Great stuff. Let's do some exercises just to remind ourselves that we are not dealing here with algebra You might be asked just to solve for x there I have a x and b equals c and then for all a b c x elements of this group And I'm gonna write group like this with these little brackets the group So that's all the elements all the elements in the CG and the operation on those now I just want to remind you I mean if we look at a x b we could say well We could just say in normal algebra. I was just going to say that c equals a C equals x equals c is as a over b or x equals. I mean I could write this as c or You know bring it up the other side so that c a inverse b inverse But that would just suggest that these are numbers and they knock this is not representative the elements here are not representative of numbers if these were for instance square matrices I want to have that we do not have this commutative property. So remember we have closure So if this group operation if I apply that to any two elements in the set the solution must also be there I have a sociativity a sociativity. I have identity Identity element and then for every element. I have its inverse inverse also in that set No way that doesn't say commutative.  So I have x equals a inverse c b inverse And if these were anything these can now be any elements for instance square matrices if I did them in this order I'm going to get a solution to x otherwise I would not have gotten a solution to x if I just saw this as normal algebra. So please please please remember those Let's do some more so we can so we can get used to to this idea So let's have a look at this problem now try and get some of these online or in your textbook They really are fun to do just to get your mind around working with groups when I write x squared They remember I have my group and I have Multiplication is my operation here. So when I have x squared I actually mean x and x So I have this fact that if I do that the group operation on two of the same element They give me b and if I do it five times I get e in other words What I'm suggesting is x and x equals b and What I have here is x times x times x times x times x equals the identity element e So for two of those x's I could put a b for two of those x's I could put a b and there I have an x and that equals e So I have this b I suppose I could do this in two ways I could say b inverse b x equals b inverse e so that goes away. I can do it again. This b x equals now I have b inverse another b b inverse there from this free b inverse And I have the fact that I now have this b inverse Squared and that's actually just this b squared. It's inverse But just to remind yourself that we are not dealing with just Placeholders these are not mathematical variables and they are not placeholders just four numbers. Let's have a look at another one Now let's have a look then at this one. I have x squared a equals b x c inverse and a c x equals x a c I've got to solve them simultaneously not through normal algebra This is see what we can do here Let's see I can do a b x there You just have to look at these and start playing quite a bit of fun to do So let's play. Let's put a c there. So I'm gonna have x squared a c Equals b x because if I put a c at there c inverse c that gives me the identity element And what I could do here is I could have an x I could have an a c inverse So I put an a c inverse in the front put an a c inverse in the front or sociativity x a c I can put a b there and I can put a b there So I have b x and I have b x at least we have that so we have at the moment x squared a c and B x and b x that's the same. So that's going to be b a c inverse x a c Immediately I see I have the a c here and a c here So I could do this a c associativity and a c inverse which is just going to give me an e And if I do exact same thing there, of course, I'm just going to be left with a c inverse x on that side So what I have here essentially is x and an x and that equals b Let me make some more space because you can clearly see where this is going that it's going to be b a c inverse x And what I can do here is an x inverse on both sides x inverse on both sides And that's identity element identity elements. I'm left with x equals b and I have a c inverse Dunn-dusted. These are really a lot of fun Really look them up as I said try to get some online in your textbook and try to do some of them Just to remind yourself that this is not simple algebra anymore We are talking about a group set of elements and then the the operation on those elements And there's a group. So we are dealing with those properties


Fairfield stood out to me because of the focus on using your knowledge to benefit the lives of others, the Jesuit philosophies. It changed the way I teach, not in the particulars, but in the philosophy. Fairfield was that exact match of personal development, professional development, the promotion of my skills to help make a difference in the world.


Good morning. You keep talking to me like this and looking at me like that. You're going to make me feel some type of way. Yes, you. At 254Facebook, 2254Channel on Twitter. Hashtag all the day is why in the morning nika bama mese ma leo shoni yango. Sita jam, mi na ku like. I like talking to you.  Ma ne nos tako sumi nisha. So, fa le kwa mtandao. Tidoli za jobgani ime andama niwa, but ikona do. Alafu apu vengene mewa, please. Musizo eniki vangu one day for evil things. It's not an everyday thing. We have just a couple of people, Pablo Morda, ICU, Femins, Mbone, Lois Moli, Adisa, Fostini, we have John, Westie Gibson, Kimzy, Issa Matiz.  No, aniki kutadze gin at least, you know, I'm thinking about you. Yeah, at 254Facebook, hashtag iswa in the morning. My name is still Valentine, if you're wondering. And you can still find me at ColourMeVal on everything. And now we are on to a different kind of conversation. We've just concluded one with Malin on mental health and all those wonderful things. And now we are going to sink in to something more entertainment like. Are you ready? Let me allow my guests to introduce themselves. Good morning. Good morning. Mam, miskiyo kizungyoten mongaya. Ni naisha hapa studio, hapa, hapa, hapa, hapa. Please introduce yourself. Allow me to start with Lady. Okay. My name is Berry Londo. I'm an actress, a stage manager, a production manager. I am a lover of arts. Stage manager si kazi raizi? No, si kazi raizi. Actually, no one I quit na mtuam kono ama kazi njengo. Okotizi. I want to... But she's not guilty. I didn't know you've been a state manager. I have so much more respect for you, imagine. Thank you. Na aku dili na actors wenga sumo times tu na kuwangan ama. And you are, sir? Well, my name is Derek Komoli. I'm an actor. I'm a director. I'm also a student at Kenyatta University doing theatre arts and film technology in 4th year currently. Ya, acting is my thing. It's my passion, art. I live art. I eat art, I drink art. Ya, it's just art itself, it's everything to me. Ya. Do you think something like art is a profession that's undermined? It's really undermined, especially in our country right now. But I think it's kind of catching up with time because we cannot do away with the fact that at least we are making major steps. But still, if you just go to the root cause maybe deep even in the society and tell a parent such that you want to venture into acting or art, they'll be like, are you really sure this is what you want to do? Ya. Nikiwa ni kwa kwa ambiwa. Ni kwa ma watu kisha skimtu ako in the arts. Also kupita exam. Ya, exactly. That's why you're doing this. Ya. Yes. Mm hm. Shame, shame. So Akili is a little bit, but you can entertain. That's why you're doing the arts for shame. That's the beautiful thing, very beautiful thing. Ya, that's true. Mm hm. All right, so let me ask you this transition from the conversation we just had. How do you feel about mental health, especially, let me start with Beiru, especially with entertainers? We have this capresha to be happy all the time, especially because when the limelight either one way or the other, we are in front of people. And how do you balance or how do you keep yourself in check? Kwae wo siji sahao? Uneza shinda kwa karakta, kwa karakta and yourself are two different things. Uneza shinda kwa karakta wo ji sahao e manye, but they are not happy. But my character is always happy. I love people just to entertainers possibly have one of the highest suicidates. So how do we balance? That's true. It's not an easy balance, but I think what you should advocate for more is the de-rolling session because not so many people invest more in de-rolling because that is what will help you after the production that you have had. Because when you are in the production, we actors tend to find ourselves going into the deep ends that are times you didn't even know I could reach to that position. So de-rolling is key. Personally, even I had, I made an initiative of actually starting a de-rolling session because I used to tell myself maybe now my de-rolling session would have been if I finish a production this Sunday, I stay at home either week or two, not talking to anyone, but all I didn't know is there's now some part of me that I continue numbing and also being a mother, it's even now more. When mama am out, if you cut to evil, guy, your snapback game says. Yeah, thank you. And then before mother would, I could actually maybe get to that moment, but now the kid do not care. I don't care whether mama means okay or not. So I have decided to put her as a possession and also my surrounding. I have started being intentional with who I want at my surrounding at what particular time and why. And in that space, what am I actually fitting in for new other particular men. All right. How do you feel about it, Derek? Well, I think mental health is a major issue, especially to us as artists, you know. I always say that an artist's best friend should always be a therapist because we are people, we are the most vulnerable people in the society because an artist most of the time, especially an actor, is not living his own life. But most of the time is always in a constant transition into one character, living the life of another and it's always a long journey to prepare for a character. So it fully gets immersed into you. So I think we get affected a lot and we really forget much about who we really are. And just as Berilla just said, I think decharacterization should always be something which is considered, should always be the last step because when you come out of a production, the first thing you need to do is to decharacterize for you to go back to being the normal you.  And we are undergoing a series of depression, anxiety, a lot of pressure from the society. Life itself is becoming unbearable with the economic drain. So we really get it tough outside there but most of us don't want to tackle the problem itself. Soon up at the major way that we use to get rid of it is go to the next play, get that character which is probably joyful, then you will think like life is already good.  And most of us go through a lot of societal thoughts that people don't know outside there. So I think the characterization is something that should always be put into a consideration by most of the actors, yeah. Do you think also we are prone to substance abuse? Uda pata ati sasa wa sana we ingindo anakunyuangasana amando anapenda nga shere sana or is just something to do with some type of addiction? Do you think we are prone to it because of that is true because in the entertainment industry shere ni kitu kubu asana kwa or ati we ingindo anapanya entertainment but most of them are using it as a as a leeway or an escape route from whatever is happening. Not because they want to, not because that they feel it's fun but life is just pushing them to that direction. They see there is no other way and they cannot handle things with their like life the way it is in reality. So they have to at least do something to put them in another level at least where they don't see life as raw as it is but at least feel a little bit of that illusion of joy, happiness for that single moment and then it's gone. So na pata when it's gone now you're back to reality you don't want to face the reality because it's ugly. So you find another way again to snap back to that illusion again. So people really do abuse drugs and substances in this this industry. And I think it's a major problem that should always be tackled. People should come out, people should talk, people should engage in programs, mentorship programs for young artists that are coming through. It's not even affecting people who are still not making, even people who have made it we find that they don't know what una pata yo pese me kushitua you don't know what you want. So una na tu nishere maybe to repay the longer life that you lived where things are not okay so una dan itu, ah, it pese kwa pata na fatuishere ke you don't think about investing, you don't think about engaging in business and the things that can even better your life better the society at large. We may have lost you a little bit when you were talking about the therapy sessions so maybe we can do that again in the day rolling. What I would think is actually looking for therapy sessions to start them because at some particular point I found out that maybe I had lost myself because I used to hide in theatre and numb some part of me and try to forget about it and I also noticed that not so many people consider the de-rolling part because you finish a session and after that production the much we usually do is maybe repost the beautiful moments that we went through even catching up with either the director or the actor that you were with on set is not much of a session that people plan for so the de-rolling for me I used to do it maybe hiding at home for a week or two, I go nothing no communication, no nothing but now since things changed in my life because I am a mother I had now to look for something else and now I am intentional in who is around me when you are around me what are we doing because as the way he has said the times that we do alcohol to be specific as that slight tipsy moment nibliki for lack of a better word I sleep and wait for the following day and now the sad part is when you wake up the following day the problem is not twice as much when it hits you so yeah I am really really looking forward to my therapy session I am both as a mother and then as a burial and then as an actor at that calibre you are very articulate I like it ok so we have just been touching on mental health and the arts in particular these rates of suicide the addictions the substances and all these things it's a very real situation jumbona kuna inza spirit almost every 5 meters inza nani nani anas tu me so let's talk about these things kindly hashtags in the morning tell me about your experiences what is maybe the biggest production when did you feel like a new SSA a mini actabuana buni e shimu when you started telling people I've done this maybe I'll start with you Derek personally I can't say that I've been in that much of a bigger production oh jadibu kwaanha see kuka mama I'm just being truthful here because I'm still on the journey of learning and growing you know being mentored and the fact that this is what I study so it's still a long way for me but at least getting engaged with people outside there who have been in big productions working with great directors like Stuart Nash production like Sarofina I can say it's a great experience but I started off as a a travelling theatre actor that's my basis though there is a background which I cannot expose here still because it was it's kind of ten ten ten ten ya issi ya certain production which is kind of a secret but so majorly I started as a travelling theatre actor doing set books just immediately after fomfo that's in 2018 after that came to Nairobi life became still unbearable did a little bit here shambalama Nairobi linifunza but we were still doing it for the love of art then joining Kenyatta University I think it opened doors for more production they are working with production like fifth wheel conservatory Nairobi performing art studio majorly being mentored by great coach like Helen Tawali for the voice and stuff Stuart Nash I've mentioned that kitchen production but my greatest achievement so far maybe I can say is during the kid fest 2022 last year when we had a chance to perform dead men that's the greatest production I can say has impacted my life because dead men did a lot to me in understanding what this craft is all about it exposed me to even what we are calling mental health right now we are talking about because I realized a lot about the character I was performing whose name is Doc actually this is a person whose mentally he was not okay he is the head of the government and he is running the government so you can really picture the kind of society he was really running because this is a person who is not right upstairs but he has people who are subject to him so yeah it really exposed me to a lot knew a lot on how to handle that and it still made me go through a lot of that mental health issues because after that it was really tough and hard for me to get out of that character because literally you had to mess up your head for you to be the character so you had to get out of the role you had to do a lot for it you had to take a break after that I was going for an audition but still when you are in Yonaku you still Doc even recently when I did a production for my classmates the lecturer was like you are still Doc so I went for an audition because it was such a tough experience for me but I can say so far it's so good we are still going on working with the likes of Beryl here both in Travelling Theater and in commercial theaters it's a good experience for me you keep talking about Stuart Nash man like he is he is still going on Stuart is really giving us an eye opener in the industry he is the only reason we have never been in a musical before that whole singing and dancing and acting at the same time really confused I don't think I have a multitask in my entire life now the same question translated to you would be a bit deeper because I want to hear all the dimensions as a stage manager as an actor I received the blessing thank you I also started in set books that was way back in 2013 after high school and then after that I joined for Naka Arts Productions still as an actress doing set books here and then I started seeing their shows the ones they were doing for Kikuyu back in the day and then I got interested after cutting call and then in set books both a stage manager both acts and does so you like why is this lady just set aside or this gentleman set aside for stage managing and then one time I just went and engaged with her and she is like I like being a stage manager because I get to understand and run things behind the scenes hence it also boosts your skills as an actress to understand the script because apart from engaging the actors with their times you as a stage manager in case an actor or an actress gets an emergency you have to step in for them and in those situations where you have been type casted for one thing for the same time and then you get into a space where you will have to be versatile and it's not like being prepared to be versatile it's part of the moment muna afikashom nambiwa Beryl Senso is not coming and that is what the director tells you and then he leaves when the director is not there you take up the mantle and move with it for the actors not to feel the director is not is not in session so after getting into that is when I met Mavin Kibicho he is the producer of Son of Man Productions and he was first doing shows in church and it was amazing I really loved it and I was like maybe I could add one or two as a stage manager as I honed my skills into this space Up until in 2019 where I met a music director Martin Kigondo we worked with him at Son of Man Productions and then now in 2019 December I gave birth so I took a break 2020 I was supposed to come back stage managing then COVID did the thing so it was again break by force stay at home look for something else to do and then this year we did now a project with him and I was like ya I had missed this and that is what adrenaline I get in stage managing and running left right and center and he can tell you a different character while acting and a different character while stage managing because I love doing two things that are challenging me at the same time because complacency do not bring the better out of you I love it I love it I love it English is not just for me please continue interacting with us by the way type casting has it ever happened to you how do you feel about it I've always been type casted wala being the villain character this bad guy I've never done this kind of a lover boy I've only done it maybe once and it was not working out I realized it's not really working out because every time you feel like you want to love express love to somebody you're kind of rough because you're used to handling people roughly and shouting at people commanding these authoritative kind of guy it's really tough for me it's something that I'm really trying right now to at least peel it off me to be free for my body to experience so many characters because most of the time I just reflect that if you give me a new character it's not working out because I don't feel the joy in doing it because I'm used to that other character kind of a character that's I want to just command you every now and then so you have a comfort zone step out very fast but it's not a comfort zone because every opportunity I get the people are like you can do that role I've ever seen you there so do this so yes you want to do the other role but you are not the boss so people will be like how do you get out of that better because I honestly understand what type of character you are after me I fought with it for a long time and I can see it for the first time this weekend I am doing a character I have never done because for set books majorly they look at your face not even how you relate with people they look at your face and they say you're an introvert so this character is for you and then you like counter experiment until you push out of that is when you actually get it but it is a fight it's a battle that you constantly have to prove that you do something else or you can also find some people that they tell okay you want to stress something else now they give you something weird like they tell better not do comedy I'm like okay wait chill I was just asking for something to enhance my emotions because I think this is one director who told me the reason why I have never given you a different thing is you did another traditional role so well so me when I look at you I just see a traditional person and I'm like kia nye jitu kila sa so yes type casting works and you know at some point we also ask the actors who may be entangle the director or the script writer at that particular time because if I am loyal we are loyal to the production we are diligent with our work and the guy did not attack me like attack him to tempatia pressure because there is no one who can crack me for lack of a better word so they are like let me also okay this guy is willing to do this then that is what it's what happens maybe the script writer is more of deru's type of thinking and character type so anytime he sits and writes he's like oh my gosh this is deru and then he continues and then you find also deru is like ya this is me is not like this is me and then they go with it but at times it helps but at times it limits because now the limit comes when it's hard to derol because you do something kufuatana even your life now changes to that at the time I used to read deru's status I would say relax relax we usually call him psycho even the warmups please do not do psycho warmups okay there's a thing I've once had in this journey of mine as a presenter ati did I was in auditioning my name came up somewhere to do something else similar type thing entertainments like ya so I came to say ati we don't want to recycle presenters I said okay so how do you answer such a person because that's not a creative talking and if I take offence that's not for me to take offence that is not a creative talking because how it's like saying Denzel Washington should just act one movie naksha act aende in fact we never want to see him again ni kama kusima me me by I feel you it's like saying to a production behind the scenes you're only supposed to do one show and never do another one again how do you cope with such people who have a say but they're not creative I think that's forming a major problem even in our film let me just go to film because that's why I experience that a lot in our film it's kind of an agenda that most people are pushing for because people are down here they don't want the actors always to be recycled we keep on seeing the same Maria we keep on seeing the same Pascal Tokodi every now and then yet there are people who want your brandawairimu there are people who have much more greater talent and they want to be there but ok and apuna you are good yes but we have not seen you somewhere so let us give brandawairimu we understand of course jina he can attract also but again it's really good for them to recycle for that exactly when it comes to business purposes it's helping but when it comes to growing the industry to me I think ok that's my view recycling every now and then doing with the same kind of people it's not going to work for us if you want to move on we really need to give chance for new people to come through because I believe great ideas that one I can tell you for sure are with these people who are still under who have not been given opportunity and I believe if they have been given a chance they can really do great to improve our television programs to improve our films and put the creative economy on a higher level but if I may just agree with burial I think sometimes directors don't want that extra trouble like nisha nika script nisha mkukast but I can train for 5 more months when this one has already maybe no I'm not disagreeing as budding artist because me I see it as a famous category I think I need to put more effort let me not just demand the job just because I want it if nani is supposed to have this job okay what is nani doing different from me I want to come up to before I get a job before I get a job this is what I'm bringing to the table versus me just say oh I'm new stop stop just putting the same people even as we want a chance I think also to like maybe throw a spanner in the works if we say like recycling if we say that you haven't gotten the opportunity how have you packaged your art how have you packaged yourself truth be told as much as we are theater fanatics we are theater lovers but what is your social media talking about can I tap into burial and actually see that she's doing something by the end of the day because the people that we say are being recycled go to their social media they are very active they are in our faces and nobody wants we only want to do the the gram we want to be in the gram for the lifestyle but not the art I just want to be the pretty burial but not show while burial a kona mando ana tembe ana hukon yuma atajuadze burial a kinga kwa kazi ana ana inga so as much as we might complain that they are being recycled but this person that has been on the full line the whole time how does the portfolio look like do you even have one how is your bio created that is now what speaks for you as an actor so theater is even risky because if you don't come to the theater you will not see my work so if I want you to see my work what do I do have I gone to an extra mile to even invite you for a play have I invited that director that person that I wanted to work with so it's also the back stops with me if I want to be up there let me package myself to make it easier for my work to speak but not my words to speak that's powerful so let's not just want things by force let's be prepared to put in the work it's equal to even worse I know someone my cousin's brother's uncle's father so to square more to square more money let's be of substance please kindly it's not just me telling pointing fingers alright so let's get to the meat of the conversation you have a play coming tell me all about that well we have two plays the first one is this weekend it's called it wasn't me we are the main characters but it is more of me and him and now him I feel is not having a challenge because the cycle is big and then there's Beril who's being messed up with mentally in that art space yes if I remove Miki Patina but it's quite a challenging play because it's a couple it's a couple that is a lawyer and she handles weird cases left right and center and every day fascinates her and at the same point she's also naive because there's some statements that she says and then I'm like Beril I will never say such a thing not me after this play I'm dumping that life yes that's actually the character that I do a lawyer who comes from work complaining about her work and she's like because I'm out of work let me just come and enjoy life with my boo at home and then I find my boo who's troubled at that time only to find out later that he was actually playing with my mind and then now there is my friend who I thought was naive but now apparently she's the psycho it's the quiet ones actually she's not so quiet she's bubbly you know you don't expect bubbly people to kill the quiet ones are expected to kill like you look at Beril and they will say this one can kill and then the bubbly ones you're like this one is for you she's so nice and then she's the one who kills in the play so it's a challenge for me because the last role I did touched on my my heart caught the bone so it took like a whole man to relax and then now back to this it is because that one was caged bad and I think that was the best player we've ever done and now being that it was also free I had to go to the emotions and the lens that I've never gone and think there's a quote I read where for an actor I don't actually necessarily have to cry to make the audience cry let me take you until you feel like I am crying and you will cry on my behalf and when I got that I was happy I was like but I went and cried at home later but I felt fulfilled by the end of the day so that is it wasn't me at the Waterfront Karen I'll just let him speak about his character near me yes and that one I am acting slightly stage managing I don't know what to do I don't know what to do you guys don't understand what stage managing is it's not easy how long is the play the play is 2 hours 2 hours no intermission no intermission personally I'm not leaving the stage I think I'm leaving just for 5 minutes I don't know what to do I'm just sitting stage managing your time I think it's a good idea to cut to rehearse but it's not a show it's not a stage managing because we are playing playing a boy I want you to tell me a bit about your character and then the second play the first play is this weekend I'm playing the character Alan Alan is a director in a certain production and he is married to Eva he is a lawyer a lawyer something of that Alan is this guy who has realized that the wife has betrayed him because the wife has slept with his best friend innocently they call it involuntary adultery when you imagine that involuntary adultery my son is playing this Friday, Saturday, Sunday waterfront curry so he knows everything he has the entirety but you know he's just trying to manipulate Eve to see whether she really can come out and speak for herself but already in his mind he knows the entire thing because even he himself is the one who gave the best friend custody into the house he's just he knew it was involuntary thank you so at this particular time he uses an excuse of he has killed that guy and the guy is in the kitchen the body is lying in the kitchen just to mess around with the wife to see if he can go my head is aching so the guy is a psycho because he is using all this death thingy to manipulate the wife get information tell the wife that you are going down with me anyway your career is just going to be destroyed that way you have to and at the same time also he himself has slept with the best friend kanaero I don't know the kanaero described in the script I think it's not even the kanaero thingy because the only thing that's making it unique is both of them know though she doesn't know that I've slept with the best friend even the script ends when she doesn't know but me I know that she has slept with my best friend but still life goes on like we are not even fighting I just want explanation how did it happen just tell me and everything is just going to why do you want more details it's helping me in writing my play because my form a play formed so I'm using this to write my next play which I'm planning to be like to have it as a kamba I'm done with you Alan Eric I'm not done with you but Alan I am done tell me about the second play we have to one time always runs out when you're having a really good time okay just briefly tell me so this one just to add more it is being produced by 2 hours sunset Friday is 7pm Saturday is 6pm Sunday is 6pm charges are 2,000 Bob at Karin and the next one it's that one now I am stage managing and production managing it's being produced by Sanuman Productions both plays are written by Marvin Kibicho it's a play by Marvin Kibicho a brilliant script writer and director he's a psycho I can say that but he writes amazing things and things that actually messes up with your mental space and now this one is talks more about the PTSD state of the of the emergency in 1952 a soldier who went to world war 2 and then after the world war 2 the brother in law died and because of that guilt because he had given that order he actually decides not to come back home immediately and then goes back to the war to fight a war that doesn't engage him, the war between the Germans and the British just to okay okay I am afraid I have to cut short over there but just one more time social media handles and remind us the time again of the two plays it's okay so this one is on Friday, Saturday and Sunday 6pm on Saturday and Sunday and then Friday 7pm drums of war that is on 30th of April at Kenya National Theatre we have a show at 3pm and 6pm our tickets for drums of war are at muk.com they are the advanced tickets then there's the ones at the gate maybe they can just check our social media handles maybe flash sales to come at Son of Man Productions my personal one is at Berry Londo and then we have at Mavella Mavin Kibichu the director then we have at Michelle Tires at Naomi the actress at Prince Della he's also in that play and then we have at Saisee the poet yeah alright there you have it at Whitefife on Facebook keep it why in the morning good job guys thank you


So in this talk, I will try to explain why as a cloud developer we should care about distributed tracing. I will show a demo of a CNCF project Yeager, which is a distributed tracing system. And I will speak about the challenges of actually rolling out distributed tracing in a large organization like Uber and some lessons that we've learned from that. Just as an introduction, why you should care about anything I say, so I've been doing tracing for about just two years. I work at Uber in New York on the observability team. I was the founder of Yeager project at Uber and also was a co-conspirator in the open tracing project when we started two years ago. And you can find me on GitHub and Twitter. So this is a diagram which Yeager can present, which is about a snapshot of Uber architecture. Obviously, it's not everything, but some of it. So when you use Uber app or any right-hailing app, really, every second the app communicates to the back end. And this communication might look like this. So instead of talking to just one single server, every request spreads out across a different number of microservices potentially hitting hundreds of thousands of individual service instances. And at least at our scale, that happens billions of times a day. So complex system, how do we monitor such a complex system to make sure that everything is working? Well, how do we traditionally do this? We use metrics and login as the classic monitoring tools. With metrics, the counter stats and gauges, et cetera, there are various techniques of people telling you what you should be monitoring to kind of know whether your components are healthy or not. And there is various products, like stats, D-premises, Grafana, which allow you to collect those metrics, visualize them. Similar story on login. I'm talking about application events, logging, and also errors and stack traces. And so as well, there is an ecosystem of tools that allow you to grab all the data and sort of aggregate it and present. So do these tools actually help? Well, of course, they help with certain cases. But the monitoring tools ultimately must tell us a story about what's going on in my system. So I was running a demo someone gave me yesterday. And when I reloaded the web page, I got this, the process just crashed. So how do we debug this? Well, I don't know. Like the code in that demo didn't even use this scanner class at all. And so yet it crashed with this message. And it's very unusual for a program to crash like this, because typically you get a stack trace in any program. This one crashed without stack trace, which is surprising to me. Anyway, I didn't want to investigate it. But the point here is that when we're talking about microservices-based application, metrics and logs are essentially giving you this one line, about one instance of a service somewhere. And how do you debug a problem without stack traces? So distributed tracing is essentially giving you what you can consider distributed stack traces, what happens across all your services in the architecture. And so really when we're trying to model architecture as complex as Uber, we want to monitor distributed transactions, not just individual instances. And just before I do the demo, I just want to give a basic idea of how distributed tracing works. So imagine we have a service that requests come into our system. And then when the request comes, what we do is we assign a unique ID to that request, simple thing. And we also introduce a notion of a context. And the context is something that we want to keep with this request, with this transaction as it travels through the rest of the architecture. So if the service makes a call to another service, then we pass that context on. And so on, it makes more calls. We still pass that same context. And as we're doing this, we kind of now know, OK, this is the path that transaction took through the architecture. As long as we can identify all the instrumentation within those services by this unique ID that we assigned at the top, right? You can modify context to also record some causality information, like the fact that actually be called C and not just someone called C in this transaction. And so if we capture all that data in addition, it doesn't have to be in the context, but captured in the background somewhere. Then we can build a trace the timeline that you see on the right here. And then next thing, just before again, before the demo, just a quick introduction what Yeager is a distributed tracing system. We started at Uber and we open sourced it a few months ago. Now it's an official CNCF project from September. And now I will show you some demo of the tracing. So I will start with kind of showing you an application that I want to use for the demo. So this is a mock application, hot rod. It's like rides on demands. And what you can do with this one is you can pick a customer, you click a button, and the backend just goes and dispatches a car, pretend car to you. And it gives you the license number. It also says when this car is arriving. And there is some, for our purposes, debugging information saying this is the unique request ID for that request to the backend. And this is how long it took to execute on the backend from the point of view of the front end. So that's all I'm going to tell you about this application. And so back to the point of monitoring tools should tell you the stories about the application. So what can I get about this application actually using tracing as a monitoring tool? So I'll go to the Yeager front end. Let me reload it. So the instrumentation in that application already sends some data to tracing backend. And so one thing I see here is that, oh, I suddenly got this list of services that are apparently included in this application. So let's not go there first. Let's go to this tab called dependency diagram. There is a separate view. So purely by monitoring the interactions between the services, of course, with the instrumentation, we got this diagram which actually tells us a lot about the application right away. We can kind of figure out what its architecture. We can see how many requests go to which services. We can see that apparently there are two data-based backends within this application. So we didn't need to do anything to get that, just to run the application. So the second thing is, OK, well, this gives us the architecture. It doesn't give us the actual workflow. Who calls whom? What's the business logic within this application? So for that, I can go and I search for traces. So there is one trace here at the top. Notice it says seven or four milliseconds. This is a bit lower than this one because this is from the client point of view. This is from the server point of view. So obviously, it's shorter. But when I click on the trace, so there are a lot of things on this screen, a lot of information. So most important one is you can see that the time sequence diagram that I showed you on the previous slide is kind of now for the real service. And these are individual operations executed by individual services listed on the left. And these are the operation names and how long they took. So one thing that we can immediately say about the service is that, OK, well, this MySQL select operation takes almost 50% of the time. So if you were trying to understand why your service in production is slow, just one look at the trace and, well, this is probably, well, at least a good place to investigate. What is it doing for that long, right? After all, it's all running on my local machine. How much time you can spend on the retrieving data from MySQL. What you can do as well is you can actually drill down into this and say, OK, well, this is the actual statement that was executed. So this is something that's automatically captured by tracing instrumentation. And you can see that within this individual kind of span. Span is an operation within a trace. So further rich data. It also says that there is a log statement here, requiring log, blah, blah, blah, whatever. We'll see why that is interesting later. So another thing we can see here is if I click at the top, this is kind of the entry level of the whole application, right, the so-called root span, which spans the whole request. There are lots of logs here. And if you look at the logs, then if you read it all of it, you kind of can get an overall idea, not just the architecture now, but what's the actual business flow within this application. So we were getting a customer. Then we were finding the closest drivers. We were calculating the roots to each driver like this. And then finally, we picked the best driver who is the closest or the shortest to reach the given point that we wanted. And then we returned that data. So why am I showing this? Clearly, you could get the same thing from the logs. However, note that all these applications could have been running on different instances potentially, right? And also, each application, if it was a production, then there would be 100 requests going through one single instance. So if you try to look at the logs, these 18 entries are going to be mixed up with gazillion of other entries from the same application, just from different threads. And how do you make sense of any of that? Well, tracing actually gives you just this transaction. It ignores everything else because it can correlate all the logs with this transaction ID or the trace ID. And that's a very important feature of the tracing is that it can give you highly contextualized information about all the things that your application is doing. And it also, again, note that these logs are attached to this span because it's really this operation that was doing all these requests from the top level, right? The logs for MySQL operations were different because it was doing something else. So not only you get logs for a whole transaction, but you get logs partitioned by individual operations within that transaction. So another thing that we can also figure out quite easily from this trace, if you're curious about what else could be the performance issue in this application. One thing is here. Well, first of all, there are a couple of errors. Like the red button here says there is an error. We can actually look at it. It was probably like a ready timeout, right? So fine. The service retries. It increases the latency. But even if there are no errors, there's a very clear pattern, staircase pattern here, which indicates that, well, all these operations are done sequentially. And now, since we didn't try the application, we can't really say whether that's the right thing or not for the application. Well, I wrote it, so I do know that it's a wrong thing. It could have been like fanning out all these requests in parallel because all the data just basically loaded all the drivers first and then getting some additional information for the driver. So you just redpool, paralyze it. You could reduce this 180 milliseconds to probably what's the longest, like 10 milliseconds. So another source of latency right away. Just by looking at the trace, I didn't have to do any sort of measurements anywhere additional. And the final one, so this one is interesting. By the way, I can actually do this zoom in into this section. So here we have a whole bunch of requests to the root service. And actually, there are 10 of them because there are 10 drivers loaded. But the execution pattern is a bit strange. Like we see here that there is some parallelism, that three requests were starting to execute in parallel. But then it's not three at the time. Actually, if you look at the vertical lines, it's always three at the time because, well, simply there is a thread pool behind it with the size of three. And it limits how much work you can do on doing this particular operation. So this is not a problem in this specific trace. But if we were doing a lot of requests, and I can easily show you, like if I go here and let's say, do this, right? Notice that the latency keeps climbing. So if I pick this one, and actually I can search the trace by individual tags. So this was a driver ID. I think I can say driver. Should have tried it at home, but it should work. Here it is. So 1.6 seconds. Well, so now this MySQL is not just it got even worse with the load. Obviously, MySQL server could have scaled easily. It's not a problem here because it's a simulated service really. But we can look at, again, in the span and say, oh, you know what? I was actually waiting on a log for other transactions. And notice the interesting thing. It gives you the transaction IDs. Remember this transaction IDs from here? So this service somehow knows this individual request. Like, we're looking at one trace, one request. But it knows about other requests which will block in this particular request on a particular resource contention, right? So that information is actually hard to come by without certain features that I'll dive in a second. In the end, so again, speaking of optimizing performance of this application, clearly this is one of the bad things. I was actually not able to show you this impact on this thing because we need to solve the MySQL problem first.  So you can't even do three operations in parallel for one transaction. You're going to be waiting on this contention. So the whole point of that is, like, I'm just looking at one single trace about the application. And suddenly, I know so much about performance profile of this whole application. And I'm not talking about one single service, right? That you could potentially have done with some profiling tool. But I'm talking about the application as a distributed application with multiple microservices, which you could run as multiple instances. So one last thing I want to demonstrate here is, so this application also emits metrics. And I have this metric here, which is kind of interesting. So this metric says, this is how much time we spend calculating the root by customer. And what's interesting about it, well, it's kind of easy to calculate. But the issue here is that if we look at the diagram here, right? So this is the root service. The root service actually doesn't know anything about the customer. It doesn't need to. All it does, it says, from point A to point B, what's the shortest root? And yet, that service is able to provide a metric saying, oh, this is how much time I spent per customer. And that's another feature of distributed tracing, which is known as distributed context propagation. Because, well, the front-end service does know the customer. And that front-end service can store the customer in the context. Remember the context I talked about at the beginning? If you store the customer in the context, then that context is available to every single node within your application. And then they can do additional statistic gathering based on that information, even though they don't really get that information in their direct API call or anything, because they really don't care. And that provides very powerful features if you want to do cost attribution. Like at Google, most of the requests, Google has also very deep stack. So if you have a Gmail, eventually it might reach some storage like a Bigtable. So the request actually carry the fact that this is a request coming from Gmail all the way to the storage, because then they can attribute that cost to something that makes sense for the business. So in this case, yeah, sure, I can attribute cost to, let's say, the service that's calling me. That's easy. But really we want to attribute the cost of doing the work to some business concept that makes sense for our business. For example, if it was Uber, we could say, OK, this is a ride request for the ride sharing. Or this is a Uber Eats delivery. So this is a high level business. And then we can say, OK, well, we are spending this many dollars per year on this kind of business by doing this attribution. So it's a very powerful technique. And I will speak about it a bit more. But this kind of demo application demonstrates how we can get it. And just to prove you that I'm not lying about the fact that root service doesn't know anything about the customer, we can go to the root service. And we can look at the URL request that it gets. This is all it gets, right? It has just start, pick up, and drop off point. That's all it has. So how does it get the customer information? Well, customer information comes from the context. And the context is propagated automatically by tracing instrumentation transparently to the service. You don't need to change the API or the service or anything else. Imagine if you wanted to pass this data for you so that services actually know about it. You would have to go and change a lot of services and change their APIs. That's very expensive. So let me stop here and go back to my slides. And by the way, this demo, there's a walkthrough if you're interested in this link. The slides will be shared afterwards. So it goes in a lot more details about how you can actually troubleshoot these things using tracing. And it has two aspects. It talks about open tracing and the Yeager specifically, and really what you can do with that. So to summarize, one thing that the tracing systems provide is the ability to monitor distributed transactions. The other thing is to do root cause analysis. So if you can find a trace which is looking suspicious, you can actually easily drill down into all various components that participated in that transaction and figure out what was going on. You can also do performance and latency optimizations using the same tool. And that's not just with individual traces. If you build some aggregation of the traces, then you can see patterns within the applications. And I'm going to be talking more about this. And finally, service dependency analysis, so far it was fairly simple, but it's just a simple diagram. I'll show you a more advanced version of it. And all of that functionality is fundamentally built on distributed context propagation. And this is something that I want to stress that context propagation in microservices is an extremely important concept. Many people are not doing this, and you will regret if you reach a certain maturity within the organization that you're not doing this. So it's easier to start from the beginning to have it. So like, who likes tracing now, like after I've given this presentation, right? So, quick poll. How many people here actually in your company or organization have distributed tracing system deployed and then use? All right, that's a pretty good percentage, more than I expected. So if the tracing was so fun as we saw before, how come it's not everyone raising their hands, right? And well, the question is kind of embarrassing a bit for the industry is that the instrumentation has been too hard so far to do tracing. It's like with login and metrics, it's easier. It's also work, but with tracing it's a bit more work. And I want to explain why it's a bit more work. So imagine you have a service and it has like a server end point and then there is a downstream call that you're making, right? And so presumably we add some instrumentation around these things to actually do the tracing at the entry and exit points. And presumably some upstream server is already also instrumented and sending us the trace ID in the request headers, right? So what the very first thing we do in this application with the instrumentation really what it does, it says, okay, take the headers, extract the trace context, create the context object in memory. That kind of you get that almost for free with the standard frameworks today. The second thing you need to do is like as your application doing its work, you need to keep that context around so that if you do happen to make a downstream call, you can pass that context downstream, right? Because if you lose it, then the trace is broken. You can't follow the transaction anymore. So number two, and then the third one is when you actually do the make a call, you take that context, the instrumentation, encode it again into the trace headers and passes on to the next request. And meanwhile, there's another library which kind of gets the callbacks from all this instrumentation. It says, oh, I'm collecting tracing data. I'm gonna submit it to the tracing backend somewhere for actual tracing aggregation. So this number two thing is what's known as in process context propagation, different from distributed context propagation. And this is actually the thing that was preventing tracing from being while mainstream these days because it's actually not straightforward to do. So it sort of depends on the language as well. So if you take languages which support thread locals, then well, you can actually store the context and thread local and sort of get it in the next phase or like in the next layer of your application, let's say in the client, in the previous example. And so it seems like it's a happy case. You can do instrumentation almost without changing your application at all, right? It's almost happy case except that there are, we don't do software these days anymore like this, right? We don't write Java applications where request is processed by a single thread. Most applications now become asynchronous. They use queues inside, multi-threaded pools, et cetera. And so that actually complicates a lot this whole process of yeah, what seemed simpler with the thread local. Now it's not as simple. There's another set of languages where thread local isn't even a thing, like in Go. You can't identify go routing. And so what do you do in that case? Well, you have to pass context explicitly. And that's like a sad story here because in many cases it's, if you didn't write your application from the start with passing the context, then well, it's kinda too late or you have to rewrite a lot of API calls internally. So it's not so happy. I mean, fortunately in Go the context object is a standard language function like object class. So Go language encourages you to use that all over the application. So hopefully as a community we'll start doing that. But it's actually, if you do do that, then tracing becomes almost easy. So like in Uber tracing Go applications was actually not that hard because most people didn't know how to pass context around, right? And context exists for other purposes as well, like timeouts and consolation and stuff. So it was already a mechanism which we can piggyback on. So is there zero trace instrumentation? Does it exist even as a concept? So like I said, fundamentally it's not even possible in some languages like Go. But if you do pass context, then it kind of becomes almost easy, almost free. And then with the thread locals as I said, it's a double H sort.  It's sometimes it's easy, but sometimes really hard, especially if you're working with a custom framework which does some custom asynchronous processing. So we're at KubeCon there's gonna be and have been already a lot of talks about service meshes, right? And so do they solve the problem actually? Service meshes like in Voila, LinkerD, they run as a sidecar. They take care basically the business of doing RPC calls away from the application. So you can write your applications, all kinds of languages, but sidecar does all the heavy logic of saying like, I know how to route requests, how to do rate limiting, how to do load balancing and all these things, right? So very nice concept. And they do monitoring as well. So they clearly can send metrics but they can also do tracing for you. Like the example, in lift 95% of services don't do tracing, it's all comes from envoy, right? And the fine print though there is that to enable tracing you just need to pass the header with an application. Well, ironically passing the header is the exact same problem of in process context propagation, right? If you run in the situations with again the thread locals and multi-threaded, it becomes as challenging as otherwise. And so like open tracing as an API now provides a primitives for doing context propagation. And because open tracing API is being integrated into a lot of frameworks like ACCA, which is like active frameworks with very high I-synchronicity, it can do the things for you without you changing application. But if you write your custom thread pools then you sort of have to do a bit of work for that. So now what about kind of what we learned at Uber from doing these things? It actually felt like this guy. We have by now close to 3,000 microservices and about half of them are instrumented for tracing and that half has been a percentage for like a year and a half as far as I remember even though the number of microservices keeps growing. So it's a tough and it doesn't help with the fact that we have like four languages at Uber so it makes it even harder on my team to actually provide instrumentations for all the languages and frameworks and write the client libraries. But if you are gonna do this in your organization, so what you should do, like one thing, I would strongly advise using open tracing because it actually decouples you from the actual tracing system. If you don't like Yeager, if you wanna switch to commercial vendor, which does a lot of work potentially in Yeager, then you don't need to change your applications. That's open tracing instrumentation stays the same, you just flip which tracer you use, right? And obviously, it's a just common good programming practice. You should use infrastructure libraries in your organization which are shared across teams so that you don't reinvent the wheel in every service. And if you do that, then it becomes a bit easier to enable tracing because that's the only place you kinda have to go and instrument things. And a good thing is many of them are already instrumented with open tracing because it's an open source API. And it's like still vendor independent. And one important thing is like don't make configurations for tracing, right? It should come enabled by default. You can have a configuration to disable it but we made the mistake originally with our Python clients of like you actually had to go and enable like put a Boolean flag in the config. And that just like was completely unnecessary friction to rolling this out. Education is very important. Distributed context propagation, I mean DAPR came out what in 2008, 10 years ago. The concept is still new to many developers. So definitely giving talks internally in the company and explaining why it's important and showing some use cases helps. So I was mentioning this, the feature where the customer ID was passed around. This is in open tracing, it's called baggage because it's something that you carry with the request. It's not the actual trace ID but it's an additional key value pair. And so what we use it for is several things at Uber. So one thing is we have various sources of synthetic traffic at Uber. Let's say there's a black box system which keeps like pinning the APIs and saying is my service is working correctly, right? And there could be some performance testing or like capacity testing that increase a lot of, like create a lot of loads on the services as well. So if you cannot distinguish the traffic by these sources then and you monitor your metrics, suddenly your metrics goes wild and your alerts start firing all because someone ran a performance test somewhere else, like not even on your service potentially upstream, right? So that's bad. So by using the baggage and propagating this sort of the type of traffic that's getting into your service, you can separate metrics using as a dimension.  And the similar thing is tendency. This is what essentially the customer information is. You pass that around and you can do a lot of cost attribution using that. And chaos engineering is another aspect. Like if we have 3000 microservices and you do the chaos monkey approach, you're gonna like keep killing things forever and not find anything because there's too many permutations of things that you can kill and figure out what affects the actual reliability of the service. So with tracing, you can actually do targeted sort of chaos introductions into the architecture based on like you're saying, okay, you know where the request is going, you can encode certain parameters saying, okay, well when it gets to this point, just kill that point or like black hole it. And so if you pass that information in the baggage and the request it reaches, and it's again transaction specific. So that's important piece here is that transaction specific. So one other thing is kind of useful. We measure the adoption and the trace quality. So we wrote a process which kind of looks at all the traces coming from various application and says, okay, well, does this actually trace look correct? This instrumentation makes sense. And if it's not, we sort of raise certain things like I don't know if you can see that, but this is like a dashboard you can get by service. It says, oh, these are all the metrics specifically for tracing quality and these metrics like this is good, but this is not so good. You can improve it and this is how, right? So we service this information as part of like a standard, like a quality metric for quality dashboard for a service that every service gets. Integration without the tools is supremely helpful for rolling out tracing because those tools are your additional sort of people who can go and harass other people to implement tracing instead of you doing this. So I'm right in time, but like black box testing I mentioned is like external testing tool, but because it's a low traffic, you can actually force tracing and make sure that every request from the black box tool is actually traced. And then you get the trace ID and suddenly something fails. You can raise an alert and say, oh, and by the way, this failed, right? So as opposed to, if you don't have that information, all you know is that this endpoint to your total API layer failed. With trace you can pinpoint some downstream service that's responsible. Developer Studio is kind of an idea for developers to where we have the, where you can drag your position on the map, put the driver here and simulate the trip and all this fun, it captures all kinds of requests going on between the APIs and it also does tracing. So again, very useful people can actually get used to using tracing.  So this is sort of kind of obvious point, but tracing is a product. You have to sell it. You have to show value to your customers, right? And I don't know what this graphics is about really. And finally, well, I can't really, unfortunately go with a service dependency diagram. So I mentioned that this is very powerful tool for actually understanding what your application is doing, right? Or how the system is organized. And so you can see there are a lot of questions like is my service critical for overall request flow? What workflows, business workflows my service is participating in, right? Will my service survive Halloween? The big thing for Uber, like Halloween is super high traffic for us and then we always do this capacity planning to make sure we have enough capacity for services and then, but you don't really know without tracing because just because our business number of trips increases by two times, does it mean your service needs two times capacity? It could be 10 times. It's like the factor is not clear actually. So with tracing you can get that factor, right? And another thing here is like a sample dependency diagram. So the previous one, you remember that was kind of a simple version because it just measured pairwise connections between services. This one actually looks at the path. And so when we say this dingo at the top left is calling core service shrimp is not real names. And it's calling service dog. So my question is, is dingo service actually dependent on the dog or not? No way to tell here, right? We have a tool which I will demo if you come to the Yeager deep dive session later tomorrow because I'm running out of time, but you can actually tell by this new tool where which services depends like at any depth of the dependency, right? So it's not the pairwise. And finally, my closing thought is that monitoring traditionally has been a lot about firefighting. Like, oh, I measure something, the fire alerts, I do something really tracing can do that as well. It can help you root cause and troubleshoot problems. But tracing also provides a very vast amount of data to do better than that, to do like fire prevention, to figure out what's your capacity constraints, how you should optimize the performance and which components in the architecture need to be optimized because they are the actual bottlenecks, et cetera. So an improving real ability basically of your service. So quick call out. So as I said, there is gonna be two more, actually three more sessions on Yeager specifically and we'll show some of the demos again there. And there's also open tracing salon. I highly recommend to attend that. There's gonna be general discussion about tracing. I also highly recommend not missing Ben Siegelman's keynote about tracing in meshes. That was, don't know what is about, super interesting. And finally, if you need more information, this is our website, some ways to get in touch with us. And it's an open source project, so all contributions are welcome. Thank you.


Let's pray. Father, we thank you. Lord, thank you for this day. Thank you for this time. Lord, we come to this session into your mighty hand, God. We pray for God. Lord, your plans, your thoughts, your ideas. And I pray that you would, Lord, just move things in us, stir up things in us, Father God. You know, as we, Lord, talk about these topics, talk about what needs to be done. I pray that you will make firm, Lord, and write these things, establish things in our hearts, God. You want to thank you. We give you all the praise and all the glory. In Jesus' master's name, we pray. Amen. Amen. Okay, let me just share the Google sheet. Okay, here we go. Okay. So, yeah, say some question. Kung, yeah, I know you came in a little late. So you could, you could take time till tomorrow morning, Kung. Yeah, you can go watch the videos of the previous sessions. I don't know if you've already done that. And you can take time till tomorrow morning about the topic. And more importantly, the description as well. Right? Okay, I'm just going through some of these things, the topic. Okay, I look at Maggie Maggie's topic, The Church of the Future and its relevance in the future world. Yes, we discussed it. And yes, that looks good.   I'm not really sure if it's, you know, if it's substantial, you'll have substantial, you know, if for a four month research, right, stirring up the fire of God in your heart. Could you talk about this, Asha? You want to tell us a little more about this topic, please? Is Asha online? Yes, Master. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Basically, as Christians, they lose the flame for God. And to stir it up to make it, we have to have the right fuse, such as the, having the heart to like, sometimes we grow like we lose our time in that. How our life is not really, our flame literally goes out when we are not literally stirring up the fire, which is worshiping our God, having the word of God in our heart. Yeah, but it'll be good if you can add some more to it, Asha, because it's, it's a, you know, it's a substantial amount of time. And this is, this is nice for an assignment paper, but if it's a research paper, it needs to be something more. Yeah, please do add to it, right. And maybe you have, you can also, just like Kung, you can take time till tomorrow morning, nine o'clock, to rework this and submit it, please. Yeah. So stirring up the fire of God in your heart, you know, yeah, it's, it's a nice topic for an assignment, for a sermon, but for a research paper, it needs to be something more, I feel, from what you've shared, it'll be very limited. So unless you have something more that, I mean, we meet on Thursday, also we can talk, right, and we meet in college. So yeah, just think about this, right. Okay, yeah, no worries. Yeah, no worries. I'm just trying to understand, like, so there's no problem, but try to add. Okay. So Siddhant, the various languages in the Bible. So yeah, can you just tell what is it that you want to talk about? Siddhant, Siddhant connected. Yeah, Siddhant. So I see that different languages in which the Bible was written. So, you know, broadly, you're talking about the Hebrew and the Greek. Is there anything more? So what exactly is the nature? Can you, would you be able to unmute and speak? Are you in Bible college? Would you be able to share, please? Just give me a minute, sir. Yeah. So it's about the history of Hebrew and Greek. Okay. Yeah, it's like, how the Greek transformed into the Arambic, then a few part of Bible is written Arambic, some prophetic books. So that, so what, okay, so you're talking about the language, talking about, so what are you going to, you know, what is the objective of it? Most kind of like history of that period, the culture. The culture of the people. And history of the language. I think you need to think through this, Siddhant. Yes, sir. Yeah, you need to think through what the scope of the whole thing is, you know, we've already taken a bit of a bit of time, but you need to think through what exactly you're going to research. And why you want to do this, you know, it's, yeah, that's what I'm just trying to understand. I know what is the biblical perspective. Of course, it's, it's great learning to talk about this, these languages and so on. But yeah, yeah, if you can just explain, that's why I just wanted to know if you can just explain, okay, what all you're going to talk about? What is this whole research on? It's related to culture of those people, those times. So it's a, it's a vast time period, right? Yeah, you're looking at centuries. You're looking at millennia actually.  Yeah. So the access to that information, and how exactly what exactly are you presenting?  And then, and I'm just thinking, okay, it's good. It's a, it's historical, et cetera. But there will be some value. I mean, this is just my opinion.  Otherwise, it'll be a, you know, it'll be a, okay, this person said this, this person said that and just presenting this is how, and it's a vast timeframe that you're looking at. Yeah, please do think through this. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. Jesus in the Jewish festivals, that's, okay, say is just one more quick thought, you know, please use the names that you have actually registered in the Bible college. So what would happen is, you know, some difficulty that I faced, I mean, this, this is for the other batch is that you know, your name comes in a certain way, when I look at the, you know, the way it is listed. And when we have these tests and assignments, when you submit certain things, you use another version of your name, maybe, which doesn't match up with the registered name, and we're finding it difficult to kind of see, okay, who is who. So I've been trying to, you know, work through that. So please use the same name that you have registered as for the course, right? Just a request. Okay. So Jesus in the Jewish festival. So, so say, would you like to just say online? So would you like to just expand on that, please? Yeah, yes, Pastor. Yeah. So, so basically, after the topic I suggested, I found out, yes, you're right. We have dealt with something like that related to the cross covenant. So I started to think further, and then I came up with this. And that's because for some time, I have actually just been interested with trying to understand the Jewish context, or the Jewish context, basically, as related to the Bible. And so that has kind of been my fascination for a while. So I said, oh, this is a good time, maybe, to go deeper. So that's why the topic Jesus in the Jewish festivals came in. So the idea, basically, the objectives, I basically just want to, it's just to show that all festivals celebrated by the Jewish people, you know, at the end of the day, all points to Jesus Christ. To a large extent, many of the Jewish people still observe these festivals, either rejecting or ignoring the fact that Jesus, the Messiah has already come. So the whole idea is to investigate, see the significance of all these festivals that God himself instituted and instructed the Jewish people to celebrate, and then see how it ties to the calendar system, which was established in their own time, and then all together tied or pointing it to Jesus Christ to show the significance of why all these festivals were instituted by God. So that's kind of the draft for me. Okay, so the centrality of Christ and all these Jewish feasts and customs as well. That should be interesting. Go ahead. Thank you, sir. So Pratik, reaching the unreached, is Pratik online? Can you just help us understand this, please? Pratik, reaching the unreached. Okay, he's not in class, I think. Fine, we'll just move on. Okay, so Louis, AI and the end-time revival of the 21st Century Church, is Louis online? No? Oh yeah, Louis, could you just share with us? AI and the end-time revival, what is the nature of, like, what is the direction? Okay, I'm not able to hear, let's just... Okay, let's check. Thayesh, could you tell us the Bible standpoint pertaining to same-sex principles? I think it's kind of self-explanatory, but if you could just explain to us what is the scope of what you want to share, Thayesh. Okay, Rupa, so I see your comment. That's fine. Yeah, okay. So, Thayesh, are you able to unmute and share about your topic, please? Also, could you repeat, please? Yeah, we just wanted to understand the scope of the research. I see your topic, which is the Bible's biblical standpoint pertaining to same-sex practices, so I just wanted to understand, like, what exactly would be the scope? What do you hope to research and present? Okay, sure. Well, I was looking, as it says, the biblical standpoint of what does the Bible really speak about same-sex practices and marriages, so I will present those points and draw a conclusion from that. Yeah, it would be good to also do some research on, okay, I know it's as old as, you know, a sin itself, right? Talking about same-sex, I mean, the sin and the aberrant nature of it in the word we see right from days of Noah, so we see that, but also it'll be good to see how it is in the, you know, how it is affected today's society and the consequence of that. Okay, it's one thing to, okay, share from the word, saying that, okay, this is what the word of God says, but it'll be good if you can say, okay, this is what is prevalent in society and also just a suggestion, you know, to see what is the consequence of that, you know, what is it, is the fabric of society unraveling, you know, is anything happening that is, you know, that's really destroying society? You know, it's, so it'd be good if you can talk about that as well. Okay, that is a good idea. I started in my first draft in the introduction to see how it has impact now over, what is it, 50-something countries, how they have started approving. I did that in the first draft so far, just giving a global perspective of where some of what is happening. So now that you mention it, this is a good idea. I think I will include that as well. Yeah, and also, I think we can also talk about, like, what does science talk about it, you know, because these are things which are, if you want to call it that, the doctrines of, you know, the same-sex philosophy, you know, so what is it, what is it that, what is the reference point for this, you know, I think if you can mention that also, that'll help, that'll be of value. Okay, okay, thank you. Okay, Abinas, Hebrew names of God in the Old Testament. Yeah, Abinas, are you in the class? Yes, fast enough. Yeah, okay. So the Hebrew names of God, now, we have actually studied it in our foundations, right? We're going to talk about characteristics of God, nature of God. We talk about the Hebrew names as, I think it's quite an exhaustive name, the why, and the incident, which happens because of it.  So what exactly do you want to do different from that, Abinas? What I was going through is like, in the Old Testament, there are several Hebrew names of God in the Bible, but my objective was like, where does it come from, what are the Bible references, and why it is important to know the names of God. So we have actually studied that, Abinas. I think we've already done it. So one of the objectives is that we will not cover subjects that we have already covered in the Bible college as a part of our course, either past or present, right? So this is, to some extent, we have actually covered it, you know, the names of God. So I think you need to relook at the topic, Abinas. Yeah, so you need to, I think it'll be better if you change it, something else or you're doing it from a totally different angle. That's why I just want to understand what is it that we're doing because it's something that's already been covered, right? Okay, so you please rework it. Okay, so hope William, thanks, Abinas. So hope William, how addiction persecutes youth in church? Okay, so there's hope online, hope is not online. Okay, okay, next. Prabhakar, you can just go to the Google sheet and you can just type it in Prabhakar. As we are just going through this, you can enter it in, please. Okay, so Harrison, identity crisis, identity crisis.  Okay, so we'll just, that's fine, no problem, we can do it later. So Harrison, are you in class? I'm sorry, I'm just switching between the chat and the chat box and the list, name list. Okay, Harrison is out there, right? Okay, Tharun, what do you like to share? Advancing technology and God and God. Is it similar lines with what Louis, AI and the end time? I don't know what he has in mind. Yeah, you can just share, go ahead, please. Louis, I haven't seen at the end time revival of the 21st century. Yeah, no, no, actually, what I'm looking at is like I picked up five different advanced technologies. And as we explore and where we stand as a world on those technologies and see through the lens of the world, like for example, the general intelligence blockchain or driverless cars or big data analytics. So I would be briefing what the technology is and as we learn more, where do we stand currently? And when we reach the pinnacle of it, we see that there is a standard that God has set on where it can reach and it exposes God and his wisdom as we learn more about those technologies. Okay, okay. So the topic again says advancing technologies and God encounters. Okay, so you're talking about these technologies, what it is, and also how you're just tying it back to how it actually reveals certain aspects of God, is it? Like certain Yeah, attributes of God and the standards that God has set. In fact, we look back into creation to learn things. For example, when we say big data analytics, the amount of data that we are processing for, let's say, credit card transactions, millions of transactions, which are happening per second and the kind of the capacity and the sizes of devices that we use are so huge. But in the creation, we see that, you know, a brain of a dragonfly can actually process about 17,000 images per microsecond. And that's a very high standard that our processors, the size and the capacity, we are far away from there. So the God standard is much higher. But as we narrow down and advance into this technology, we only see that this is something that God has done long ago and we match up to the wisdom of God. Okay, nice. So can you, you want to change it to like something about creation then, like rather than God encounters? I mean, I just a suggestion. Yeah, I'm still thinking through the topic. I know I didn't raise it well. But I had a couple of other topics like technology and in the theological lens and things like that I was looking at. But I might change it. Like, as I think through and as the paper comes together, I might, I will change it. Okay, because I'm just thinking like when you use it as a hashtag, no, it'll just like directly lead to the thing. So it's good to kind of be specific, I think, like what it leads to. I think that will help. Yeah, but yeah, very interesting. So you're going to talk about five advancing technologies. Yes. And, and God encounters. I've also thought about like blockchain. I'm not, I'm not connecting to anything in creation. But again, the very essence of blockchain is to establish the moral framework and to hold people accountable, so that we will be able to authenticate things well. So that's, that something comes with the change of heart, which, which is again, the work of Christ in man. So that, that, that is one thing that that and another one when it comes to tracking everything is not something that connects directly. But otherwise, they are technologies that expose that, you know, the goddess and set a standard. Like it's, we only, it increases our knowledge of what God has said for us. Okay. Yeah. So if it's not just limited to creation, I guess you can frame it in that way. Talks about the image of God, kind of attribute of God probably. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Thank you. Thanks. Okay. So Rupa said that she'll do it late. She's, she's traveling, but we had a discussion on her topic, creating a home away from home about about open home and ministering about how home's house is being a place of ministry and also the downside of it, you know, to do it, how to do it well, etc. So it's okay. So Maxon is Maxon there. Maxon is going back to false prophets. So Maxon, you framed that. We discussed it last class, but you framed the topic a little, I mean, the title of it a little differently, right? False, because you're talking about in today's church and that's what we discussed last class. So kindly rephrase it a little differently, because that's what will go as the title on the report that you submit. So it'll be good if you can like specify what exactly it is about the false prophets. It's fine, you know, to talk about the dangers, to talk about how it is in present day church and all that. You can change it later than just saying that you can actually, according to the scope of it, right? And whether it's the mainline church, whether it's whatever, you know, you are in in Africa or in a particular country, I think that will help, right, rather than false prophets. And so obviously it's a warning. It's a heads up to the believer that these are false prophets. These are false, false ways of doing ministry, right?  You're giving the biblical perspective in a way the antidote for what is, okay, this is the ill or the thing that is happening wrong, whereas this is what it is, this is what scripture says. So we need to present that as well. Okay, Asha's question is, can you show me an example of a research paper? Yeah, Asha, the thing is, yeah, once you've, you know, finalized on the topic, we can, you know, do that when we come to that. Yeah. So, because I don't want us to be kind of swayed by others, what others have done. So yeah, I can definitely share that. Okay. Understanding the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. So actually, like we discussed last time, I mean, after the class, we discussed this. So Judaism and Christianity, so you're talking about the impact of, you know, Christianity in Judaism and vice versa about talking about messianic Jews, we discussed that. So please change the title to that. I know you need to think through whatever that you're, you know, covering and kind of change that tweak it to define it a little bit, please. Yeah. Okay, So Prabhakar, perseverance in prevailing Christians, persecution and religious atrocities in India. Maybe it can be reworded, right? Religious persecution. So when you say religious atrocities, it's not just Christian, right? It's not just against Christians, but it's to other communities as well. Religious atrocities. I was directing towards Christians only pastor. But yes, actually, I was trying to figure, I mean, add certain minority religion, minority group of people. So it is overall certain some points I'll like to add, like, getting the same treatment, some of the points which I want to carry. But if it is like, it should be limited to like Christian persecution. So I'll change it to like, yeah, maybe just drop the word religious.  So you can just say persecution and atrocities. Christian persecution, persecution against persecution and atrocities against the Christian community would be I think accurate. And also when you say perseverance in prevailing. So you're actually talking about how to persevere through this, right? That is what you mean. That's one of the main motto, like how to deal with it, like how to overcome all. Yeah, so probably the best way to put it across is to say, the Christian response to prevailing persecution and atrocities. So when you say response, you're talking about perseverance, talking about, you know, praying, how you should actually so you can use the word response, the church's response or the believer's response to, you know, you can use that those words. So you can do that. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So Chris, does alcohol have a place in the life of a believer in the current times? Okay. So I think we discussed that. And so I guess you'll talk about, yeah, you said you'll talk about your own personal experience also, you can present that. But let that be, you know, a smaller percentage compared to, you know, the research of the whole thing. I'm talking about the negative impact of alcohol in the life of a believer. What the Bible says, and also, yeah, different cultures, I guess, you could even go that, take that route, like well, certain cultures tolerated. So you could even address that. Okay. So that's fine. Yeah. Then Kennedy, handling spiritual and physical burnout among pastors in ministry will lead us, yeah. So that is good. So just one, I think it's a broad area. So when you present findings, it's good to talk about real lives. And you don't have to really mention names, but actually in your research to find out from pastors from ministry leaders, if you can talk and see how it has impacted them. I think it'll be closer to home. If you can talk about, maybe in your own, I mean, wherever you are, in your own city or in, you know, if you can add that as well, it'll be good. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, Chris, I'll thank you then. Yeah, Kennedy. So we'll, you can do that. Yeah. So that'll be good. You know, if you can get first hand knowledge, you know, people whom you know, and if we are sharing about burnout in what way it was a burnout, that'll be really good. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Then come to Elisha, the role of media in the spiritual development of teens. So Elisha, would you like to just explain that please? Pastor, I will be focusing on the rule that the new media and how the church can use the media to advance the support the spiritual development of teenagers in our churches so that how we can develop content through the media to support the spiritual development since media has become a very common tool for everyone in our generation. So that is basically what I'll be looking at. What, how, what exists so far has impacted and consider if there's still a gap that the church can also set in to close that gap to advance the spiritual development of teenagers within our denominations. Okay. Yeah. So you can talk about, I guess you can talk about spiritual development, what it involves, you know, what you mean by spiritual development, of course. One is, you know, spiritual maturity, Christlikeness, and we're also talking about spirituality, like, you know, development of the human spirit, like the spirit man being edified, discovering the gifts. You know, all that is spiritual development, right? So, so when you look at media, and you can also categorize media into, you know, everything, right, right from today's social media, maybe should be things that people connect together, and then other other forms of media. So have you mentioned social media? No, it's a, it's media, so media can also be print, media can also be other forms through which people receive information, right? So, so you can specify, like, what media that you really want to talk about, is it print old school, or is it like, so you can specify that and categorize it, because people do use print as well, you know, but it's just that it's, it's in, you know, in, it's Kindle, it's digital, but it's still, you know, in that way. So you can actually talk about Kindle and any other form of digital, I mean, print digital media, I don't know how to word it, what do you call that, I guess, ebooks and so on, audio books, right? So you can include that as well. Then of course, you know, Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and all that. So we could talk about that. It'll be good to talk about the downside of it. It'll be good to talk about the limitations, right? And it'll also be good to present some working models, like in a sense, if you know of churches or ministries and get information about who's using it and who's using it successfully, some such as stories. And also, I'm sure, you know, all these methods also have limitations, right? There's only so much. So should be supplemented with, of course, you know, man-human interaction, like people. So that also, you know, so that's a gap, right? When it comes to media wave, one is the actual human interaction, of course, it happens online, but then the actual, you know, person-to-person real interaction, which is absent. So how to supplement that, right? So that would also be useful. So the scope of research, again, you can fine-tune it, you know, are you including? What kind of media are you including? Also, spiritual development, think about it. What all entails spiritual development? Christlikeness, spiritual hunger gives knowledge of the word. So in spiritual media, what? What is spiritual media? I mean, sorry, in social media and other, you know, electronic form. What can it really contribute to? And what it can't? And I think it'd be good to give a realistic picture there. Yeah. I hope that helps. Yes. Yes, Pasta. Thank you very much. Okay. Okay. So, yeah, so we've gone through this. I'm sorry about that confusion about, you know, the draft. So please take one more day. Please feel free to present it on the stream, you know, on online students. E-learning, please do post it in the discussion, right? In your discussion, you could just add it, or you could email me, the email ID. Also, I will post on the discussion. This is for E-learning students, so you could use that. And I will go through it, right? Go through the draft. Okay. Any questions or can we wrap up today's? Okay, Abhishek. I thought a title like Masayani Judaism and Modern Interpretation of an Ancient Faith. Tell me again. You put it here, is it? Have you? Okay, I will put it in the chat. Yeah. So, Masayani, I'm sorry, I can just put it. Masayani Judaism. Okay. A Modern Interpretation of an Ancient Faith. A Modern Interpretation of an Ancient Faith. Okay. Okay. Modern Interpretation. So, is it just an interpretation of something that is old or has it really gone through change, you know, right? So, the fact is, like you were telling me, yes, people have accepted Christ. There is, you know, the growing, you know, the percentage of people in the Jewish community who are experiencing salvation, transformation, etc. So, they do hold on to certain Jewish customs, but really, they have experienced those other Masayani Jews, right? So, it's not just an interpretation of an ancient faith, right? So, I don't know if you can use that. Yeah. It's fine. You're almost there. Sorry? Study of the, like, intersection of Judaism, Christianity. So, that would be just common points, commonalities. Like, what is prophesied as a reality? Okay, just go with that. I was like, you think about it. You post it. Let me take a look. Yeah. Put it on the Google Sheet. Let's take a look. Okay. But, see, I know basically what you want to do. So, that's fine. It's just that you need to, the topic should actually reflect that research. It's very important. It can't be, you know, it can't be saying one thing and the research be something else or you, you know, promise, because the topic promises what the research is about. And when a person reads it, it has to fulfill it. That's the only thing. That's why, you know, we're just talking about refining the topic and, you know, doing that. It can't be two different things. It can't be heading off in a different direction. That's the only reason. Right? Okay. Prabhakar, you want to say something and also Maxon. Yes, Pastor. I want to say, actually, I was thinking just to focus on prevailing Christian persecution and atrocity in India. Like, how to do it? It's a response that we already have in, you know, by most people when you have audit, but I want to do more research about the current contribution or throughout the history of India, like whatever happened in the history of India, regardless of the centuries. So shall I put it like a prevailing Christian persecution and atrocity in India across centuries? And if that is what you're going to be studying, you can do that. Or, you know, you can just say prevailing persecution and atrocities prevailing in today's church and the church's response. And I think that'll be fine. Yeah. And then also, like we discussed, you know, I think you can talk about, you know, how church has been responding. And then maybe if there are success, I mean, some not success stories, testimonies that can be shared. And also if there are, you know, like the solace, the persecutor, experiencing transformation in the process of persecuting the church, I think if those can be, if there's some research done, and that can be presented also, that would make it even more interesting. In this climate, in this environment, the persecutor himself or herself undergoing change. Or if you can get that, that'll also be fine. Yeah. Sure. I'll do that. Thank you. Okay. So, Maxon, your question or thoughts? Yeah. Of course, I just want to ask you, like we meet once a week. So I think this time, when someone need your maybe like advice assistance in the middle of the week, which is the best media to reach out to you? Yeah, I think you can just email me, please. You can use either of those email IDs. You can just email me. Like on the stream, I actually, I was, I was traveling, so I didn't check it. But you can email midweek, you can email me. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Because I actually, Abhishek emailed and Rupa also emailed, and we kind of had a discussion about their topic this past week. So, so yeah, you can email me. Yeah, we could do that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So that's, we'll let's wrap up for today. All the very best. These are good topics. What you have, you know, what you've shared. Just go a little deeper in what seems to be, you know, it's a broad category, you know, you just go a little deeper and it'll be good. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Thank you so much. We'll, we'll stop here. All the very best. God bless you guys. Bye-bye. Thank you, Pastor. God bless you. Bye-bye.


The purpose of this study was to evaluate the bibliometric performance and post-K award funding of KL2 scholars and compare it to other mentored K awardees at the same institution. This study found no demographic differences among KL2 scholars, but did find that KL2 scholars had more initial publications than other mentored K awardees. Furthermore, the number of initial publications was a significant predictor of future federal grant funding. This article was authored by Kelly Qua and Clara M Pelfrey.