes be opened in a way that isn't possible through a purely technological attitude toward the world. It is the thou that opens my eyes. Allowing the thou to open our eyes means that we experience both the openness and the resistance offered by the other. The transcendence of every individual being and of nature itself challenge us to relate to them as a thou. In Second Kings, when the servant of Elisha was risen early and gone forth, behold and host, compassed the city both with horses and chariots, and his servant said unto him, Alas, my master, how shall we do? And he answered, Fear not, for they that be with us are more than they that be with them. And Elisha prayed and said, Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha. Many years ago, in an online discussion forum, before the MTA was founded, I and several of the future founders of the MTA engaged with critics of Mormonism, one of them asked if we had ever seen angels. When I read Lincoln Cannon's affirmative response, I had a powerful spiritual experience that I compare to that of the servant of Elisha. My eyes were opened to see the world in a way that let me recognize my fellow human beings as angels. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers for thereby some have entertained angels and wares. Do we see our fellow human beings in the world infused with grace and potential? If not, let us pray to God to have our eyes opened. God will answer that prayer through the world and the people we encounter. They will become a thou to us. One of the great strengths of Mormonism is its sacralization of the mundane. It encourages us to see the world as divine and potentially divine, as infused and saturated with grace, paraphrasing from doctrine in Covenants 88 called the olive leaf plucked from the tree of paradise. The light of Christ is in the sun and the moon and the stars and the earth and the power by which they were made and is the same light that quickens our understanding and is in all things and gives life to all things. Without this light, they are dead to us.  Anyone who has seen any or the least of these has seen God moving in majesty and power. I say they have seen God. However, the light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehended that not. Nevertheless, the day shall come when you shall comprehend even God being quickened in and by deity. Another distinctively Mormon aspect of this is Mormonism's emphasis on embodiment. The soul of a human being consists of spirit, immanence and openness and body, resistance. Every human being may be imminent and transcendent to us in the I, thou relationship. Some of you may have heard one of my favorite Mormon quotes about the nature of God from Charles W. Penrose, who is my great, great, great grandfather, served in the First Presidency. And I paraphrase, he talks about, if God is an organized being, there was a time when God had a beginning. But that God is a manifestation of the spirit which pervades all things, which is the light in life of all things by which our heavenly parents operate, by which they are omnipotent, which never had a beginning and never will have an end. This spirit always existed, but it is not understood or cannot be comprehended except through organisms. If you see a living blade of grass, you see a manifestation of that spirit, which is called God. If you see an animal of any kind on the face of the earth having life, there is a manifestation of that spirit. And if you see a glorified human, there you see manifested in its perfection this eternal, beginningless, endless spirit of intelligence. And we are following the footsteps of those gods who have preceded us in this light. He says, some people may think this rather a low idea of a divine being, but I think it a most exalted one. The person whom I worship, I acknowledge as my father, and we can add mother. Through him I may learn to understand the secrets and mysteries of eternity, those things that never had a beginning and never will have an end. And we are climbing our way up in the same way. In other words, God is both transcendent and imminent.  The outcome, as Buber says of this relation, and some of you may recognize echoes of Joseph Smith here, love ranges in its effect through the whole world. In the eyes of one who takes their stand in love and gazes out of it, people are cut free from their entanglement and bustling activity. Good people and evil, wise and foolish, beautiful and ugly become successively real to them. And so they can be effective, helping, healing, educating, raising up, saving. Love is responsibility of an I for a thou. We are molded by our pupils and built up by our works. The quote unquote bad man, lightly touched by the holy primary word thou, becomes one who reveals. How we are educated by children and by animals. This reminds me also of Brigham Young speaking about revelation. I live constantly by the principle of revelation. I never received one iota of intelligence from the letter A to what I now know. I mean that. From the very start of my life to this time, I have never received one particle of intelligence only by revelation. No matter whether father or mother revealed it or my sister or neighbor, no person receives knowledge only upon the principle of revelation. That is by having something revealed to them. Who reveals? Everybody around us. We learn of each other. I have something which you have not and you have something which I have not. I reveal what I have to you and you reveal what you have to me. I believe that we are revelators to each other. Are the heavens opened? Yes, to some at times, yet upon natural principles, upon the principle of natural philosophy. Revelation comes through both the openness and the resistance, and both are always surprising and not merely subsumed into us. Dideraf Uchtdorf a few years ago in general conference gave a great discourse entitled You Are My Hands, in which he reminded us that we, who are disciples of Christ, are the hands of Christ ministering to the reflections of Christ around us in the world. Grace is experiencing the world with eyes wide open to the recognition and acknowledgement of the presence of God. God is involved in educating a child, in lifting the poor out of poverty, in emancipating women and minorities, and yes, in the development and ethical use of technology to enhance the individual and collective lives of the lesser intelligences, as Brother Joseph put it, to bring to pass immortality and eternal life. So that was a lot of heavy religious stuff. What does all this have to do with transhumanism? It is at least this. The transhumanism of Mormon transhumanists is a religiously motivated one. We seek the exaltation of individuals and communities, as we have in our MTA affirmation. It is not enough to be a geek or a technology fan or advocate. We must learn to see as we are seen and know as we are known. Wherefore, pray unto God with all the energy of heart that you may be filled with this love. President Ochtorf in that talk, true love requires action. We can speak of love all day long, but until we manifest that love in action, our words are nothing but sounding brass or a tinkling symbol. We have our work cut out for us to demonstrate by our words and actions that we are disciples of the gospel of Jesus Christ, also from our MTA affirmation. As we do so, our fellow Mormons and fellow Christians will have less cause to wonder whether we seek to supplant God with technology. They will have less cause to wonder about our commitment to Christ, and perhaps more importantly, they will feel and recognize the love that motivates our commitment to lifting mankind through all the means God has given us in this world, saturated with divine grace, if only our eyes are open to it. Christ enters into thou relationships, symbolized by naming the person Saul, Saul, and then challenging, why does that persecute me? Like Adam and Eve, where art thou? What is this thou hast done? That thou relationship opens our eyes in a way that mere instrumentalism, such as eating the forbidden fruit, cannot do, even though the latter is necessary and inevitable. It is insufficient. When we do likewise, our eyes will be opened to see, as described in the Doctrine and Covenants, whether there be one God or many gods, they shall be made manifest. Everything is a kingdom, or a world, and every world a God moving in majesty and power, and every God a reflection of the one God, worlds without number and worlds without end. Thank you.


presentation so I'm just going to get rolling into it. I'm going to be speaking about the state of front-end architecture in the year 2015 and start talking about some of the trends and tools and workflows. At a very high level just introduce a number of these concepts. My name is Aiden Foster. I'm a front-end architect and my company is Foster Interactive. We're a web development shop that works with, actually with other web development shops of fair amounts, small and medium enterprise, different kinds of businesses where we help implement websites that have fairly, you know, websites that need to be built that need to be maintained and taken care of in the long run. So we need a sustainable manageable website that works in all kinds of platforms. I'm the vice president of the Toronto Drupal user group which organizes the Toronto monthly meetups and help organize this conference. We're the website sponsors so we put together the Drupal North org website and I also run and founded a meetup for SAS which is the CSS pre-processing language. So again a meetup that meets up every month or two to talk about SAS. So I've got a quote from Carl Sagan. You have to know the past to understand the present. I kind of love the 80s ridiculous turtleneck image and really that's important to understand that what we do with our front-end architecture now is a direct result of sort of the history of what's been happening in web design. So we kind of start in the pre-mobile era back when we used computers and the internet was attached to a cable that was attached to a piece of furniture and that was our experience. I used to remember people's phone numbers. I used to have to print or write down directions before we went to certain places and that's sort of the history of where we started when mobile sort of kicked in. But now we move into 2007 and it called us the early mobile age and that clearly began with the iPhone 1 when it came out 320 by 480 screen. The iPhone is significant not because it was the first web-enabled browser but it was the first one that could deal with desktop oriented websites really well on a small screen. So this really began that era of the mobile web. In 2008 then Android came out in the G1 in North America was released as the HTC Dream. In 2010 the iPad 1 came out followed quickly by the iPhone 4 which is significant because it's the first ultra resolution screen device that at least I was aware of followed by the Samsung Note 1 which began this trend in phablets and like you know when that came out my buddy at a Samsung I was like that's a crazy you know that's a crazy device why do you want a phone like that turns out pretty much all phones are like that now so it's really difficult to predict how these trends are going to go and then we move into 2012 Windows 8 came out along with the Windows Microsoft Surface and all these crazy laptops with touchscreen different sizes all over the place that was followed in the same year in 2012 by the Xbox getting a software update which gave it a web browser around the same time all kinds of TVs and smart TVs and all that started becoming really popular and then we move into 2013 Google Glass came out one day after it came out the term glass hole was released upon the internet and so and then we move into 2014 Android Wear so you get a fan you know you get your smart enabled watch which for some crazy reason has a web browser app you can install so yes you can use a one-inch web browser screen on your wrist but maybe just like the phablets maybe that has some use I just not aware of yet in a few years I'll have a web browser on my watch 2015 Google Glass is abandoned by Google but they promised something new will come out so it's a form factor that at least I want to think about and then Apple Watch came out which doesn't have a web browser on it yet but you need to attack it so really what we're looking at here is that we now face in this landscape of all these devices a number of challenges that our pre-mobile ancestors did not face device formats is a challenge we've got to deal with screen sizes display densities user interface inputs and a wide range of of html support on those devices we need to worry about performance so first of all these signals are coming potentially over randomish crappy Wi-Fi networks or 3g networks that kind of thing and then there's a second sort of big challenge that comes with with performance which is figuring out the problem of how do we get a big high quality picture on a high quality device and a small optimized picture on a small screen device this also introduces the problem of testing right so we need to figure out you know we need to decide how many devices we intend on supporting and then we need to install all the browsers that those devices themselves support and then we need to figure out how many screens we're going to worry about so all the screen sizes we end up with this incredible complexity and diversity of the number of vices we need to address planning and design is really hard so you know we got to figure out how to take all the content from our website and cram it into a little phone and we need to think about new design processes that that have evolved in this case and as a result of all of these other problems we now have way more complex code we need like way more lines of front-end code to render a website because it needs to deal with more cases and be more flexible so let's take a look back at what the solutions were in the past as soon as the iPhone came out dedicated mobile websites came out and they were called the iPhone version of your website in 2008 when the Android was released the first thing it did was it said it lied to the user agent which is how detected you had an iPhone and set you to the the iPhone version of the website and so it lied about its user agent so that when you bought an Android you would still get that that iPhone version of the website in 2010 the retina version of the iPhone came out and it also lied about its screen size because it's got this nice high resolution display but you wouldn't want this crappy little thin stripe of a website on your on your retina iPhone so it lied about its resolution and then the iPad one came out and we were doing all the signature detecting and I don't know initially when it came out I'd load up websites on the iPhone and it would load up the sorry on my first iPad it would load up the iPhone version of it so it be this thin little website on your nice tall screen so that's an example of user agent detection gone bad that problem was fixed pretty quickly 2011 all these phablets come out right and they're just all lying about their screen sizes and resolutions some of them are pretending to be iPhone some of them aren't and so this is this to deal with this problem this system w o w r u r f l is this database that is like a master list of every mobile device that's ever been released times the number of browsers they could support and all the rest of that and they compiled this database and then it outlines all the capabilities of every possible device in there so kind of reminds me like who else has a list of all the children in the world's who what they're capable of so this is it's basically like it's like Santa Claus and it's got this big long list of every device that exists and some are naughty and some are nice and so really it also doesn't help when all the devices kind of pretend to be other devices as well so the use of dedicated mobile in 2008 actually was a pretty good solution you know there's three phone formats we need to worry about plus desktop performance well on the mobile one we give it 320 pixel wide picture so it loads pretty quick testing it by the four things and test it planning and design well okay it's double right so you design the desktop and then you design the phone version and then code complexity well it's exactly double right you've got two websites to build and maintain not so much in 2015 right we got all this stuff to build and there's no way you're building a TV a phone a phablet a tablet a small tablet you know and everything in between so it's really just not practical anymore as an approach so I'll call this the early mobile dark ages of dedicated mobile which takes us out to 2011 and then in 2011 the miracle of the Boston Globe was released upon us so this is the first big commercially viable responsive website that came out it was mission critical to their business it was high volume subscription based website and it even came with its own guidebook on how to implement it so Ethan Mercott's responsive design so this is really the beginning of a new change and how we approach front-end development and it really really ushers in what I'm calling I guess the responsive mobile era so following up into that the year 2013 was declared the year of responsive design by Mashable in 2014 it's an interesting development the aoda ontarians with disabilities act kicked in for websites for any company with fifth or any organization with 50 or more people in it and you now need to comply with the wcga to level a standards for accessibility at the beginning of 2014 and it just happens to be that using a mobile first responsive website approach it's much much more conducive for making a good accessible website than it is to fragment across your websites across a number of platforms later in 2014 Shopify reported that 50 percent of all their traffic was on mobile devices and then in 2016 Google mobile get-in right Google changed their algorithm so that if you search Google on your mobile phone it basically filters out any websites that don't work well on mobile phones so by 2015 we have to support mobile there's really two competing strategies dedicated mobile and responsive dedicated mobile is no longer practical so we are now clearly in the responsive era so now we look at responsive design you when it first came out in the year 2012 and we're faced with all the same problems but it really solves only one right it only solved the display format problem because we still have the issue especially with like classic responsive design where we send a high resolution picture to all the different variations of the screen and it squishes and it flows and it fits but it's still a performance issue because you don't want that high res image on your small screen testing is still a nightmare we've got a million devices and how exactly we're going to test them all planning and design it's even worse than the times two case because now we have to come up with like basically entire new methods of thinking about how we design stuff and the code is super complex and there's no simple shortcuts we can use to make that easier so i'm going to talk a little about how some of these solutions have have evolved that aren't responsive design and this is really what we're building in our in our front-end sort of development stack to improve this before i go into too much detail on that i'm just going to talk a little bit about performance and so why performance is important this is from google's breaking the thousand millisecond time-to-glass mobile barrier and so what this is is they've done an analysis of user race analysis and how people perceive websites based off of how quickly they load so if you load a website and it takes 0.01 seconds to load your perception is that it occurs instantly if it takes one second to load the people's experiences they are freely moving around the website if it takes four seconds to load we're now at the threshold where you press you press a button four seconds later your mind will start to begin to wander and that takes 10 seconds we're basically unable to focus on the task so if you if you if you make if your website you click it and it takes 10 seconds for that next page to load people tend to basically forget what they were looking for and you've got a very very high chance of just closing it off you know check your email go do something else because you're probably going to forget what you're doing or go and use a different website so we need to make sure that our websites while many people would argue you know and google's arguing you should be at one second for it to load time we there's a general consensus that four seconds is a pretty critical threshold that we should all remain under while the importance of how fast websites work has become more obvious based off of things like google's analysis we look at the look at the data of what's happened and so this is from when the boston globe came out till last year and this is the average page load size for a website when they're loaded and we can see that it's gone from roughly one megabyte to roughly two megabytes over this period of time so while it's become obvious that it needs to be super it's super obvious that it needs to be a very fast website the size of it has doubled and the speed of our internet has certainly not doubled in that period of time so what's actually happening is is websites are becoming slower even though we know it's important for them to be quick so what are some of the strategies that have evolved to do this and the first i'm going to talk about is the use of a performance budget so this isn't code this isn't this isn't anything other than a workflow process really and it starts off with at the beginning of a project where you're going to do some measurements and you're going to compare you should you should do some load test times on your competitors websites just to get a baseline and see where folks are at then your team collectively that means designers stakeholders developers business managers everyone needs to get on board with this concept and pick a target and you're saying we're drawing a line in sand if all your competitors take 10 seconds to load you're laughing right because if you get to four seconds then people are going to leave their website and come over to yours because they're because the experience is so bad so you pick a target and it's going to be four seconds or less i actually tend to pick four seconds because it's pretty hard to get websites down to four seconds sometimes so then we go through development and cycles of testing and so as you build and iterate on prototypes of your website you remember to test it and it's part of your release cycle and your release management to build and test build and test and if you increase if your test show you are greater than your target you have to redesign something before you push that stuff into code and so that could be redesigned as in you know a common thing is we've got a big masthead on the homepage marketing says uh that's got to be a slideshow so that we can present four of our business sectors instead of one and so you load those in and if that all loads on the page load you're finding a long slow load time you know that's a that's a debate of either maybe there's a code solution so you load one graphic and then lazy load the less the rest secretly behind the scenes or maybe it's a design problem we say actually no we're not gonna we're not gonna put in that feature and then once they pass the test it's time to deploy a couple other tools have come out to help with performance so the automated testing tools so webpagespeedtest.org is one of them and so this is a tool that i would be using for that testing phase where you can just put your site up on a server and it goes and it pings it from a number of different locations on different browsers different platforms and it creates an average of that so you can see where you're at you know 2.25 seconds okay cool we're under our four second limit another very useful tool is the the page speed insights from google and this is just like so i just fired in Drupal North into there and you know there's we've got a 64 percent score because there's all kinds of other optimizations that are possible um it reports sort of false uh false reports sometimes but it's still a very good tool and a quick and easy way to make a checklist to make sure that you didn't accidentally do something that that you can really just improve very easily another of the developments that has been very helpful in the front end world for improving performance relates to images and so one of the main problems is we've got all these different screen sizes and they have different display densities so what is ever since sort of ie8 dropped off the board it's been feasible to use scale scalar vector graphics in your website and so scale vector graphics basically it's just a it's a different format of file that's really good for icons and logos it's not like it's it's not good for like photographic looking things but for for more graphic designary kind of components and what's good about them is they will scale to any resolution and render very clearly at all different sizes and shapes so Drupal 8 has um has scalar vector graphic support sort of built into it they kind of expect you to upload your logo in scalar vector graphic um but the other thing that scalar vector graphic gives us that nothing else does that's really cool is one major optimization advantage is that you can control the color of the graphics that show up in your website with your css code and so what that allows us to do is you know in the past say we have a button with an icon and you hover over the button and the icon color changes you stuff to upload two pictures one of each color of that graphic now we can upload a single svg and it can make these two derivative variants of it simply with css code so that's a that's a significant optimization and it's convenient too right like say you change the color palette a little bit in your website halfway through it you're just controlling that with your css which is awesome the next thing that's really cool and definitely unique about svgs is responsive artwork so this is an example of a logo where if you've got like a large amount of space on your screen it shows up this highly detailed version of the logo and as our responsive website squishes in size so say on the mobile version of that different qualities of the artwork different amounts of information are presented so when it's large it's detailed when it's small it's a very simple uh a simple symbol and none of the wordmark stuff appears which is pretty neat this is in my opinion better than um an alternative approach which is to convert all your symbols into icons because you can do multiple color uh multiple color artwork with svg and you can't do that with icons and you simply do not have this this option with typography to the best of my knowledge another major element so again the the the biggest performance problem has always been pictures how do we get the big picture on the big screen and small picture on the small screen uh the responsive images community group was formed in 2012 it is a bunch of clever folks who are both on the vendor browser side of things uh clever developers and and and sort of stakeholders who are trying to figure out how to make images work well on mobile websites and they came up with this new html element called picture and what the picture is is it's a new tag and basically you load you you make like six derivative images let's say hypothetically of a single picture you upload them to your server and then it just by using this tag in its simplest format just knows which image to load for your screen so that's that's amazing it's supported in chrome now sorry and this format came out in 2012 2014 so it took him two years to sort out and debate this issue and now browsers so firefox and chrome both support it the other browsers it fails gracefully so it turns back into a plain old regular image with a small javascript shim you can actually get it to work on pretty much all the modern browsers so this is an awesome format and it deals with a second problem that wasn't even really really addressed in in the and simply by getting the small picture on the small screen you can see this image of the dog here on the desktop and he's in front of like the white house or something there i'm not really sure but um and then we see the dog on the small display and it let's just assume for for for the purpose of this uh demo that the subject matter of this image we want to emphasize is the dog and not that he's in front of the white house if you just scaled this image down to 320 pixels wide that dog would be tiny and basically invisible to see so we can do art direction where we crop different shapes and sizes of images to put different emphasis on that component so that we can art direct this image so in the context of say there's a blog post about a dog or whatever uh you would see the dog up and close on the small phone but on a desktop experience you get a nice big uh you'd still understand the context of that situation what is also really cool is Drupal 8 comes with responsive image and picture support out of the box by default so now this is relatively simple to do uh right in yeah right right out of the box which is great because we do a lot of work to get this going right in Drupal 7 okay so i'm going to switch over to kind of cody stuff a little bit just to talk about what's been necessary uh to help us build our websites uh we're building them with sass which is a css preprocessor uh basically css as a language was always written to be super easy to read and because of that it's missing many of the cool functions that i would expect from every other programming language in existence and so sass gives us uh basic math functions and and sort of things that we kind of depend on in other languages and you know the complexity of the requirements of css dramatically increased over time but the language itself did not really evolve all that much but really the main thing that i just want to point out about sass that allows us to do things better is we can break up our like crazy gigantic chunks of code into small bite-sized pieces and in sass that's called a partial and so our coders can like work on and multiple people can work on one project at once and i can work on this thing and then someone else can work on that thing at the same time and then basically because all that gets compiled out into sort of machine friendly styles it's been very efficient for helping us work collaboratively on large more complex front-end developments i'm going to change gears back into what's happening in design and so early on in 2012 possibly even a little earlier the concept of using style tiles as a design deliverable early in the project was pioneered by samantha warren and so what this is is you've got four four example style tiles here and this is not user interface design this is simply a sketch to present a feeling and emotion it's a tool to talk about color and style and and these designery kind of components completely independently of user interface design and so this idea of of of separating out user interface from the feeling sort of evolved in this idea we kind of ran with it in the design circles as as as the process of figuring out how to design responsive websites evolved so it became kind of clear that that that component of how we design websites is we're no longer designing like a page anymore it's not like a page in a book because there's all these different flexible flowy screen sizes we're more like designing a system of design to talk about how the various components and brand elements and user interface components all work together as a greater whole and then then by by thinking about it in this way we can we can keep it more consistent across our devices and so the best technology that existed before this is a brand style guide so like brand books for big brands it says how to use the logo how to use fonts how to do banners those kinds of things so it's it's we're now the design has kind of shifted from being more less like page design and more like building a brand guide and so early on in early on in responsive era as well component-based designs kind of manifest themselves as these kitchen sink frameworks so twitter bootstrap and zerb foundation both give you these awesome packages of things where you can download a million widgets and components and then use them in your website really easily i'm not a huge fan of them because one consequence of that especially early on was you get these huge slow payloads because you're loading all this code for buttons that you actually never use in your website and the second thing is they all they kind of tend to look a little like each other the performance issue has been mitigated to a degree since the early days because they they switch these projects so that they use sass so that you can include only the pieces you you need but the still that same principle of like you you're making a ton of assumptions about how the design is going to be implemented your website when you download one of these frameworks so that kind of evolved into another another idea which is the idea of making a roll your own bootstrap and this was kind of so basically for your website you custom build out a custom version of it just for yourself and that was pioneered by what is now manifested as pattern lab by brad frost and this is the concept of atomic design and it's really an interesting it's an interesting way of thinking about how the relationship of user interface elements should be working in design so he talks about atoms and those that might be like a text input field and then atoms built up it so say it's a text input field and a button and then we've got molecules where we start taking atoms and put them together so you could imagine an input field next to a button with a magnifying glass icon on it is now kind of a search input and then we take that search input and say put it next to a navigation bar and now we've got the header for our website so that's an organism and then you might have the header for your website and the footer for your website coming together and that becomes a template of which those templates are manifested across your pages so i don't use these this pattern specifically but we do something analogous and i think even if you're being introduced to sort of component-based design it's very useful to take a look at pattern lab and see how they break things down because it's well thought out and interesting and i guess so from a coder's point of view this is awesome right it sort of defines how we break up break up and divide all of our our different design components but designers i found they have a really hard time with this because if you ask a designer like okay design the text field and then design the button and then put the two elements together after designers don't like designing little bits and putting them together they want to sort of get a feel for it as a whole so we kind of merge the two ideas and this is what's part of our workflow so when we get a comp so this is a website we just launched a couple days ago um and but we received a comp of this website early on and so we basically identified the chunks of it that are the components so we've got the main menu component the mass head component and the actions component and we call it actions it's just our internal naming convention because we're trying to get people to do something right like click on this and go and buy stuff or maybe it prompts you to call or whatever so those are the those those are the separate components that we we've identified in this particular layout they're actually more but you know whatever and now let me spin back to our cso to the advantage of sass hat sass allows us to break up our files into individual pieces so what we have actually done is now taking our user interface component and the file the the actual code that controls how that thing appears is in one file and each each component gets its own separate file so what we're kind of doing is we're taking how we think about design components and how we structure our code and sort of using both analogies to to mirror each other which allows coders and developers to kind of collaborate in a more effective way another side effect of using this kind of structure with these components that are in separate partials on their own is that it's very efficient for reusing a piece so we're using an action in a different place of the website so we've got this on the homepage we could use it somewhere else in a very efficient and simple way so this idea right this is an evolution of how things are how things are changing in our front end workflow experience but we've got another advantage we can do so we've got our sass partials that that generate our our our site's website but we actually now use a separate program called hologram there's a presentation coming up tomorrow on kss which is an alternative way of generating style guides so really literally from the same files we put some text comments in the top and those text comments define what the html of the components are are are defined as and we generate two outputs from the same source files one is our live website the second is a full style guide website that's generated from the same code it works in html we we can test it on our individual browsers our individual components uh you know give it to our clients to approve what these pieces look like while we are building things so we can debate about font rendering and that kind of stuff in a context that's real and relevant to the project rather than by debating about why the font doesn't look like the photoshop comp after the fact so this is an example from the the intercare website i was showing before on the right here here's the nav for our finished or evolving style guide right as you work through the project it started with like two or three things at the beginning and as we work through it we started adding more and more components as more and more pieces of the website get mapped out and it's responsive right so i just stretched the browser in this example and you can see how an action component on the mobile phone and maybe this is a smallish tablet kind of size the layout actually changes so this is a really useful tool to show how variations work on real devices and in addition to that we we started expanding out these components as well so they have variations in design of these particular components so we've got our vertical oriented action component which looks pretty much the same at larger sizes regardless of the component but there's a horizontal variant when it gets small the image goes to the left if you see on the preview example when it's small the image stays stacked so these are just variations of the component and it's very efficient to do this because we have this manifest of all the pieces in our toolbox our own custom bootstrap so to speak that we can we we have automatically documented from our project and sometimes we're coding and we work on this first and it because it's easier to map out and plan this stuff out in the style guide itself and sometimes it's easier to do the code in Drupal first and then we just sort of export the html and copy it over into our into our style guide examples so we take this idea yet another step further so we take this output the automated style guide that comes out of our website and we do what's called automated visual regression testing so this is another tool that we add into the mix and what it does is it runs a test and the test already what it what it what it will do is you tell it to look at in our case we test our style guides we tell it to look at that action component and what it does is it takes a couple screen grabs of the action component at a couple different browser widths and it saves them so let's pretend I ran this test in the past and I run this test you know net right now so it goes and it takes all these screen grabs of the of the new of the website when I run the test it compares them to the ones that has saved in its like backlog of screenshots and these two images are exactly the same so reports and it says yes this test has passed if we were working on the action component and say we changed something right so we changed the font size of something so let's say this was our pre-saved component and notice that the title has gone all caps there and we run the test again it's gonna it's gonna detect a difference and it's gonna you can see it actually shows you so it shows you that this pink stuff is what's different between the two layouts of the website and it identifies this so this would be a test that fails so as we work through our project one of the things we can do is like as we build components out we build automated CSS visual regression tests on them so that it will before before we we we can easily compare to see if I'm working on the action component and I'm changing a bunch of things and I press save I'll run the tests and make sure that there's one fail on action component but if some other component somewhere else say I changed the title on this and it accidentally changed you know it's supposed to only change it on the home page and it changes it somewhere else a different test will trigger and I'll see there's two fail tests or maybe even more so this is a good sanity check to help reduce the testing requirements because it's so many devices so many different things that we need to test on that anything we could do to automate some of that and it's really tricky to catch CSS regression errors sometimes because it could be like it never shows up until you rotate your phone right and so this kind of thing is a is an amazing tool for assisting with that and speaking of testing so this is the craziest setup I have used so far there are tools called browser sync there's another one called ghost lab but browser sync is open source that's the one I like to use and basically what it is is you plug into your main development computer and then you get all these other devices on the wi-fi and you probably want to run them off of cables because you're going to drain the batteries of everything really quick and you spin up the the browser sync server or the run the ghost lab app and as I'm saving and working on my code and browsing around on the sort of controller computer all these devices follow along so as I scroll up and down through them they all scroll up and down as I browse pages they all browse around so at least for manual testing which still needs to be done the automated stuff only helps catch some errors you've got you know a billion screens going and you can at least sort of see everything simultaneously you see over here I'm running windows 8 in a vm you know and a couple different browsers all at once so this is a bit this is the most of it I tried to see how many you could connect before it would start of it flood the network and this this worked pretty well uh realistically though while I'm coding I will have two you know like a phone and a tablet of different os's and formats while I'm working and literally as I save it refreshes the main screen I'm looking at and it refreshes these two devices so that at least you can catch more problems literally while you're working and you get a better like idea of what you're actually coding and it's delivered more in the platforms that it's actually going to be received in so one of the other things that is part of this larger puzzle that is important to take into consideration is how your team names their css in the past we just like do random stuff and name it like front page you know promo thing and that is makes it really tricky to maintain your projects over time because what we're trying to do is make these separate components the second components are both user interface components and their files so there's a number of different competing uh almost language like you know patterns for how you should name your css one is object-oriented css one is smacks one is bem um it in my opinion it doesn't really matter which one you pick so much so long as you get your entire team to sign up for one and sort of commit to it and actually there are now drupal coding standards for how css should be designed so given uh I would say if you're not using any the automatic default is to take a look at the drupal coding standards which are an interesting combination of both bem and smacks um definitely and so modules even contrib modules are now expected to generate their css to these standards but drupal's had coding standards for a long time but this is a relatively new thing that we've got coding standards for css and I add a tool into the mix to enforce my coding standards so this tool is called scss lint and what it does is it's like a strict parent that makes sure that I format my css exactly according to the rules one space too many no that's not good enough too many you know even the naming conventions whether it matches the bem standard or not it can detect this and what's great is that you can completely configure what the rules are right so if you take you know it's more it's more about like collaboration and team uh team oriented development on the front end these days and so if everyone on your team spaces the css components or the sass components exactly the same puts the selectors in exactly the same order so our our linter is that annoying that it's like no you got to put the display stuff first and then the color stuff and then the typography stuff it's kind of like it's kind of annoying and makes me cry a lot because I have to like do all the syntax stuff because it's technically valid right it will render and work no matter what but if our entire team does it exactly the same way and it's consistent across the project and this standard might slowly evolve but it's pretty pretty consistent over time it is so much faster to understand and pick up someone else's code or god forbid your own code from a year ago when you have a linter nagging at you constantly about what is right and not right about your code and if you're in a rush for a hot fix who cares push it up if the linter fails and go and fix it later so it doesn't stop you from getting your work done and so the output of this would look something like this uh you know you're supposed to put a zero on the front of point seven five or you know there's one or two spaces that should be added into the mix so i've got this crazy set of tools right it's like this huge selection of stuff that has been added into our front end development workflow in essence to write css which we used to write with a text editor by hand but to assist all of those problems that have been coming up so what do we do about it we automate all the things and so how do we do that there are two competing major platforms one is called gulp js the other is called grunt js these are systems you install on your local machine and they're task managers and so what these can do is talk to all the other tools that i've been outlining um they're both grunt js is a little bit older so it's kind of got a more mature set of tools that have evolved for it gulp js is newer so it's actually more modern performant and customizable so i we we used to use grunt js and now we switched to gulp js but they're both great tools and so this task automation example is for when i'm coding so i spin up i run this task watcher and what happens is the computer sits there and waits until i press save on some file and as soon as i press save sas fires up and compiles the css then it fires up and compiles the html and the css for the style guide then it takes all my connected browsers and refreshes them and then it sends it over to the lint nagger and reports on all the syntax errors that i'm that i'm working on so basically you know press save does all these actions automatically every time i press save if i've got a syntax error it is so much easier to catch them while you write them than it is to go and fix them all later so it will mag it will display and i'm able to see all my stuff on different browsers as it goes through so this is an example of a second sort of task that we've got set up generally and it's a pre-deploy check right so i've been working on something um looks good to me on my local browser and now i want to get ready to commit this code to a staging server for actual real qa so i run the production build compiles the css does the style guide lints the sas and now we add in a few extra tasks right we take all the images that are in the theme and we use a lossless image compressor we take all the svg graphics that are in the theme we both we copy them and compress them and then do a second step which actually takes multiple different graphics combines them together into one large file which has performance benefits and then outputs that to the site um then after that so we now have compiled css but it does a second pass on it and it looks through my css and it sees any tags that were in there that um that have you need to have vendor prefixes for for older browsers and it goes ahead and it adds those in and then it runs my css regression test to make sure that this change you know i i look through the list of passes and fails there should be if i change one thing there should be one fail and a whole bunch of passes and so that's a double check before we go into into live production and so that and and i haven't got it working yet but you can actually i've seen a lot of people do well not a lot i've seen that it's possible to do you can do an automated performance test on this build as well so that thing can then as a next step go and query google and run it through the the optimizer or or other tools similar to that and you can make sure your load time is before under four seconds so you don't actually push up loaded code once all these things pass then i'm ready to push that commit up to the qa server so admittedly it's not easy to set up all of these tools uh there are a lot of pieces of the puzzle that come into place here but it has some very very significant benefits your team's velocity will increase you will have fewer bugs make it into your qa server so that's fewer bugs to fix and fewer bugs to find it's all it's difficult to push up code that isn't optimized because you you're automating the compression of images and those kinds of things so that you don't accidentally upload an image that should be compressed more and once i think the most valuable is that once you get these somewhat complicated dev stack set up you can recycle them relatively easily between your projects and so you know once you pay your upfront cost of figuring this thing out it's not too bad to transfer it to newer and newer projects so i'll leave you with one word of advice take it in baby steps uh yes i've started my daughter early on on this stuff um whatever you're doing now just add one thing into the mix so if you're not using sass that's definitely the first thing you should add into the mix if you're not doing living style guides i'd say that that's probably the second thing to add into the mix but just you know take it slow add one item into your into your process once you become comfortable with it now it's time to add in a second item and slowly over time you'll end up building a more and more complicated stack and more and more stuff will get automated and you can you know spend more time thinking about what you want to do with code what you want to do in design and less things and less of the mundane tasks that that that we don't really we don't want to focus on i don't want to worry about compressing images anymore so thank you very much and if you have any questions let me know


This study investigated the association between dietary patterns and the risk of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, NAFLD, among middle-aged Koreans. The results suggest that men and women following a prudent dietary pattern had a 22% and 36% lower risk of NAFLD, respectively. In contrast, men and women who highly adhered to the flour-based food and meat dietary patterns had a 29% and 55% higher risk of NAFLD, respectively. Additionally, no significant difference was observed between the white rice and NAFLD risk. This article was authored by Sanga Shin and Jale Fu.


Namaste, welcome to the 15th session of this course of Yoga and Positive Psychology for Managing Career and Life. In this session, we are going to discuss asanas, asanas as the intervention for managing self and career. You might recall in the last session, we discussed about this framework of intervention, yoga and positive psychology we are looking at from the perspective of self development and for the self development, we are going to discuss some interventions. These interventions are identified with respect to the different layers of self as described in the notion of Panchakoshas. So, in the Anvayakoshas, we are going to discuss two interventions ahar and asanas. You may also recall that in the last session, we discussed about qualities of food and how food can be a major intervention for our well-being which in turn result in managing our self and our career better. So, we discussed about the qualities of food and how different prakritis are apt for different types of food etcetera. In this session, we are going to talk about asanas. Before we discuss about asanas, let us look at what is the health situation at workplace. So, there are two studies from these two research ah papers, we are going to look at. First paper of Padma and her colleagues, it talks about the health problem and the types of health problem ah prevailing in Indian workforce and it says that around 56 percent of the people they surveyed across India had new musculoskeletal symptoms, around 56 percent of the total people surveyed in India ah they had musculoskeletal systems. So, some ailments related to muscles and skeletal system 22 percent had newly diagnosed hypertension, 10 percent has diabetes, 36 percent had dysyplidemia, 54 percent had depression, some sign of depression, anxiety and insomnia and 40 percent had obesity. Musculoskeletal symptoms included cervical and lumbar strains with or without this disease ah polyantheglia and the muscle spasm and the heel pain. In another study, it is found that back pain is still the leading cause of sickness absence. Job related stress has an impact on productivity and work ability that has been demonstrated to have the significant predictive value for disability and early retirement. Back pain and job related stress are interrelated and both have an independent and possibly ah negative synergistic effect on work ability. Consequently, workplace health promotion interventions to reduce the impact of back pain and stress perception on work ability should target both physical and psychological dimensions. We can see that the problems related to health are majorly about ah musculoskeletal systems and that has a clear connection with the sitting posture or in general postures ah we have at workplace that is why asanas are very important to address this problem. However, we must remind ourselves definition of mind. We discussed in the previous session the definition of mind given by a C. Gallin colleague says that human mind is a relational embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information. You might also recall that we ah looked at the different components of this definition of mind and we juxtaposed that with the 5 koshas of the human self. So, mind is embodied process it regulates the flow of energy and that is related to ah gross body and energy related aspect is related to the sheath of the ah subtle energy. So, ah asanas have to be looked at not just physical intervention. Asanas have as much impact on mind as our thoughts can have impact on our overall experience of life and as much they are reflections of mind. At the outset for this session I wish to acknowledge these two masters Dr. Stephen Parker ah for his book Clearing the Path and Dr. David Frawley ah for his book Yog and Ayurveda. Asanas ah in nutshell reduce the aches sudden pains and hard palpitation ah. It reduces the internal friction of the subsystems and subsystems within our body systematic patterns, bands and stretches which are part of asanas they lubricate the system and make it flexible. Regular practice of asanas ah enhances the feeling of energy it slow down the breathing rate it tunes the body and regain the inner rhyme. This also results in better sleep which is sounder and more efficient. In fact, the very first studies of impact of yoga actually looked at the impact of yoga asanas on quality of sleep. Asanas help keep the body supple and strong while energizing the mind and boosting self confidence. So, you can see that asanas are performed at physical level they are most evident at physical level, but they also have great impact on the quality of the mind and quality of our day to day experience. Doing asanas on a regular basis has been shown to enhance brain wave coherence and improve functions such as memory and intelligence. It lowers the stress related hormones in the body and it increases both mental and physical performance. Asanas also contribute to emotional stability how it contributes it contributes to emotional stability by increasing the amount of neurotransmitters such as serotonin in the body which is known to induce good mood and sense of happiness. Not surprisingly asanas are great intervention for positive psychology. To understand this in more detail we need to look at the connection of body, physicality, emotions, quality of mind and how it is connected to our day to day general experience of life. We need to understand that body is a physical structure within which our habits dwell and lived out. This is the beautiful explanation given by professor Stephen Parker. So, we can look at our posture. So asanas are posture not only for few moments asanas are posture for life. So just reflect on our posture for example is standing posture when we are standing is it solid balanced aligned relaxed so that there is no fatigue or we have tendency to lock our knees in tension. While standing do I sink my chest downward so that our shoulder seem to carry the weight of the world throwing your lower back out of alignment and causing your head to droop forward and muscles in the neck to become tight enough to give you headache. That is what Stephen Parker asked in this chapter on asanas. So asanas have to be looked at general posture of life as well why it is important. Why posture is important? Why we need to look at body posture so closely and how they are deeply connected to our experience of well being which in turn result in managing self and which in turn has impact on managing our career. So many forms of body work actually try to create awareness of this kind of body armor and help to learn new habits. We learn to dwell or we indulge into different thoughts and those liking and disliking are called asanas in the yogic literature that likes and dislike is reflected in the body in different ways. So asanas should be looked at as a way of exploring the very deep aspect of the self also dwelling in the flesh and fabric of our lives. So we use central skill of yoga the application of mindful awareness to conduct the exploration. Yogasanas can help us to integrate every aspect of our nervous system including our emotional experience, sensation, cognition, motivation and sanskar the deep rooted pattern of thoughts which result in to pattern of behavior which result in to pattern of situation we keep finding around ourselves in our day to day life. It is useful to quickly compare yoga and particularly asanas with the exercise the physical exercise the component of asana in the yoga is parallel to the physiological aspect of consisting bending, stretching, strengthening and holding a specific position. So to that extent asanas are similar to exercise however yoga and asanas themselves they render health benefit that are similar to exercise but also go beyond it. So yoga practice are actually driven by goal of experiencing the calmness of mind by performing the physical posture. That is done with the breath regulation and that requires a meditative state that requires full attention to the activity full attention to the moment we are doing. So if we have a quick comparison of the yoga and particularly yoga asanas and exercise we can compare these two things on the metacognition aspect, energy aspect and oxidative stress aspect. Yoga is a metacognition that denotes an aspect that makes you different from various forms of exercise. What is metacognition? Metacognition of knowing the process of knowing. Yoga practice aimed at building our metacognition because of the mindfulness nature of the practice of asanas. Because of the need to observe ourselves while performing asanas it enhances our metacognitivability. Exercise generally does not have that requirement, paying attention is not very important aspect in the exercise and that is why you must have seen that people keep listening music or keep talking and it is very much allowed in the regime of performing any exercises. Second aspect is energy. So, yoga practice actually facilitates the energy conservation that it does by economical utilization of energy for mental and physical benefits. In the exercise we cause the energy utilization to support the body for physical exertion and its metabolic needs. So, in the exercise we utilize energy and the aim is to enhance the physical exertion. Third aspect is oxidative stress because asanas have this meditative element into it, meditation practice induce the uniform change in the biomarkers and that in turn result into uniform change in the behavior and that in turn is reflected in the improved cognitive performance and decreased oxidative stress. Whereas exercise lead to erratic changes in the biomarker because it does not have the meditative element in it.


Hey, what's up welcome back to the podcast now in today's episode. This is a I got a very long text from this coach who's been listening to these episodes. And I think this he he was very brave for sending me this question. I've never talked to him before. This was his really his first question he's ever asked first ever interaction. And this is a little bit different. But he said, Hey, Ben, I want to start a business, but my wife doesn't feel like that's going to be a good move for us right now. She has a job, I have a job. And I think she's worried about not being stable. If I go full time into this business. And she's very unsure that this is something that I should do. Now, the way that my mind operates is not going to be the same as everyone else. But here's what I'll tell you because I'm married. My wife does not work. I am the sole provider. Right. And I told her before we got married, that that's exactly what's going to happen. I'm going to be a sole provider. She's not going to work. And, you know, like, that's not normal in 2021 for relationships to be that way. But for me, that's what I wanted. And so I had to be very intentional with how my business is operating in order for that to happen in the first place, right? But to answer your question here, if your wife doesn't believe in you, and she doesn't want you to step up and do this, then there's probably something that's happened in the past that has made her believe that this isn't a good move. Maybe you've tried to start something in the past and you didn't follow through.  So there's a reason why she would tell you that it's not just because she doesn't want you to fail. It's there's something underneath. And if it were me, I would sit down tonight. I would turn off Netflix. I would have her throw her phone in the other room and I would have a sit down conversation. And I would say, Hey, I need to know why you think this way. So this way, I can give you more confidence when I do start this that this is this is what I want to do with my life. Because if you feel called to do something, you should do it. And as a man, you should lead in your marriage. And I can't do that for you. That's something that you should be doing. And if you really want to go after something, I feel like you need to go after it, but it's not going to work the way it should. If you have someone who you're married to, if they don't believe in you, because at the end of the day, you'll be working on it, and you'll have this this negative force against you, you need to have her be in alignment with what you're doing. And the only way that's going to work is if you start communicating better, right? And I'm not like a marriage counselor here. But what I will tell you is like, if you want something, and your significant other doesn't want you to do that, then you need to figure it out. How should how should I talk about it? Like understand why? And again, the name of my podcast is the sales show. So in order to persuade people, including your husband or your wife, whoever, you have to be good at selling them the idea of why you're going to do something. And you have to sell to yourself why you want to do it. But if you need the approval of someone else to move forward here, it's going to come down to sales, right? It's going to come down to sales. But I would start by communicating. And I promise you, your business is infinitely easier when you have a partner who supports what you want. It is drastically more difficult if that person is pulling on you all the time, they're not wanting to work on that project, they're not wanting you to stay up late and do that. I can't imagine how my life would be right now if that was the case. So go talk to her, figure it out, and go start your business.


I would like to invite panel members to come here for the Q&A section. If you have any questions from Nayla, please just raise because we're going to take it out and we'll forward it to her and she could get back to you. Okay, shall we have the first round of questions? Maybe we collect five or six questions at a time. Testing. Good morning, thank you very much. My name is Mike Jones. I'm based at the Swedish Biodiversity Centre. I'm also chair of the IUCN's Resilience Task Force. So this session has been particularly interesting to me. I actually have many questions but I'll confine myself to one and that's aimed at Magnus. And that's to ask him to what extent has he considered history and the history of responses to climate change, the consequences of climate change to societies in Europe over the last couple of thousand years. My understanding is that climate change of less than one degree actually can have very profound effects. So it's not just about the interaction between Europe and other climate change-sensitive parts of the world. I think it's also about what it's going to do here in Europe. People who think that we can manage, can cope with, adapt to two degrees of change, I think they're dreaming unless they start to take the lessons of history into account. So my question is to what extent are you doing that and feeding it into climate change policy? Thank you. Yes, next. Yes, thank you. Holger Hof is my name or the Stockholm Institute here. My question also goes to Magnus. It's half of it is a comment just to understand you're right. You're not focusing on developed countries only. You're also addressing increased vulnerability and developing countries, I suppose, because they are also more dependent, some of them on imports, for example. And the second is the question whether you address some atmospheric teleconnections as we are exploring with our colleagues at SRC, which either through climate change or land use change in other regions may very strongly affect the situation in distant regions via changes in precipitation and other long-range effects that may be caused in quite different regions. Thank you. My name is Ose Johanesen. I'm at the Stockholm Center. And my question goes to Frank Tumalov. And you have given me the same question. So I'll just give you this question back. The choice of countries that you have in the base is for that and taking consideration to if SEI is going to focus on, how do you say, where the issue is critical. Just coming back from the Philippines yesterday, the women there are very empowered and maybe looking at how do you choose countries based on maybe gender inequality and difficulty in working in sectors like DRR, like for example Pakistan and India, maybe where the issue is much more critical and a women's struggle. So thank you. I'm Bo Chilin, at SEIassociates.com. I also wanted to ask Magnus. I think that it's very interesting with these categories that you mentioned, biophysical, trade, financial, human, et cetera. I was just wondering two things. First, will you make any distinction between climate disasters and more long-term climate change in operating this? The other question is really that human covers so many, or people as you said, covers so many different categories of problems. It can be health. It can be political impacts. And I wonder if you could comment a little more about this. Thank you. Yes, hello. I'm Jör-Anil Somaxper. Also, SEI Associates.com. To Frank Tomala, this work on gender and disaster risk reduction. I'm thinking about timing. Earlier we heard from the work on clean air and how we come into international processes. Just on time, after 15 or maybe 25 years of research at work, you seem to be starting now. And we are talking about post-2015. What are your entry points to policy impacts in this short-time perspective? Thank you. Thank you. I'll jump in first then. Question on history is a very interesting one. And within this set of projects, I'd say we're not specifically aiming to do that, but there are two things that come up. One is the general scenarios work there, SEI does. And we've mentioned there the discussion about learning from historians, developing future scenarios with historians to gain perspectives on past change as something we'd like to do. So we're definitely thinking that way. Another is, I think your question was partly about the limits to adaptation, which is quite a few gaps in the research there. And that's something that, again, SEI would like to focus on more. What are the limits to adaptation? And then again, within that work, then you could look back to look at previous limits and how they are often a lot lower than assessments of adaptive capacity and vulnerability tend to show. So not within this line of work, but very much get the point. And then Holger, yes. So in terms of the index itself, that would be something global. And indirect impacts are important for all countries, not just rich ones. So there's a policy message there that is relevant to richer countries, but indirect impacts should be part of adaptation and planning in all countries. And some emerging economies or low-income countries are extremely trade-dependent, for example, for food security or for other resources. So these issues will no less important there. And one of the case studies we'd like to focus on is actually about food security in Senegal, for example. I'll say something more about that tomorrow, I think. And quickly, though, on extreme versus long-term. So again, within the idea of this index, then it will be quite crude and it won't necessarily distinguish between the difference. It will look more generically at exposure to risks through the pathways, even though those risks are different if they're about extreme events or if they're about long-term changes. So I think in our conceptual work on indirect impacts, then we distinguish between the two, but the index itself might not get that level of subtlety. And then the people pathway, we will concentrate our research, having set out this conceptual framework, maybe more on the overall global context and on the trade pathways, partly because they're the least researched, I'd say. So on the people side, human health has quite a good amount of research on the impacts of climate change on human health. And the migration story is a very complex one. There's a lot of disagreement in the literature on the extent to which climate is a driver of migration under what circumstances, what kinds of migration. So we're choosing not to venture too much into that field within our project in the short term, but to sort of note that there is a discussion there that clearly, especially over the longer term and under higher-end scenarios, the movement of people across borders is going to be an issue of some sort. I'll pass it to you. Thanks also, and Joran, for your questions. I think they're not that easy to answer, but as usual, it's a combination of things. And I don't remember asking you that question. But thank you for getting me back on that one. I think in terms of the choice of countries, it's a combination of selecting countries that have a higher level of poverty and low development and that are highly vulnerable, that have been identified to be highly vulnerable to climate change and that have experienced a high frequency of disasters with high impacts. The selections also, based on some preferences, UNDP have had not just those countries, there have been some other countries we've discussed. We did not discuss the countries that you mentioned. That's probably partially because of our own inexperience in working in some of those countries and the strategic decision to focus on Southeast Asia rather than South Asia. Even though there's been a lot of discussions on our opportunities and our capacities to work in those countries, and I agree with you that clearly some of those countries are even more vulnerable and that gender equality is even greater. And it's partially because of our own capacities and our own opportunities. I've only just recently rejoined SEI 10 months ago, so this is one of the opportunities that I've identified. And we've also created a lot of human capacity in our Asia Center in terms of looking at gender and hazards and gender and climate change. So I hope that goes some way towards answering your question. Yoran, in terms of timing and entry points, again SEI capacity and opportunity plays a great role there. In some aspects we're coming to this quite late. There's been quite a lot of work on this and this is going to be one of the challenges, I think, overall with our new initiative on disaster resilience because it is a very crowded field. There are a lot of players out there and we have quite a lot of experience in vulnerability and resilience research, climate change, adaptation, and some other related areas of work, but this is the first time we're trying to bring it all together and building on, just saw Roger Kasperson in the audience there. Hi, Roger. Building on our work a few years ago of the poverty and vulnerability program and the risk life, the Hudson vulnerability program. So sort of with some of the stuff we're going full circle now, which is nice to see. I think there are a lot of opportunities in the policy arena to influence what's going to happen with the post-2015 HFA even though it is just sort of literally around the corner, but there are a lot of policy platforms, dialogues and things like that happening, at least in Southeast Asia at the moment, that when we can hook into and that we are hoping to have an influence on. And the final thing that I have mentioned in my presentation, which I forgot, is that I think one of the really great opportunities for us right now with the UNDP is that they're just about to launch their new strategic plan for 2014 to 2017, which focuses on regional cooperation, of course, poverty reduction, gender equality and building resilience to disasters. And UNDP and Asia see SEI as a key partner in the region. So I think that's our opportunity. Thank you. So we have the second round of questions. Actually, we don't have much time because we need to answer the questions, so maybe two more questions. Yeah, two more questions. Very short question. Yes, it's Arnold Rosemary at SEI Stockholm. A bit of an appetizer before I launched with respect to intestinal diseases. And I missed that message from... I mean, human beings are extremely vulnerable to a few things and one of them are multi-drug resistant intestinal bugs which are going around the world. Ha, I think maybe you should maybe tell us a little bit about how critical the situation is in Vietnam. There are people in this audience from Caroline's Institute that are actually working in Vietnam on this question. It will be bigger than AIDS. It will be much, much bigger than any of the intestinal disease we've had so far because this is multi-drug resistance in many species. And I think you can connect it to poverty, gender, climate change, what have you, peri-urban, urban questions. But I think that will bring us together in something for SEI. Thank you. Could you kind of make the question short? Can you repeat the question? I'm sorry. Now, just to say, if you know something about the work on multi-drug resistance in Vietnam. One more question? Sure. Sorry, also for Magnus. You mentioned your index. Thanks for sharing it, by the way. The idea is great. You mentioned it sort of as an awareness-raising tool. But this is a process question. We all know once an index is out there, it's open for all kinds of appropriations and misapplications. And I was just curious if you thought about what types of policy applications it might be used for and whether you can mitigate against any of the wrong uses. And the second question is the cocktail glass on one of your slides. Thanks. Sorry, we cannot collect any question now. If you have any burning question, we still have a few days here. So please come to our member and we could discuss directly. Magnus, I do want to... I'm glad you mentioned the cocktail glass. I forgot about that. Do you know what cocktail it was? It was a cosmopolitan. And the point was it's sort of bringing a more cosmopolitanist flavour to adaptation. We're all in this together, that sort of thing. So, well spotted. In terms of the policy use or the way in which to raise awareness, part of this is motivated by interviews we've done at COPS and some early work on the case studies. And the idea of indirect impacts is quite new to some people, which I find quite a surprise. But a lot of people need a way of coming into the topic and people love maps. So it's really quite a simple communication device to start people thinking about why certain rich areas or certain parts of the world that are very trade dependent are coming up as the red areas, not the green, safe, blue areas of the other maps. And in terms of guiding against its misuse, then I guess we just have to be extremely clear about how it was developed and what its limits are. And that's something that you find in the other vulnerability indices that they're very opaque sometimes in how they arrived at their selection of indicators and how they've weighted them or put them together and they don't do that. So I think it's just a big health warning on the front of its limits. Thank you. The question addressed to me, actually I think we could discuss outside this panel because the time is finished and I need also some time to really recollect and we could share more about what's the situation and program in Vietnam. I hope it's okay with you. Thank you very much panelists for sharing.