Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. I'm here at Wikibon headquarters. Fusion I.O. is on the move again. The company just announced that it's buying NextGen, a hybrid flash array company. We've been talking a lot at Wikibon and Silicon Angle about the impact of flash. We had a big flash cube this week. For the last 15 years, Function has been moving out of the host out to the array. I'm talking about Function like sharing and snapshots and replication and data migration. All the storage function that companies have made billions of dollars selling. Fusion I.O. is coming at it from the other end of the spectrum. They started at the server. That's smart because Function's moving back. What Fusion I.O. is doing is they're essentially developing a platform and it's making a lot of the Function that has moved out into the array less relevant. Fusion I.O. is coming at this from the server moving out into the storage hierarchy and with me to talk about that is David Floyer. David Floyer is coming to us from the West Coast. Good morning, David. Good morning, Dave. Yeah, so this is a pretty interesting announcement. Fusion I.O. has been making some moves. We saw they recently acquired ID7 and now NextGen. First of all, tell us about NextGen. Where do they fit? NextGen are a hybrid storage company. They use Fusion I.O. storage cards, the PCIe cards. And they have aimed clearly at the hybrid market. They have three different sets of models. The high end going up to 100 to 300,000 I.O.s and the low end around the 50 I.O.s. So very suitable for heavy workloads that small organizations have but combining for a small organization that only wants one or two devices combining flash for the performance side and storage for the lower cost side. So now talk a little bit about the ID7 acquisition, how that fits in and really what are my real question here is what is Fusion I.O. trying to do? Help us squint through that. Well, they bought ID7 which has all of the open source code and intellectual property around the stack. So that's providing the Linux kernel and almost every vendor now is using Linux as a starting point. So it's providing the drivers, providing the code in Linux for the new type of I.O. Let me stop you there. Let me make sure I get this right. So Fusion I.O.s game, their main game is to really extend memory with a persistent flash medium at very high speeds, a little lower cost than memory but persistent and much, much faster than spinning disk. And what you're saying is that ID7 and Fusion I.O. are essentially helping to improve the Linux code, the Linux kernel and the entire stack to make it more friendly for this type of architecture. Did I get that right? Is that correct? That's correct. And with the acquisition of Next Gen, they will add all of the code as well to that, which is the code that traditionally was provided by the storage vendors. So it's the snapshot, the remote replication, synchronous replication, all the thin provisioning, et cetera. All of those sort of capabilities will be essentially open source and just take out all of that, make them own that stack and completely disrupt the whole of the array industry in the long run because the amount of money that will be there available will be very little. They'll be integrators as opposed to innovators in that area. You're saying they being the traditional storage array business will be integrators rather than... So Fusion I.O. is innovating. Let's double click on this. Fusion I.O. is the only company with the capability through software to do what we talk about as atomic rights, the capability to write directly to that flash and bypassing not only the spinning disk but bypassing disk protocols which are very chatty and very overhead intensive and not good for performance. So that's, first of all, that's a correct statement, right, that Fusion I.O. is the only one shipping that today. That's correct. And that's required for very low latency. So what Fusion I.O. are extending their reach from the very low latency into the low latency and providing that stack of functionality on a Linux base as part of the ecosystem and if they provide soup to nuts, all of that capability and provide that platform, that's their goal. That's what they're trying to establish. So when you say platform, you're talking about an end-to-end platform from server out through the network to be able to share these devices across clusters, is that right? That will, assuming that they established the initial platform for the low latency and very low latency, of course that's where they are going at the final resting point. So that's a long-term direction? That's a long-term direction. That's quite a few years off. But Fusion I.O. is attacking the hyperscale market. Obviously Facebook and Apple are its two big customers. The stock was down last quarter and revenues are still under pressure because those two big companies have slowed down their buying. This is a typical pattern for Fusion I.O. But the stock's up today on this announcement and I think largely because Fusion I.O. is dramatically expanding its total available market, David, isn't it? That's right. It talked about the number of new customers that is had in the government in different areas above 5 million and a whole raft of them above a million. So it's trying to extend its customer base away from just the whales in the area and being the platform that the newly emerging cloud service providers are going to use, the new storage stack. This is the one that they're going to use. Going after that market, skating to the park of where new innovation is happening from the ISVs. It'll be in these cloud service providers and providing the platform, an ecosystem on which they can then develop additional products. Okay, but the hyperscale market today is growing very fast but it's still relative to the overall market. It's still small, right? I mean, it's a niche. You talk about the size of the server and storage business. The hyperscale market accounts for what? 10%? Less than 10%? Yeah, if you include the Google and the Microsoft and not all that's available, it's probably around that 10%, 15%. But it's growing substantially larger than the overall marketplace. Will the hyperscale trends, that notion of scale out and high degrees of automation, the market that FusionIO is going after, will that trickle into the enterprise in your opinion? Well, it'll trickle in in two ways. It'll trickle in because all the innovation is likely to, the ISVs, the new ISVs will start life as a cloud provider and they're putting their bet that that will happen fairly quickly. That is happening now that that's where the innovation is going into the marketplace. And we've seen that ourselves in Salesforce.com or ServiceNow or examples like that where the root of new applications and new ideas has come from those cloud providers. They're taking the bet and I agree with them that that's where a lot of the ISV market is going and that will move processing from inside IT to the cloud. And then that being the main thrust there they will establish their platform as their ecosystem, as what cloud providers and then eventually of course those ISVs will produce packages based on that technology for enterprises and it's likely that they will produce the package and have a reference architecture for it. Okay, so the SMB gets access to this technology through the cloud service providers in your view, not directly? Yes, the SMB, they will eventually get through that. But like everything else it's going to be very much a mixed market for a long time and if they can own that part of it they think the pendulum is swinging towards that and that's where the package is. Excellent, all right David Floyer thanks very much for stopping by and clinging us in on this big announcement from Fusion IO Fusion IO expanding its total available market acquiring hybrid flash vendor NextGen for $119 million. David Floyer really appreciate your quick response here and good talking to you. Good talking to you, have a great day. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll be back next time with more breaking analysis here from Wikibon and SiliconANGLE. Appreciate you watching.


Thank you for the introduction. Welcome everybody, well thanks for coming to my talk. It's really nice that you're here. Well, my talk was announced, it's about speeding up your website. My name is Mike Reinhardt, I live in Rotterdam. I really like Rotterdam, it's my city. I'm about making your website faster. I like fast websites, I don't like watching slow loading screens. I started when I was a kid, I always had a creative mind. I didn't make it to art school or an art academy, but I always kept myself creative. By the 90s, I started fiddling in GeoCities. I don't know if anybody knows about GeoCities. Eventually, I started building my own web page. My first web page online, Microsoft's front page. Anybody familiar with it? Cool. It was fun times at that time. We didn't really care about speed or optimizing for mobile devices, because there were no devices to browse the internet with. We had a lot of creativity to create all kinds of websites. The internet then web 1.0. We didn't call it that way, but that's what it was. It was one-way communication, basically. One big information dump of webpages linked together via hyperlinks. It was fun times, but over the years I developed my skills from webmaster to web designer and eventually a web developer. Today there are millions of pages and a lot of devices that we have to optimize our website for. It's very important these days that our website loads fast, especially on a mobile device, because we have to compete with billions of websites. If you look at your statistics, I don't know about your statistics, but if I look at my analytics, almost half of the traffic now comes from a mobile device. Sometimes even more than half. People visit your website from a mobile device. This was a statistic from 2016 from Steadcounter, and it shows that mobile has over surpassed desktop traffic. Especially on mobile speed is important. According to research, it's almost 53% of your website visitors. They will leave your site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. You could lose more than half of your web traffic before people even see your site. If you leave them waiting with some white loading screens and don't show them that anything is happening, people will just click away. Now this data is also not unseen by Google. Google is paying a very close attention to speed. Last year they introduced Google's speed update. I don't know if you probably heard about it. Last week there was an article in news that after this update, until now they saw that the average speed of web pages improved by 20%. This really helped to speed up the internet. It takes a long time for web pages to load. According to Google research, it takes more than 15 seconds for a mobile site to fully load. If you think about it, people will leave your site if it takes longer than 3 seconds. That is way too long. Because web pages are carrying a lot of weight, we've seen over the years that the internet has become heavier and heavier. We are loading a lot more JavaScripts, images, videos. The average web page nowadays, I've seen figures of 5 megabytes or even more. According to research, more than half is over 2 gigabytes. If you consider that the old classic game Doom, which is a first person shooter with 3D graphics, multiple levels, sound effects, is only 2.3 megabytes. Today we are still struggling to just put out a piece of web content in the same size. We still have some work to do. All this weight is really affecting the user experience. We keep our visitors waiting with loading screens, slow loading web pages. It's affecting the overall experience of our web visitors. They don't measure time with a stock watch.  When they see a white screen or things don't move, then you get people like this throwing their foot. Also the big companies, they also know this data. There are a lot of reports, for example Amazon. They saw that for every 100 milliseconds, their website loads slower. They lose like 1% of sales. That's like billions of dollars. Maybe we don't make billions of dollars with our website, but still, who wants to lose money? You can find a lot more reports on this website. It's called WPOStats. If you ever want to convince your client or boss to optimize your website, you can find here a lot of interesting reports on what kind of effect it has on sales, visitors, and engagements. Web performance is not really a one-time thing. It's like a continuous process. It's a journey that you continue to monitor, optimize, and measure. Measurement in my eyes is part of web performance. Before you do any optimization, you want to start with measuring. Find the starting point and see what is slowing you down. There are a lot of tools these days that you can use. All of these tools are free to use. Most of them are web-based. They offer all kinds of interesting figures, like load time, page size. Pingdom test is another popular tool among the WordPress community. Web page test is like the industry standards. All kinds of figures on how your website is performing. All these figures tell you half of the story. They don't really tell you how fast your website feels in the eyes of the visitor. There is one story about elevators in the old days. I don't know if you know the story. In the early days, when in New York they were building high-rises, elevators were introduced. People were complaining how slow the elevators were. All kinds of engineers were thinking about solutions to speed up the elevators. It cost a lot of money using faster engines to speed up this elevator. One clever engineer came up with a solution. He said we shouldn't focus on the elevators, but we need to focus on the users, on the people inside the elevators. It was a clever invention to put mirrors in the elevators to distract the people inside the elevators. After they put these mirrors in the elevators, they asked the people if they thought the elevators were faster or not. They said these are much, much faster. The speed was exactly the same. That's the story about elevators, but back to the web. How can we get people engaged? How can we keep them focused on our website? The most important metrics for that to keep in mind is the first content for paint. That's when you first show something on the screen that something is happening. You want to quickly show something that stuff is loading up. There are several other metrics like first meaningful paints, but then there is also the time to interactive. That's actually the time when people can start interacting with your website. That's what we should be optimizing for. Where do we start with optimization? We can go to Google and type in how to optimize my website. We will get millions of results. I think there are thousands of tactics to speed up your website. Back-end, front-end sites. You name it. I just listed here 10 performance tips. I don't know all the tips and tools, but I know a lot. I just thought, let me list the top 10. We will go through these. For that, I'm using my own site project. It's the Miami Guide. I was talking to Ian. Miami is one of my favorite cities. I go there every year. I came up with the idea to create a website in WordPress and started a travel guide. I go there every year. I have my social media profile. It's a really fun city. But enough about that. The travel industry is really a competitive market because there are lots of travel sites. One way to win from competitors is definitely with speed, especially in the travel brands. You see a lot of travel websites that are really loading slow. They are using a lot of video, of course. The first thing I do is start a measurement in Lighthouse. Lighthouse is a tool that is freely available in your browser, the Google Chrome browser. I ran a report. At this time, when I measured my site, it was 6.5 seconds. Time to interactive.  When you scroll down, Google gives you several optimization tips. The first tip is to defer off-screen images. Off-screen images are images that you don't see immediately above default. When you visit the website, somewhere at the bottom of your website, there can be images that are not immediately visible.  One way to do that is a lazy way is to use a plugin. I'm currently using this one. It speeded up my site to 3.9 seconds. This was on desktop and we are in a mobile-only world. We need to optimize for mobile. When it comes to web performance, you can start out with all kinds of tweaks, but that's just like putting a band-aid on something. Most importantly is to have a good hosting platform, so a fast loading server. With HTTP2, there was a talk this morning, talking about the advantages also for security-wise HTTP2. HTTP2 is also a lot of advantages for performance, loading more than two times faster. Another thing you want to do is run the latest version of PHP. Also security-wise, it's important, but performance-wise, by running the latest version of PHP, also it's a recommendation for WordPress is to run PHP 7.3, I believe. I don't know what's the latest version. That can help you to speed up your website like three times. Enabling Gzip on your server. By enabling Gzip, you compress your files and it's compressing it to smaller packages, so also you will save lots on bandwidth, and a CDN, so a Content Delivering Network. Is everybody familiar here with a CDN? If you have a website that's visited from multiple locations all over the world, people will be able to access the files on your server much faster because they will be accessing it from a nearby server. Well, tip number six, images. Well, that's still one of the main quick wins to speed up your website, so it's like the low-hanging fruit. A lot of web pages these days are using images, so we need to make sure that we are using the right format, right sizes, and that they are compressed. There is a guide by Eddie Osami. Here's a whole guide on how to optimize your images. You can basically give a whole talk about how to optimize your images. I really like this tool. It's a tool from Google. It's called Squash. It's a web-based app, and the app itself is like 15 kilobytes, but it really compresses your images really nicely. You can select all kinds of different formats, and it's available right in your browser, so you don't need any other tools. Another way to optimize your images is to use a plugin. If you work with a lot of people like content editors, you can install this, and automatically images will be updated when they upload images to a blog post. You don't have to worry anymore about optimization for images. Well, number seven is caching and compression. You want to cache and compress everything there is on your websites. By using a plugin, you can easily, well, this is one of the most popular ones, WP SuperCache, you can cache your websites. There will be also a talk after my talk about web performance, and he will talk more in depth about caching. Besides caching, you want to make sure that your code is merged and minified. When you normally visit a web page, when you go to view the source code, you will see a lot of white spaces between all the codes, well, merging and minify combines your codes, takes out all the white spaces and unnecessary characters, and the overall package is a lot smaller, so that it loads much faster, especially on mobile devices. There are plugins for everything on WordPress, also for merging and minifying your codes. You can use auto-optimize. Well, besides optimizing your codes, you want to make sure that you are serving clean codes. What I mean by clean code is that you don't want to serve any code that is not being used or unnecessary, especially with plugins. If you have plugins running on your website, that you're only using, for example, on your contact page, but not on your own page, well, that's still a weight that you're serving to all your pages. There's a special plugin called the plugin load filter, and with this plugin you can disable other plugins, not to load on specific pages, so that you only serve what is really needed on that page. And, well, a final tip is to offer a valid code. So you want to make sure that the code that's on your page that has no errors. You want to make sure that your style sheets, well, they load in the header, and that all your scripts are at the bottom of your web page. Otherwise, you will get these messages from Google that you are loading blocking resources. And also you want to check if there are no images that are 404s, images that are not found. So you want to make sure that code is validated. Well, after all this optimization, you want to constantly check what is the effect of your optimization work. So at the time I checked, my site now loads in 3.8 seconds on a mobile device. So it's quite okay. You can go for 100%, but I didn't set it as a goal, especially on mobile. If it is below 5 seconds, it's okay. So besides optimizing, you want to make sure that you keep on monitoring it because your site is really dynamic and it changes. So it's important that you monitor how your site is doing. So there are a lot of tools. For example, Google Search Console now also gives you alerts if several pages are slowing you down. So you will get notified and optimize them. What you can also do is set performance budgets. So there's a tool online that's how to calculate performance budgets to see how fast your site needs to load and then calculate how much weight your page needs to be. And also in Google Analytics, they now offer the page speed score. So you have a nice overview of which pages are slowing you down so you can optimize them as well. And they even give suggestions on what you need to optimize. So Google really helps a lot to make our website faster. And how fast you need to be is I think really depends on your competitors. So if you want to compare, if you don't know who your competitors are, well, there is this website. It's called a similar web. You just fill in your own website or as a competitor, it's also possible. And it will give you all the web pages that are competing with you. So it's a handy tool. And then just check how they are doing and make sure that you're running faster than them. There are other and more advanced tools. This is Speed Curve. It's a really nice tool to benchmark yourself with other websites. I used this in the past with clients. But it's really nice to see where you stand with your competitors. And you can make it a real sport to stay the first in line. So now that we basically talked about all the three topics about measurement, optimization and monitoring, this is going to really help you to get fast and also stay fast. So, and I think that's the most important thing of web performance. So, and that was my talk. Well, thank you for being here and having questions. So I have some more tips on my website that you can download some guides.


When using PubMed, you may find the number of results that it retrieves to be overwhelming. Remember, PubMed contains over 30 million citations. It would not be uncommon to have PubMed retrieve well over 10,000 results on a topic. In fact, searching for the concept cancer yields over 4 million results. Luckily, there are strategies that you can use in PubMed to refine your results and make them more manageable and relevant to your needs. In this lecture, we'll discuss PubMed filters and field tags, looking at how they can be used to narrow and focus your results. While I'm focusing on PubMed, it's worth mentioning that most biomedical databases such as M-Base, Synol, and Psych Info offer their own set of filters and field tags as well. Let's start by talking about PubMed filters, which not only allow you to narrow your results, but also enable you to focus your search without adding additional terms. Continuing with our search on the relationship between cell phones and cancer, we want articles that focus on children and are from the last 15 years. We can use the filters for both of these criteria. First, complete your search in PubMed. Then, look to the left-hand side of the results screen. To limit to the last 15 years, use the date slider and adjust it to 2005. Doing this will automatically adjust your results' date range. Alternatively, you can scroll down to the publication date filter and limit to articles from the last year, last 5 years, or last 10 years. If we want to limit the results to those that focus on children, we need to scroll down on the sidebar and click on the additional filters box and then click the age filters. Here, you'll also see additional ways that you can filter your search. A few popular options are article type and language. For our search, click on age and then select the specific ages that you'd be interested in. I'm going to click on the child birth to 18 years, child 6 to 12 years, and adolescent 19 to 24. Next, I'll click on the show button. Now these filters show up on the filter sidebar. Clicking on the box next to child 6 to 12 years limits the search to the specific age group. If I want to try a different age group, I can unclick this box and then click on a different option such as young adults 19 to 24. One more thing that I'll point out about filters is that if you're looking for high quality articles, you can use the article type category to quickly narrow your results to publication types that are considered high levels of evidence. For example, I can narrow my search on cancer to reviews in order to find summaries of multiple studies on a particular kind of cancer. Or I can limit to randomized controlled trials, which is considered the strongest form of study design for evaluating interventions and diagnostic tests about cancer. One feature that I find frustrating that's important to note is that the filters that I turn on will remain on even if I move to a different search. To turn them off, click on the clear all link just above the results or on the reset all filters button on the bottom of the sidebar. I'll finish talking about filters with a word of warning. If you want to find the newest articles and or if you're conducting an exhaustive and comprehensive search such as a systematic review, you'll want to be very careful about using filters. While filters are perfect for quickly narrowing and focusing a search when you need a small set of articles on a topic, using just about any of the filters available in PubMed will automatically exclude the most recent articles published. That's because most of the filters rely on mesh terms to work. Therefore articles that haven't been indexed yet will automatically be excluded. Also the coding behind the filters isn't immediately obvious so it makes it difficult to report your search strategy in a way that can be easily replicated by others. Thus when doing an exhaustive and comprehensive search it's recommended to use search terms instead of filters. For example, if our search was being used for a systematic review, rather than using the age filter I might search for children by including the following mix of mesh and keywords. The mesh child or child with an asterisk or youth with an asterisk. Like filters, field tags are also helpful for quickly accessing a few relevant articles. But on like filters, field tags are standardly used when conducting a systematic review. A field tag is a special tag or code that is typed at the end of the search term. The tag goes in brackets and tells PubMed exactly what fields to search. For example, I would type Osler William Bracket AU Bracket to tell PubMed to look for articles written by William Osler. To better understand how field tags work let's briefly talk about the default fields that PubMed automatically searches. When you type a search term in the PubMed search box for example the term cancer, PubMed defaults to looking in all fields. This means it retrieves results if the word cancer occurs in any field such as the title, author name, author affiliation, journal name, abstract, language, mesh terms, or author supplied keywords. This is certainly a more thorough way to search but it can lead to a large set of results and a higher chance of retrieving off topic results. For example, this article on Seminella came up when I searched by cancer because it was written by an author whose name is J.L. Cancer. When you use field tags you're telling PubMed the exact fields to search rather than letting the database search in all of the fields. For systematic reviews the two most commonly used field tags are the TIAB and TW field tags. The TIAB tag tells PubMed to search for the terms in the title or abstract. So if we're looking for articles that discuss the relationship between mobile phones and cancer we can use the TIAB field tag to reduce our result numbers from around 1500 to 200. And from these 200 results most should be on the topic because we know that the citations either have the search terms in the title or they are mentioned in the abstract. If you want to be a bit more exhaustive in your search you can use the TW field tag. This tag searches the title and abstract but also includes the author supplied keywords in addition to many other fields. However, what's most important about the TW field tag is what it's not searching. It does not include author affiliation, author last name or journal name. These fields tend to retrieve the most off topic results. Not sure which to use? Test both options. With field tags there's some flexibility. If using TW captures relevant articles that you might otherwise miss you'll want to use this broader tag. If instead TW is causing a lot of noise you might want to tighten your search with the TIAB tag. This is where you might want to reach out to an informationist for advice on the best approach to take. When you only need a few relevant articles the TI field tag becomes extremely useful. It looks for results in which the search term appears in the title. When you're scoping the literature to get a sense of what's been published on your topic using TI is a great strategy to employ. For example, if I use TI after cancer and mobile phones my results go down to 23 and I'm only getting results where my search terms are in the titles. While you might miss out on articles that don't mention the terms in the titles this is a quick way to force relevant results to the top. Field tags are versatile and can be used with other search techniques. For example, I can develop my search and include nesting to group like terms together truncation to search for multiple endings and double quotes with my phrases along with the TI field tag. If you have trouble remembering what abbreviations to put in the brackets you can also apply field tags through PubMed's advanced search. Click on the advanced link underneath the PubMed search box. From here you can type your search terms and use the pull down menu next to all fields. In this menu select the field that you'd like to search. As soon as you add your search to the query box PubMed will add the proper formatting so you don't have to. At this point I've only skimmed the surface of what you can do with filters and field tags. If you would like to know more check out PubMed's user guide. Access it from the PubMed homepage by clicking on the FAQs and user guide link underneath the learn heading. For a full list of field tags visit this guide and click on the appendices link on the left hand side and then click on search field descriptions and tags. In closing it's important to remember that one of the reasons that PubMed is seen as a go-to database for biomedical literature is because of its extensive collection of citations. But if you find yourself in a situation where you need to narrow or refine your search filters and field tags are two search techniques that can help.


Common challenges in English for Japanese native speakers If you ever find yourself driving in French Canada, you will be stopped by stop signs that say it, which is stopped in French Almost all drivers in North America would know that this means stop because it's the same octagon red stop sign In Japan it's very different, stop signs are triangular with Japanese script on them but, beneath the Japanese You can find English subtitles which read stop In fact, if you travel anywhere in Japan, the majority of signs and announcements related to travel are offered in Japanese and English English has been taught in Japanese schools since the American occupation after World War II However, according to an English proficiency index in 2017, Japanese English proficiency is 35th out of 72 countries and compared to other Asian countries such as Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and India, Japan ranked lower It's a boy annual, October 29, 2017 Nationally, English is a mandatory class in schools for students aged 12 to 18 years old but many Japanese English learners struggle with speaking English Demographics, grammar differences, and culture are some of the factors hindering Japanese speaking ability in English Limited exposure to English Compared to other countries in Europe, Japan has very limited exposure to native English The Japanese government has taken steps to solve this problem, such as increasing the budget for English education in public schools and creating programs such as the JET program Which hires native English speakers to live in Japan and to work in the Japanese public school system Japan has historically been isolated and has only started opening up in 1868, at the beginning of the Meiji period Before 1868, Japan had a closed border policy which lasted around 250 years As Japan began modernizing and growing, Japanese nationalism along with stigma towards English also grew which affected English education and attitude towards the language until the conclusion of the Second World War Pale off Saga are 2015 The population of Japan is 98.5% ethnically Japanese, with a very small minority of Korean, Chinese, Peruvian and Brazilian workers World population review, 2019 With such a homogenized population, the need to speak or learn English in Japan is very low Compared to France, another country which struggles with English, Japan has a lot less English in their language media In a survey conducted on 1,000 Japanese men and women, 69.9% felt their English was very poor or poor S.I. 2017 Although Japan has very limited exposure to English, the Japanese government has recognized this issue Along with the importance of the English language and has taken steps to increase English exposure in Japan Different language groups The difference between English and Japanese, like languages, is another reason why Japanese language learners struggle with English For English speakers, learning Germanic or Romance languages is not a big jump compared to Japanese Which is often rated by as a difficult language to learn for people in America Japanese and English grammar is very different Japanese uses thousands of characters borrowed from Chinese called kanji 46 phonetic symbols called hiragana and another 46 symbols called katakana for foreign loan words English on the other hand only uses 206 latin script characters to produce various sounds Several English sounds such as C, F, L, Q, V and X are also absent Japanese There are also major differences with the tenses in both languages English has three basic tenses, present, past and future Japanese has two, past and non-past Japanese is written from right to left or vertically from top to bottom as well See cheer November 29, 2011 The word order in both languages are different as well In English the word order pattern tends to be subject, verb, object order Whereas Japanese follows a subject, object, verb order pattern A word for a word translation of Mr. Yamada watch as TV in Japanese would be Mr. Yamada TV watch The many differences between the two languages make it difficult for Japanese language learners to learn English Different cultural norms The culture and communication between Japanese culture and most English speaking culture are also very different In Japanese culture, communication is often indirect and relies less on words to convey context and more with expression and tone Ambiguous speech and understatements are often used to communicate the speaker's message subtly and to maintain harmony throughout the conversation to prevent a loss of face Cultural Atlas 2019 In order to maintain face, many learners are often afraid of making mistakes which negatively limits their ability to experiment with the language Although English is taught in schools, the efficacy of the teaching methods is very poor in Japan Majority of schools only focus on grammar, reading and writing with limited speaking All junior high school students in Japan need to score well in order to get into a good high school Which are designed for students bound for university This puts a high expectation on students to pass tests and for teachers to effectively teach their students to pass these tests Studying to pass a test isn't the most effective way to learn a language And you also can't effectively learn by limiting the amount you speak and experiment with the language It isn't all negative for Japanese education As previously mentioned, the government is making changes to make English more prevalent in the Japanese educational system Are you ready to start your teaching career abroad? Almost all Japanese students learn English and can effectively read and write in English But a large majority struggle with speaking the language Limited exposure to English, large cultural and grammatical gaps, missing sounds and ineffective teaching methods are just some of the factors affecting English learning in Japan Japan tends to be a strong country in many things such as environmentalism or sports However, English speaking isn't one of its strong points Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad Send us an email or call us toll free at 1-800-490-0531 to speak with an ITTT advisor today


I'm sorry. If you already answered this, did you name the car? Yeah. Hondo Hondo. Yeah. I saw that on. Yeah. Why do you have to name the car? I mean, not like I don't have a name. You don't have to name your car, but often people do a little weird. Not to name your car. I'm just saying. What is it? What do you just call it car? Yeah. I call it the car. Get it. I put it in the truck. I put it in the car. There's there's there's no individualizing. Yeah. Something wrong. Although I have I have threatened my wife that things go really south. I'll try to I'll try to jump the Golden Gate Bridge in it. Oh, well, that's uplifting. Yeah. Wait. If I drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, what would you be jumping off of it with the car? You would drive off the Golden Gate. I would, I would hire a ramp to sit there for, for perhaps the first two minutes or whatever. And to see how fast I could go. Like, so I could, so I'll clear the, the suspension. Very elaborate. It is. Yeah. Like you've really thought.  Being like how weird that you would name your car, but I've got music picked out for when I drive my car, I'm fully off the Golden Gate Bridge from a ramp. Yes. The music will change depending on the situation. Now that we've taught you how to solve story problems, it is time to, to wrap things up. Any, any final thoughts from any of you. Oh man. Yes.  That's the dogs advice to dogs. Don't eat the purple berries.   Talk about food at this point while you can. Oh, okay. Geez. Don't eat berries, water rationing. No, no, no, it's good. You should. We could leave on an uplifting thought, thought or not. We don't have to, Sarah. What do you got? Words of wisdom. Have a bagel. Eat a bagel. I like it. Like all this, you know, no starch stuff. Just eat the bagel. It's great. Rodgers like shut the Phoenix down for it because no water should exist there. Hey, Dr. Whiskey, I didn't say that. I just said, oh, we don't know why Roger hates Arizona, but we apologize on his ban. Roger, there are two rabbit species in Missouri, according to the state government. The eastern cotton tail is the most common and then there are swamp rabbits down in the boot hill area. Nice. Sounds like something people at St. Louis would call people on the Illinois side of the river. Swamp rabbits. But it would be delete expletive swamp rabbits. You know the difference between a cotton tail and a swamp rabbit? Cotton tail doesn't know how to use a turn signal. Midwestern joke stuff. That's not even a Midwestern joke there. I just it doesn't make any sense at all. It doesn't make any sense. But I love it and you're right. And you're absolutely right, Tom. Every Al's diner should have a kindly Pat Marita running it. I apologize for that. He does sound like Amos, by the way. I didn't think I didn't think it until someone said it. But now that's all I can hear. Yeah, I told you. I really don't hear it. If there's there's there's a lot of similarity. Amos, that's your Halloween costume. Maybe it's just a freak. I can only hear certain freak. Although choose it wisely. Yeah, what kind of basis do you want to be?


I'm John Mesco, I am with the Sustainable Farming Association. We're an organization out of Minnesota. Some of you may be familiar with us. With me today also is my wife Lisa. Lisa, in addition to being my wife, is a partner on this project. She worked with us in developing the entire proposal as well as carrying out some of the curriculum development that we're working on right now. We are farmers in addition to this. We farm in East Central Minnesota, we raise grass-fed beef as well. We use Twitter, and if there's anyone here that uses Twitter and you want to let folks know in your network that you were here and you learned about this, well, there's some Twitter handles, mine and laces as well, and then we use the hashtag Adjust2015 if you're doing anything with that. Real quickly on the Sustainable Farming Association, very similar organization to what you have here in the Northern Plains Sustainable Ag Society. We've been partner organizations for many years. Our key focus though is on farm to farmer networking. And so our solution, our way of arriving at solutions to Sustainable Ag issues is bringing farmers and farmers together to develop solutions, present solutions, share solutions with one another. We have a lot of partners in that process though. SARE obviously is one of those. Lots of other organizations, government agencies, other non-profits, other entities that we work with to carry out our mission. And that came in handy when we developed the team to put this project together. I was the project lead, Dr. Valentine Caddow from the University of Minnesota worked on human subjects as well as helping to develop the curriculum or the, excuse me, the surveys and the interviews. Dr. Mike Roseman from the Agri Wellness Incorporated. He's a syndicated columnist and a rural psychologist. And he really was helpful in helping us understand the importance of dealing with people when they're talking about difficult subjects. And you'll see why. Jan Joanidis from Renew in the countryside, Lisa, as I mentioned, Jerry Ford and Jason Walker are SFA staff members. We also had an advisory team. We have three farmers on there, Dennis Engel, Josh Reinhards and Chris Kudner. Kevin Marl from University of Minnesota, Kevin Palante from Minnesota Department of Agriculture. Tony Nye from Ohio State, Keri Stroh from here at Northern Plains and Beth Larrabee from the Iowa Organic Association. So as I said, obviously this was funded by NCR SAR. The genesis of this project really comes out of the understanding that, yes, we need more farmers on the land. We need more people farming in sustainable ways. We need to continue to transition corn and soybean land into farmland that is raised or managed more sustainably. But we need those farmers to succeed. When we have a constant cycle of people coming into farming and then hitting a wall and dropping out or reducing their impact and then another new farmer coming in, that's not helpful. And so that's really the genesis of the project. How do we keep farmers in business for the long haul? So in the work, we surveyed over 200 farms and farm families from all over the country. Obviously most of those folks were in Minnesota and the surrounding states, but we had people in the survey from the West Coast, California, East Coast, New York, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Canada. We had all different types of farms represented in the survey. We had mid-sized, small-sized, large hog operations, dairy farms, beef cattle farms, vegetable farms, corn and soybeans, fruit and nut growers. Lots of different types of producers represented in there. We selected a subgroup of those and conducted face-to-face one-on-one interviews where we went into a lot of depth about how they started their farm business, what some of the challenges they ran into, what some of the successes they had, what advice they might have for folks coming in. And the final phase of this is to develop an add-on curriculum that can be used by beginning farmer education programs. It's not a full-blown new beginning farmer ed program. It's an add-on curriculum that can support existing programs. So I want to give you just that we don't have time to give you all the information that we collected. It's available on our website and I'll give you that link shortly. But I want to give you a little bit of a flavor of some of the information we found out. So 71% of the people we talked to said that when they started farming, they intended their farm to be a full-time income. And in reality, about half of those people make less than 25% of their net income from the farm. This is like at three to five years into their farming operation and a third of the people make less than 10% of their income from the farm. So the result is that of our surveyed people, most, the vast majority of people are way below where they had initially planned to be. We don't call that failure necessary, but it necessarily, but it is an indication that things, something didn't match up. Something played out differently than what they originally planned. And so consequently, most people are not satisfied with their level of income on the farm. One of the quotes that summarizes a lot of what we heard from people, a lot of what we ran into. We have dozens and dozens of anecdotal quotes that we collected as well, but this one kind of summarizes what people are thinking. The reality of how hard it is to take on all that we planned and dreamed and to build our business from the ground up has been a shock. I admire people who have gone before us and set up great farm businesses, especially the people who have done so without a partner. There are just so many hurdles to get over when starting a farm business. And that's really, we heard that message a lot throughout the process. So we took all this information, as I said, there's information, more data on the website. We took all this in and we developed a set of learning objectives, things that if we could have a chance to take these people through before they started farming would address most of the issues that they highlighted for us. So those learning objectives that are in this curriculum are to acquire a basic understanding of soil literacy. As you just heard, we're talking about how do we build successful farms that starts with the soils. So one of the things that we want to incorporate in that is the soil literacy. The next thing is identifying progress benchmarks. We really heard from people that they were surprised when they got three, five, seven years down the road and something happened. Or they woke up one day all of a sudden they were out of cash. Or they woke up one day all of a sudden somebody got hurt. One of the farming partners or the labor, the person providing the labor got hurt and then that threw their whole business out of whack. So what we want to talk about, and I'll give you an example of that later, is how do we set those benchmarks in place so you can begin thinking about if this were to happen, what would we do? If somebody were to be injured, if we lost labor, if we had a child, how would things change when we get to that point? So we'll talk about benchmarks. Basis for business plan assumptions. Anybody who's made a business plan, you know you can't predict the future. You have to make assumptions on what's going to happen. But what we found oftentimes is people are making assumptions really literally out of thin air without a whole lot of foundation underneath them for whether or not this is a good assumption. And so we, in our curriculum, we take people through their assumptions and we just have them explain what their basis was and in the process uncover some of those flaws. The most successful farms that we surveyed, the one distinguishing characteristic of those farms was that they had developed community networks. That those successful farms had a set of advisors, formal and informal, maybe a paid consultant but also maybe a neighbor that knows more about this particular enterprise than they do. They had networks of community people, they were involved in a church or they had some kind of social activity in the community. They had a network of support around them. So that's one of the things we talk about in the curriculum. A lot of problems popped up with employee management, particularly on small and mid-sized vegetable farms which very quickly as they grow they need to add labor. That type of farm brings labor in quickly and so a lot of problems early on as they bring in labor, how do we find good labor, how do we pay for good labor, how do we keep them employed. And contrary life patterns, in some of the more tragic cases that we uncovered were situations where somebody had an addiction that they managed in their life but when they started farming all of a sudden the stress and the pressure of having to make a farm payment or to make ends meet all of a sudden that underlying life pattern that they were able to manage when they had a full time job, paying the bills, all of a sudden now that pops up and becomes a major problem. So we're going to identify those things, business plan alternatives, what is it that if we do need to shift gears, if we do need to make a change in midstream, where are we going to go from there. I'm going to have Lisa come and talk a little bit about the last objective that we're covering and that is family roles in the farm and children, what that entails. Apologies, we rehearsed this last night but we had a different computer. So I mentioned to you that I was going to talk about benchmarks, okay. So when we say benchmarks, we would like to see people think about red lights on the dashboard of your car. Does anybody have a dashboard light that doesn't go off? Okay, yeah. We had a car once where the light burned out and it went off so we were okay. Some lights on the dashboard are really not that big of a deal, right. I mean my mechanic says sometimes just the gas cap being loose can cause the light to pop on. So well that's not a big deal but some lights mean you need to stop the car right now, right. Anybody have that one come on? Like if you don't stop right now you're going to do some permanent damage to the engine. So what we want to do is have people think about what lights on the dashboard of their farm operation over the course of time. When that light pops on, what are they going to do, okay. So I'll talk a little bit about that. So what are the indicators of a need for change? So we ask in our curriculum, we ask people to lay out the course of their farming career on a timeline. Now this is not something that is obviously perfected or etched in stone but it's something to get people just thinking about what they might do. It's not hard and fast but it gives you that perspective of the long term. So if we want to look at somebody that's going to start farming at age 20 or 30, we give them a 30 year window that's reasonable and so we take them from 2015 out to 2045. And so some of the, particularly some of the smaller farms that we talked with, they made a decision early on they were going to incur credit card debt to get the process started. So a lot of people do that. Might not be the best option but that's what people do. So we ask people if that's, for example, if that's what you're doing, then when will you have that paid off? Put it on the timeline. Make it a firm commitment. Maybe you've decided you're going to start farming with some kind of rough used equipment but your goal is to get a better tractor five years down the road. So put that on the timeline. Maybe you have promised your spouse that you're going to remodel the kitchen at some point. You know, just stick with me. Stick with me. I know this isn't right but as soon as we get this farm going we'll remodel that kitchen. So put that on the timeline because you know what, if you don't, if you don't actually fulfill that commitment that's going to be, may be an issue that affects the sustainability of your farm. So a lot of people start farming with kids in that five to ten year of age range or maybe newborns for that matter but a lot of people that we talked with wanted their children to come into the farming operation at some point in the future. And so what we tell people is alright well let's put that on the timeline. You know if you're, if ten years from now you want to have the farm operation far enough along that you can support an additional full time worker, put that on there and then in addition to the timeline when we go further into this we connect financial benchmarks to this. So in other words what's your debt to asset ratio need to be ten years down the road in order to have that happen. What kinds of financing will you need to make that happen?   So that's a red light on the dashboard. So we're just, just asking people to take that.  Now again we know that you're not going to say today what things will look like 30 years from now but to begin thinking and to begin having a long term perspective and say if this doesn't happen that would be a red light and we're going to make an adjustment. Now I'm going to ask Lisa to come up. Thank you. Alright. Okay. I want to add too that the feedback that we received from the farming participants were was overwhelmingly positive. So they were very grateful to be able to share their stories in the hopes that this would help others. So thank you for funding it. Alright. With regards to the family farming and roles on the farm, with our surveys we found that 45% had experience with farming, half had little or no experience, 34% had no formal training in farming. This is why family tensions arose. So we found that there was a need for knowledge about integrating farming and family roles. So we decided to equip them with a framework of knowledge and we did this through lecture, workshops, worksheets. And just briefly we went through the roles on the farm. We encouraged them to keep their off-farm jobs. Farm work and chores, we encouraged them to define what those look like on their farms. So whether they were a CSA, a grain farmer, thank you, or a livestock farmer, a combination, they needed to define what chores are specific to their enterprise. And then family management was also a role that needed to be discussed. So we took them through what it looked like to have children on the farm and covered child development issues on the farm, different roles that children could play. We talked about child safety and we also talked about the benefits of raising children on a farm. We talked about household management because we all know that's another role that needs to be played when you're farming. And then accounting and marketing, we received a number of comments from the participants that indicated that accounting and marketing were aspects of the farming enterprise that overwhelmed them. They were surprised at the amount that would require of them. So it's definitely a role that needs to be considered and somebody needs to take it. And we had some tools that we could refer them to to learn further. And then networking is another role, so there would be business networking and then social networking for the family, so community networking. Let's see. Oh yeah, we also referred them to Strengths Finder, Gallup Strengths Finder. This is a personality test. Dr. Michael Roseman was a very helpful member of our team. He is a farmer and a psychologist as well as an syndicated columnist. And he agreed this would be a good tool for them to use. So we encourage them to take that test, it's very simple, it's inexpensive, and it helps them to identify their top five strengths. And what Gallup found in their research was that people operate better and are engaged more in their work if they operate within their strengths. So we also referred them to a tool that Dr. Roseman provided for us and that is how to have a family business meeting. And then conflict management and mediation are referrals for people who just need a little bit of extra help in this area. And then what we had them do is have their own family business meeting, just the two of them. We wanted to start out with the partners and we had them go through the rules on the farm with some of them not having any kind of an agricultural background or very little farm training, it was helpful to sit down and discuss what rules need to be taken and who can take them, who fits best in those roles and strengths finder can also help with that as well. And we had them pencil that out for their farm and also engage in discussion. Okay. Yeah, so we encouraged them to continue having family dialogues as well with their children to encourage children to take ownership if that's a part of their picture in life. So communication was a big element of what we encouraged. So that's it. All right. So the result of this work is a curriculum we call the new farm reality check. It's there's several different formats for that, a short workshop. We could probably do something in an hour, but we really like to have two or three hours. We've presented the short workshop a couple of times already. We have a day long workshop that is currently in development. There's a couple of items that we want to add to that, extending that beyond the depth of the short workshop. That would be a day long something like a pre-conference workshop like you've all seen and heard. The website for this project is right there, sfa-mn.org slash adjust 2015. And you can see the more of the results. You can see a lot of the anecdotal information that's out there. And that is where we will be we're behind on posting the worksheets and that kind of stuff out there. That'll be in the next few weeks. We also have at sfa our own beginning farmer development program called the deep roots farmer development program. And this will be incorporated into that curriculum as well. Like I said we've presented already a couple of times. We've presented at the Iowa Rural Psychology Association, the Minnesota Organic Conference we're presenting here today obviously. The SFA annual conference which is being held February 14th in Ding, St. Joseph, Minnesota why you should try and come there we'd love to have you. And as I said the deep roots farmer development program and more. So if you know of events or activities or organizations, groups that would benefit from this let us know. We'd be happy to work with you to bring this to you. I want to say thank you to Sarah, Beth, the whole team. Thank you for your help in getting us through the process and getting us here to talk about this. Your team has been a wonderful asset to us promoting the work and talking about the work very, very helpful. So I do think we have some time for questions if there are any. Thank you. The question is what types of farms are most successful in becoming full time operations. We saw no distinction in that data. Now, as I said, most of our data, most of our farms were in the mid to small size. We had all of them represented, but we were skewed that way and one of the challenges that we've identified is trying to get a wider range of farms. We had some representations throughout, but I'd say most of them were not small and mid-sized range. Most of them probably were not livestock farms. So we didn't see a distinction. All farms had the same types of issues, but I'm a little hesitant to say that's any kind of definitive answer. Yeah, thank you. The question is what kind of prior experience did people have? Lisa had some information up there that I think was 45 percent had no formal training. 34 percent had experience and 34 percent had no formal training. By formal training, we meant that they went through a curriculum or a degree program of some kind. Some people would say, well, that's growing up on a farm is formal training and we had that as a category, too, right?  And then the rest of the folks identified their training as coming to sessions like this, coming to conferences, reading literature, going to workshops, no, like, program. You follow what I'm saying? The question is, were those who had a farm background or some kind of formal training more successful in becoming full-time farmers? In our survey, no. They were not significantly more successful in becoming that full-time operation. I think one of the distinctions is what is a full-time farmer? If you're, for a lot of people, if they're just paying their bills and only work they're doing is on the farm, they might consider themselves to be a successful full-time farmer. If you were to look at it from the perspective of a small business, a non-farm-related small business, agriculture is the only business we think that that's okay, right? If you talk to a small business owner that runs a business in town selling t-shirts, they've got a plan for their retirement, they've got a plan for their college education, for their kids, they've got all that planned out. And if they're not meeting those objectives, they don't consider themselves successful. But in agriculture somehow, most people think, well, we've got money to put the crop out this year, we must be doing okay. And so does the family have health insurance? Does the family have the kinds of things they need to grow and prosper? So in answer to your question, we did not see any distinction in that. That's a great suggestion and I'll repeat that and summarize that for the video. There's a suggestion from the audience here, a very good one, that we take this material and adapt it as needed to help farms that are maybe stuck in a rut or are looking to begin a new enterprise or stretch or grow in some way to bring some of this to help them in that development process as well. And I think one of the things on a much broader scale that we need in sustainable agriculture is leadership development. The corporate ag side of agriculture, the commodity producing side of agriculture, has a full-blown leadership development program for their growers. And it's kind of almost like a career path for someone in that role and we need that. We desperately need that. And so that's another share grant coming down the line.


CHAPTER XX. IT'S A WAY THEY HAVE IN THE ARMY. My family in Canada have since remarked that although my letters had invariably been cheerful throughout my imprisonment, from the time I set foot on English soil, they reflected the deepest despondency. That could be explained in part by the fact that un-chirful letters could not pass the German, but could pass the British censor, but more particularly it was due to the fact that I became entangled in the interminable red tape of the army system, and instead of meeting with the warm sympathy that an exile longs for, met, on the part of the army, with cold suspicion, however kind some individuals were to me. Simmons and I were not permitted to leave the boat until the military came for us, so far so good. We were taken to the headquarters of the general officer commanding the district. He briefly examined us and, good-naturedly, gave us some money out of his own pocket and tickets to London, where we were ordered to report to the war office. Getting in the smoke, as the army has named that city, we proceeded the next morning to 14 Downing Street and sent our names in to the official we had been directed to by the general. He was in Mufti, whoever he was, and received us kindly enough. We were closely questioned about our experiences, particularly in relation to our guards, food, treatment, and so on. He also asked us as to the amount of sickness among the prisoners, the constriction of the country, and so on. Dismissed, we made a dash down past Big Bend and the Parliament buildings for the Canadian Pay and Record Office, where at Millbank it overlooked attempts. A sergeant took our names and, after time, took us into the Paymaster. Simmons drew his money without difficulty. But I found that I was fifteen months dead, and was told that I could get no money until my identity had been re-established. I protested so much and so, in fact, that I fully expected to land in the clink. No use. I was sent out on the street, talking to myself. We next called on Lady Rivers Berkeley and Lady Drummond to thank them for the very great kindness of themselves and the Canadian Red Cross in sending us our parcels regularly, and without which we would have surely have been too weak to have made our escape. Lady Fakora, the wife of our late commanding officer, was out of town, so we did not get to see her, much as we desired to thank her for similar kindnesses. Simmons was single, he was sent to Canada at once and was promptly discharged. I had a wife and family waiting me there, and I wanted badly to go to them by the next boat. My wife had been receiving letters from me during my fifteen months in prisonment. She had regularly received her separation allowance, the Canadian Red Cross, and many eight kind friends in London had been sending me prisoners of war parcels for a year. The authorities admitted my identity and my former comrades recognized me. I had fifteen months' pay at a dollar twenty a day besides a subsistence allowance of sixty-five cents a day, coming to me, but could not draw a cent of it. I was dead. And continued so for three months. There is no explanation it's a way they have in the Army, or so the Army says. In the end, it was only through the active intervention of Sir George Perley, the Canadian High Commissioner in London, that my case was righted. He, I believed, called the Ottawa authorities who in turn got in touch with my wife, who produced the necessary documentary evidence to prove that I had been alive and a prisoner all this time. I went to the depot at Safford. I borrowed from my old friends. I hung around the pay office. The paymaster said I was not on the strength of the regiment. I was old soldier enough to profit by that calamity at last. The bitter injustice of such miscarriage of justice blinded me, as I think it eventually does most soldiers, to the accepted code of civil life. I refused to attend roll-call or do-drills, fatigues, or any other part of my regimental duties, other than certain interesting and thrice daily rites, not unconnected with the kitchen. It is the commonness and constant repetition of such stupidity and such lack of action that so much injures the reputation for intelligence of the Army in the minds of those who have served in it, so that those who know it best, like at least, and put up with it only because it is a poor instrument of a good cause. The paymaster felt sick. A young sublatern was acting for him.  As I have said, I was an old soldier with all that implies. He marched me up to the officer already more or less at sea about his new duties. I asked for money. He was aware of my history but did not know the tangle I was in. How much? I wondered how much the traffic would bear. Twenty quid, sir. I ventured. He went up in the air. Impossible! I'll give you ten. I okayed that. The words were yet warm on his lips. Fifty dollars is a great deal of money to a soldier. He gave it to me with a pass to Scotland, where I had relatives, to which I had long been entitled, but which had been useless to me as long as I had no money. I quickly gathered my cronies together and we packed into the canteen to celebrate the occasion fittingly, in the only fashion a good soldier knows, in army beers so thick and strong, that the hops floated to the tops of the mess-tins. While searching for the bottom of one of those, I heard the orderly shouting, Corporal Edwards, Corporal Edwards! The other men gathered round me in the corner drinking while I scrunched down so that the orderly passed on and out, still shouting my name. I fled to the tent and was hastily gathering my things together when a corporal came hot-foot saying that the officer wanted me at once. I went in, gave him my very best regimental salute, and stood at attention. I find that you were not on the strength, Corporal, and are not entitled to any money, so I'll trouble you to return that money I gave you. I'm sorry, sir, I said sadly, but it's gone. Gone how? Yes, sir, I said firmly. My mates have been keeping me going. Well, you must get it back from them at once, and return it to me. It's most irregular. Push on now and see that you're back here in an hour's time with that money before those fellows spend it all in the canteen. Very good, sir. I gave him a smashing good on reach, to cheer him up against the time we should discover that I was well on my way to Scotland. And I remained there until I received notice that my regimental bones had been officially exhumed, after which I had no difficulty in getting my back pay and three months furlough for Canada and home. Author's note, an amusing and at the same time gratifying sequel to this story developed immediately upon the heels of its publication in a considerably smaller form in the Saturday evening post. Sergeant Edwards, who had not previously been consulted by the authorities, was at once offered his choice between doing duty in Canada or taking a discharge from the Army instead of going overseas again. He chose the discharge. An interesting fact in connection with Brumley, the man who was the first to be recaptured on the second attempt to escape, is that according to a post I received from him by his wife he has since made two other unsuccessful attempts to escape. Scarf, who was exchanged to Switzerland, reports that he has married a Swiss girl there. Stampler, another Patricia, who was captured at the same time as Edwards, has recently been exchanged and is now in England. Scott, who was captured with the men of an English regiment, was exchanged to Switzerland and recently returned to Toronto, and has been in hospital in a serious condition ever since. The fate of the others is unknown.