I'm Robin, welcome back to Whiteboard Friday. About a year ago, tools like ChatGBT, large language models based tools, came out and got us all thinking about how we can use them better as individuals and marketers. In this video, I'm not gonna make you a machine learning expert and I don't think I'm gonna be tearing up what people have been saying so far, but I'm gonna break down some of the technology and some of the limitations that go into it, which I think gives us a lot of clues about how we can use them best as individuals and marketers. And I think you'll be pleasantly surprised that a lot of it has parallels with the kind of things we're used to. So let's start with the steps that they have to go through for ChatGBT, for example, to give you an answer to a question. Again, like search engines, they have to first gather the data, then they need to save the data in a format that they're able to access, and then they need to give you your answer at the end, which is kind of like ranking. If we start with gathering the data, this is the bit that's closest to the search engines that we know and love. So they're basically accessing web pages, crawling the internet, and if they haven't visited a web page or got another source for a piece of information, they just don't know that answer. And they're kind of at a disadvantage here because search engines have been doing this, have been recording this information for decades, whereas they've kind of only just started. So they've got a lot of catching up to do. There are a lot of different corners of the internet that they haven't really been able to visit. One of the things that they can do on a piece of information that they can gather that other search engines can't access is chat data. So when you are using the platforms, they are gathering data about what you're putting in and how you're interacting with it, and that feeds into their training model. So that's one thing for you to be aware of when you're working with platforms like ChatGPT is that if you're putting in private data in there, it's not necessarily private after you've done that. So you might want to look at your settings or look at using the APIs because they tend to promise they don't train on API data. If we move on to the second stage, saving that information, this is kind of what we refer to as indexing in search. And this is where things diverge a little bit, but there's still quite a lot of parallels. So in the early days of search engines, actually the index, the data that they had saved wasn't updated live the way we're used to it. It wasn't that as soon as something came out onto the internet, we could kind of be sure that it would appear in a search engine somewhere. It was more that they would update once every few months because it was very expensive. It was costly in terms of time and money for them to do those index updates. And we're in a similar situation with large language models at the moment. You may have noticed that every so often they say, okay, we've updated things. The information that it's got is now alive up till April or something like that. And that's because when they want to put more information into the models, they actually have to retrain the whole thing. So again, it's very costly for them to do. And both of those limitations kind of feed into the answers that you're getting at the end. I'm sure you've seen this, you might be working with chat GPT and it hasn't happened to see the information that you're asking about or the information it does have is out of date. And the way that you've probably managed that is by either copying and pasting a bunch of context into the chat window, which is something that's quite specific to these tools that we can make the most of, or maybe you've asked Bing to go away and have a look for something. And this is something, a dynamic that we're getting very used to with these tools, but it is quite specific to large language models. The fact that we can shore up this, the gaps in the long-term memory by kind of dumping in stuff to the short-term memory and asking it to work with that. The interesting thing is, even if we're not doing this stuff, that's what's happening in the background anyway. So when you have a conversation with chat GPT, the model actually has no memory even of what it last sent you. What's happening is whenever you send a message, there's a script running that is copying the entire conversation.  So it has none of that memory. And that's useful for us to know because we're actually relying on the ability to dump all of this context in short-term memory as much as possible in all of these kinds of interactions. And there can be some limitations there. So used to be that the main limitation was just how much information you could fit in. And a lot of the conversations came down to context windows. So it used to be that you couldn't really paste that much information in there. We've reached the point where actually you can put quite a lot in. So GPT 4.5, you can paste about 300 pages worth of text. Anthropic, which is a key competitor, you can paste about 500 pages of text in there. So we've really reached a point where like, I don't want to be copying and pasting that much information into each prompt. That's not really the limitation anymore, but we've still got a couple of problems that they need to overcome as companies and as developers of these tools.  So the gaps that they've got in their knowledge still can't be filled by us just pasting everything into the short-term memory.  In fact, you can get a better performance boost by just taking the relevant information and putting it towards the start of your prompt, then you can by paying for the next most expensive model. So that's something that's kind of interesting for us to think about because when we're working with these models, for one thing, we know that we are regularly dumping lots of information into the context, like that's how it pays attention to our conversations, that's how we fill in these gaps in knowledge. So on the one hand, we don't want to have to search through all of these different documents and find out exactly where the right answer is. That's kind of what we're asking ChatGPT to do. But on the other hand, if we are putting loads of irrelevant stuff in there, it becomes more and more likely that it's going to miss the thing that we actually wanted to handle. So there's a couple of things that we can do to deal with that. One, in terms of us as individuals, we can remember that long conversations are essentially all being dumped into this context window. So if we're talking to about one thing and then we actually want to switch to something else, we can essentially just decide to switch to a new chat, which is very easy in these interfaces. Another thing that we can do is be mindful of things like mega prompts. So this is really condensed blocks of instructions that you quite often find people putting at the top of these interactions. Again, that could mean that things kind of get shifted into this middle portion where things often get lost. So we're kind of trying to make sure that we're focusing things as much as possible. And of course, if we're dumping big blocks of information in there as well, we're trying to do some weeding out of the stuff that we know is less relevant. The other solution to this kind of problem is kind of more technological and more enterprise, but it's definitely something for us all to be aware of as a growing industry. And that's something called RAG. So RAG stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation. And the way that changes is basically, instead of our question going straight to chatGPT, for example, with nothing else, we have a separate database of important information that we want. So that could be all of our company's internal documentation that we don't want to go external. Or it could just be a bunch of things that we know are relevant, but we couldn't copy and paste them all straight into the context. So we have this separate database and there are tools called vector databases, which essentially are designed to work very well with large language models. And they have a very similar kind of logic to them. So they can pull out the most relevant documents that should go as part of that prompt and add it in naturally to the context. So this kind of automates that step of you having to go and search and copy and paste things and weed out the things that are less relevant. It makes it much more streamlined and it gives you a way to have a more private but much more contextually aware version of these tools. And it starts to solve some of the problems that we have in terms of missing knowledge. So in terms of things to watch out for and potentially work you might want to get involved in, it's worth kind of bearing in mind if that's what people mean when they talk about RAG. But what does that mean for us as individuals? What does that mean for us as search marketers? Well, as I said before, these companies have a couple of fairly big problems that make it quite hard for them to fill all of the gaps in their knowledge, quite expensive at the very least. At the moment, that's not too much of a problem. These tools are so new that we don't remind a bit of copy and pasting. But it is going to get to the point, I think, where we're starting to compare these tools based on how easy they are to use. Do I have to keep reminding it of the stuff that I had last week? If so, I might switch to this other one that I don't have to do so much. So they're going to have to solve that problem somehow. One way they could solve that problem is by baking in RAG from the start. So essentially, when you're using this tool, they have kind of three tiers of memory. They've got the long-term memory, the model, which is the way it's working at the moment, the short-term memory, the stuff that you're dumping into the text chat, and then a kind of a medium-term memory, which is information they've been able to gather, but they haven't had the time or the resource to bake it into the model yet. Now, if you try to do RAG yourself, and if you've got skills and a bit of time and a bit of coding knowledge, I recommend you give it a try, you find that a lot of the conclusions you come to are very familiar. So for example, HTML, fantastic, flexible way to communicate information. If someone has designed a page well, they've put the right headings in there, it becomes much easier to pull out the most relevant stuff, and then that chunk of information is much more likely to work its way into your answer. Likewise, if you've got a page that's kind of full of irrelevant stuff and a couple of good nuggets of information, or a page that is very well targeted to the topic that you're thinking about, the second page is probably going to be the thing that shows up. So the things that we've been thinking about in terms of optimizing for search engines are very relevant when we start thinking about RAG. And even if they don't go down the RAG route, we know they still have to crawl and find all of this information. So the idea of having pages which are very worth a crawler's time to visit, very well structured, easy to understand, very relevant, these all continue to be a good way to think about how we can prepare ourselves for potentially optimizing for large language models in the future. So, in summary, as individuals, if we're working with something like ChatGBT, we need to bear in mind the data's not private, so you might need to look at your settings or check out using the APIs. And we want to keep the conversations as focused as possible on the things that we want. If we're pasting in a bunch of data, do some checks to try and weed out the stuff that we know definitely won't have the answer. In terms of search marketers, if you're optimizing your website for search engines at the moment and you have someone saying to you, but what are you doing to make sure that we're ready for large language models? We don't know exactly what's going to happen, but it's a really, really good bet that the stuff that you're doing now to make things good for search engines at the moment are going to be very relevant for the large language models that come. So, I hope you've enjoyed listening as much as I enjoyed talking about all of this. If you have any thoughts, please feel free to reach out to me and thanks a lot for listening.


I'm Ishaq. I'm Indonesian. What part of Indonesia are you called? Yeah, Aceh province. Aceh has been attacked by tsunami in 2000. Yes, where were you during the tsunami? I was in my hometown, but likely my hometown didn't affect it by tsunami attack. Today's our theme of what's leading your newspaper, right? So hold up your newspaper and show us what's on the front page. The police is arresting the suspect of terrorists in the middle of Java. This happened on yesterday, 9th of May. The police arrested suspect of terrorists yesterday and today become the headline news in my local newspaper. So that is the first story. What is the second story? A lot of house representative candidates failed to fulfill the requirement. When is the election? Next year, 2014.


Hey, this is Brett and this 2015 Toyota Sequoia Platinum Edition is stock number 12500ZA. We're here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, you're new and used SUV headquarters. This 2015 Toyota Sequoia has the 5.7 liter V8 engine. It puts out 381 horsepower. This vehicle has been fully-safetyed and inspected by our service shop as a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and tapped off and this Sequoia is 100% ready to go. We're going to go inside under the hood, start it up in this video, go over all the options. Blizzard Pearl is the color and we shoot all of our videos in 1080p, 60 frames per second. So if you have HD capabilities on your computer, tablet, smart phone, or television, I highly recommend. Turn them on right now because they are, it is your best way to check out the quality, condition, and options of the vehicle before seeing it in person. And if you like the video and how we do things here at Summit Auto in the upper right hand part of the screen is a subscribe button. To our YouTube channel, click that and then click the bell notifications. You'll get updates every time we do videos here at Summit Automotive. This one comes with the 20 inch painted and polished aluminum rims and for the miles on this vehicle, rims are in excellent shape. Has Bridgestone Duler HL tires, these are 275, 55 R20s and they have probably about 60 to 70% of the tread left on them. Front fender is in excellent condition, I didn't see any dents or dings on there. Headlight lenses are pretty nice and clear. Has the factory fog lights, the front bumper parking sensors. Front bumper does have a couple little nicks and stuff in it, but that's why we do the videos. As you can see right there, it's got one little ding and then a little bit of a crack right there, but nothing too bad. Doesn't affect the performance of the vehicle. Hood is in nice shape, I didn't see any dents or dings on there. And the passenger side front fender is in really nice condition too. Passenger side rim, it's a pretty nice shape. It does have that lizard pearl, which has a lot of metal flake in it. Even just walking around it is pretty cool here in the picture studio, it definitely shimmers a little bit. As you go down this side of the vehicle, take note of how clean the body is, how reflective and mirror-like that paint is. We take these HD videos, so if you are far away or even if you're close by and you just cannot make the trip down, but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle, you can see the vehicle, hear the vehicle and have confidence in what you're looking at before you even get here. So when you do get here, there's absolutely no surprises and you can make a smart and informed buying decision from wherever you're at. And if this video helps you make that buying decision, let your salesman know that you saw the video, it was helpful and that Brett sent you. Back rim is in nice shape and the back tires have just as much tread as the front tires. You get a pretty good look at the frame there, it doesn't look like it has any corrosion on it. Coming around to the back of the vehicle, Rear Bumper has the backup parking sensors, full towing package which includes the receiver hitch four pin and seven pin wire, which I can imagine is a big selling point on this vehicle with all the seating room and towing capability. The rear gate is in pretty nice condition as well, does have the power slide down gate or window, I should say.  I think they do go completely flat and they'll beep at you once they are in their final position and see those work nicely.  Coming around the driver's side, just as clean as a passenger side, rear quarter, didn't see any dents or dings in there, this back rim is in really nice condition as well and down the rest of the side of the vehicle, I didn't see any major dents or dings. You do get the heated power mirrors, blind spot monitoring, built in directional signals on there as well. Inside the Platinum package gives you the gray leather interior, both of these front seats are heated and cool. Side curtain airbags, no rips, no tears on the seats, comes with a set of weather tech floor mats in the front. Right here's your blind spot monitoring, power tilt, telescopic steering wheel, your tilt for your reverse on your mirrors, the power folding mirrors, all that good stuff. Memory driver's seat, our windows power locks, power mirrors, JBL synthesis sound system. We'll hop inside, check out the miles radio and everything that this Sequoia has to offer. You can see that this one has 141,120 miles, instrument cluster is very nice and clean. You do get the leather wrapped and wood grain trimmed steering wheel, cruise controls, forward collision warning, audio controls and from radio controls, Bluetooth controls on there, the steering wheel is in really nice shape. I wanted to show you that those mirrors do power fold in, just have to have that ignition on and both sides are working properly. So this one does have the touchscreen radio with the factory navigation system on it. This is also where your backup camera shows up and you can see that that's working nicely. You have your information center controls right here, power slide down rear window, stability control, turn dial four wheel drive, all your climate controls are right there as well. It does have AM, FM and Sirius XM radio capabilities. You get an outside temperature display right there. Here are your heated and cooled seat buttons so you just turn that dial for heated or cooled and then you get cup holders and storage underneath there. Automatic transmission, passenger side format and seat are in really nice condition. Didn't see any rips or tears on there. This one does have a Blu-ray DVD player, power sunroof, map lights and you do get compass display in the rear of your mirror with home link buttons for your garage door security systems and lighting systems. We'll take a quick look at the back seats and then we'll start it up and take a look under the hood. Second row quad seating with the latch child safety system, no rips or tears on there. Passenger side rear seat looks really good as well. Get rear air controls, 120 volt 100 watt plug-in. I think these are red, white and yellow hookups. And then you get volume controls down there with your plug-ins. There's your heated seat buttons. It does come with a set of headphones and remote control for the DVD player right there. You get that nice center console there as well. These seats fold down like that. Third row seats are in really nice condition as well. You can even put those third row seats down with those buttons right there. It has the WeatherTech floor mat back here as well. Seats fold up like so. Child safety locks on the back door, the back doors, bottoms of the doors all look really good. And you do get these side window shades which are a really nice feature if you've got kids. Keep the sun out of their eyes and stuff. We'll start it up and take a quick look under the hood. Starts right up, no check engine lights or anything like that. I personally would like to thank you for checking out the video today. And hopefully from this HD video, you'll have been able to verify the quality and condition of this vehicle inside now. Under the hood we have the 5.7-liter D8 engine. Engine bay is very clean, runs very smooth. Once again, this vehicle has been fully-safetyed and inspected by Elder Service Shop. It has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. Here's your mission sticker. You can see the shocks are doing a nice job holding that hood up. And this vehicle is 100% ready to go. And for the age of miles, I think it's in really nice condition. And to see more pictures of this Sequoia, or one of our other 450 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, you name it. We've got to go to that website right there. www.SummitAuto.com Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations all at SummitAuto.com. If you'd like to check out more HD videos, you can go to YouTube.com.com. Remember to like, subscribe, and share on this video and all the videos that you see there. Click the bell notifications. You'll get updates on the videos we do each and every day here at Summit Auto. In fact, in a second you will see links to subscribe to our YouTube channel in the upper left. Link to more Sequoia videos like this one in the upper right link to this vehicle on our website in the lower left. And a link to one of our latest YouTube videos in the lower right. Click those check us out and we're super excited to help you with this Ultra Clean 2015 Toyota Sequoia Platinum in Blizzard Pearl. Thanks again for checking out the video. Remember to like, subscribe, and share.


This is Dennis McMahon and welcome to Positively Vermont. And I'm very pleased today that we are going to be exploring an organization called the Women Business Owners Network. And here on behalf of the organization is a member of the board, Marie Eddie, who is also the founder and CEO of Eddie Career Services located in Hinesburg, Vermont. Welcome, Marie. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me on the show. Well, first tell us a little bit about yourself and your background in business and what you do today. Sure. Well, I am a solopreneur. So I am a career consultant. I like to say I'm a career coach because I'm one of those rah rah encouraging types of people. And I started my business in 2018 after having worked in education for 27 years. And mainly I started it to pursue my passion because I love career coaching. And so that's what I do now through my business, Eddie Career Services. That's great. And tell us about the Women Business Owners Network itself, a little bit of the history of some of the people who might have been involved in it at the beginning and maybe some of the people today. Sure, sure. Well, Women Business Owners Network started in 1984. The mission of WBON is to encourage and support women who own and operate businesses to foster economic stability of women-owned businesses and to improve the climate for entrepreneurship in the state of Vermont. And it started in 1984 because one of the obstacles that women were experiencing when they started to, well, when they wanted to start a business was lack of capital. You know, a lot of businesses you need startup monies. And believe it or not, in the 1980s and the early 80s, women could not get loans for their businesses without a husband's signature. So, and that wasn't too long ago. I mean, within our lifetime. So women who were frustrated by that aspect of starting their own business got together and said, well, we need to advocate. And the best way to advocate is to come together as a group because more voices are more powerful. So that was kind of the impetus to start WBON. But really what WBON has become is a support network for women business owners. I would say about two thirds of the women business owners in Vermont are solopreneurs and solopreneurship can be kind of isolating. So to have the resource of an organization like WBON that has monthly chapter meetings where women come together to network and also to learn from each other. There's always a speaker each month at the chapter meetings. And then there are two conferences a year through WBON. There's the full day spring conference which is coming up this June 7th. It's gonna be virtual this year due to the pandemic. But the spring conference is usually focused on professional development with a lot of great speakers and workshops. And then there's a half day fall conference in Vermont which is statewide that is more focused on networking and just getting together. Because again, there's power in numbers but there's also support. So WBON is like a support network for women business owners. Would you tell us about the category of women business owners? Would that also include professionals who operate as single practitioners or maybe in partnerships with other people including men? To give you an idea of some of the women who are members. Okay, so some of the ones who own their own business. So like solepreneurs, some work in body work like reflexologists, massage therapists. There are some photographers and graphic designers, a lot of coaches and consultants like myself. There are female business owners in finance like accountants, CPAs, bookkeepers. There are realtors, artists, virtual assistants and social media consultants. Social media is critical these days to promoting your business. Everyone in business needs to be tech savvy. So we have several women who run businesses helping other people become tech savvy. And but not all of us are solepreneurs. There are several members who employ other people. Some of those companies that they run are like in the food and beverage business, automotive repair, public relations. Women who work for companies where the majority of the leadership are women. So it's a broad range. I mean, we do cover every single, I would say we're a pretty wide ranging organization. That's great. Could you give us an idea of maybe what percentage or what sector of the economy in the state of Vermont is owned by women? Yeah, good question. It's gonna sound small, but it's really big. In Vermont, about seven, a little more than 7% of the businesses are owned by women. That is twice the percentage of nationally women, women-owned businesses, because nationally it's like 3.5%. That's all. So yeah, yeah. Which is again, a reason why you need to come together and support each other, you know? So yeah, about 7% of the businesses in Vermont are owned by women. And in terms of the term ownership, I realize I get a little legal when I hear that word. Does that include people who might not be the entire owners or have some equity in the business or people who are in management and not necessarily the main stockholder or owner? There are some members who co-own a business, usually with their spouse. There are a lot of husband and wife teams that come together to own a business. And whether or not those are, you know, I think they're still called women-owned businesses. If your name is on the title. Interesting. And what about professionals? You know, percentage of maybe doctors, lawyers, countents, other type, unlike yourself. Other types of consultants who operate on their own or maybe with a small amount of parts. What's the demographics of that? You know, I don't have it. I don't have the numbers handy, unlike consultants. Professionals. But I would say, you know, recently I read a report that was produced by Visa. And it just came out in 2019. And I'm trying to remember some of the statistics in that. About, you know what? Numbers. They don't stay in my mind. I just always get, I just get a little sidetracked with equity. And that's why my legal thinking, that's one of the problems. But getting back to this percentage. I mean, why is Vermont, gracefully ahead of the national average with women ownership? Oh, maybe it's because of organizations like WBON, who are here to support and help women business owners. We're invested in the economic viability of women owned businesses. We, we actually, you know, there are a lot of coalitions within Vermont, a lot of organizations to give you a, for instance, during the pandemic, you know, when the PPP loans were distributed, the public policy committee of WBON wanted to ensure that women got an equitable portion of those loans. And they partnered with the Main Street Alliance Vermont and also with Center for Women in Enterprise to not only educate women on the loans and how to get the loans, but actually sat down and helped people fill out the applications and make sure all of the paperwork was in order for them to be able to obtain some of that money. That's great because half the battle with a lot of federal programs is having the right paperwork. Right. There are people who do that and that's all they do to try to help people get that kind of money, grant writers, grant assistants. It's there. The trick is getting it, you know, but that sounds really exciting. And the other thing that I think maybe all business owners have, but the women have any particular issues with support, with not only with business or good with clients, but dealing with environmental matters, regulations, transportation, all of these things that businesses have to deal with in order to be successful. Yeah. How do you help out? Well, like, let me give you a, for instance, historically, women had difficulty finding mentors. You know, people and mentors are critical for professional development. You know, mentors provide the wisdom of their experience, but they also provide access to influencers. You know, so historically women had difficulty finding other women who could mentor them.  So part of what we do is support. And speaking of mentorship recently, WBON initiated a new program for members called WBON plus. So WBON plus is an initiative by the organization to provide mentorship in a small group. So a small group of members come together. They meet regularly for a short period of time. They share their challenges. They share their best practices. They provide encouragement to each other. It's kind of like giving each woman an informal board of advisors. So that's one of the support opportunities through membership in women business owners network. What about networking? That seems to be so important for any kind of business, but how do you manage that, particularly your network? Well, we have every chapter has a monthly meeting. And so that's an opportunity to network. Now, the funny thing was during the pandemic, of course everyone went virtual. And the chapters started holding their monthly meetings virtually. And the beauty was that members in the Berlin chapter could access Rutland's, you know, monthly meetings. And same thing with Williston, you know, people were going around and whatever Sunday, good, they could go to because they were a member of WBON. They could go to other monthly meetings. Whereas typically you wouldn't get in your car and drive an hour and a half for an hour and a half meeting. You know, if you didn't have to. So it's really opened up the opportunities, I'd say. And speaking of which, we are kind of collaborating with Main Street Alliance Vermont in our spring conference this year, June 7th, in getting the word out to people, because going virtual means that people can access from even outside of Vermont if they want to come to our conference. And we have seen that. So it's a good thing. Tell us a little more about this idea of, you say you have chapters. Yes. Tell us about the chapter network, how that was set up, or is set up. Yeah, well, they're all set up very similarly because we follow, we, chapter organizers get together monthly and support each other too. You know, they share ideas for speakers. They share ideas for topics. And they share ideas for getting the word out to people, because WBON members can go to chapter meetings for free as part of their membership, but they're also open to guests. And guests can actually come to two meetings for free. After that, there's like a nominal fee to attend a chapter meeting, but essentially it's set up like this. People get women get together. There is an introductory period like the first 15 minutes, everyone introduces themselves and their business. So there's that networking piece. And then there's a speaker question and answer period afterwards. And then usually there's a little more networking at the end. So every chapter meeting is pretty much set up like that. And before the pandemic, you actually physically. Oh yeah, we met in person. Yeah. But I guess as a latent function now this pandemic, the virtual meetings, you can get people from all over the world. Right. And as a matter of fact, about three months ago, I was attending one of the chapter meetings and there was a woman from England. She, she saw it somewhere and thought the topic sounded interesting and she joined us. That's right. Yeah, it is really, that is going to be one of those like benefits from the pandemic where even, we're even talking about keeping a chapter, at least one chapter virtual to provide that opportunity. Because people have seen the benefits. And also the ease of it is just can't be overestimated. And it's amazing how the other funny thing is, when people check into these virtual things, they may run into people they haven't seen for years, but new in the, let's say a past life. Yeah, have you ever done that? You've been in a workshop. I just did it two days ago.  And they haven't seen me in a while. So, and, and, you know, that's kind of what I miss about in-person meetings, because A, you have an opportunity to hand out your business card. And we do that. We put out our business cards at monthly meetings, but B, you know, after the meeting ends, there's that informal time where you can get together with someone you haven't seen for a while. And that networking is, is crucial to business too. I suppose that's something women business owners lacked up until recent days, you know, the old chamber of commerce or old boys network or whatever male groups they used to hang out in.  There were some obstacles for women in the beginning. And let's just take the example of golf. The role of golf courses in business opportunities. A lot of people would play golf because a lot of business happened on the golf course and afterwards in the clubhouse. And a lot of golf courses were not open to women members. You know, it might, it might have been the wives of members could play on Saturday between what, you know, nine and one or something like that. But now, and even brought to country club, they didn't allow women members until the late 1970s. So they had women golfers because my, my mom played there, but my father was the member. See, that's amazing. I don't think a lot of people realize the barriers, but it's the, what are they called the glass healing or something like that? Yeah, because so much. Oh, here's another story.  It was written by a female engineer. And you know, engineering is very nontraditional for females. It's getting better. But there was a lot of obstacles.  So anyways, this woman wrote her name was Francis. You know, Francis with an ES at the end. She started working at this engineering firm that had a big, big firm and the it guy set her up with an email address. And as a joke, he wrote Frank at company XYZ.com. Okay. So the two of them had a big laugh over it. And then he created one that was Francis, you know, who was working at the company W XYZ.com. Now she started every once in a while, she'd look at Frank's email because it was live. Yeah. And she noticed something Frank was getting emails that talked about out of work networking opportunities, professional development conferences. And Francis, she was not getting those emails. And that's sad. Wow. That's a major development. Yeah. It's like a study. And a lot of women got discouraged and dropped out of engineering because of that. Now, now I read that article like 20 years ago. I will let you know that I just read in that 2019, 2019 article by visa. They said in the last five years, no, 79% of American female entrepreneurs that were surveyed for that article reported that they felt more empowered. Then they did five years previous. So 79% of women today feel more empowered than they did less than a decade ago. So things they are changing. Yeah, that's amazing. Let me ask you this. A couple of items. One of the things you are involved in is legislation and public policy and our legislature is still in session. Congress is still in session. Tell us about some of the legislative initiatives that you're working on right now. Yeah. Well, of course, the PPP part was very big. Also last year because so many of our membership are solopreneurs and they were being hit hard by the pandemic. They worked with the legislature to clarify them as independent contractors so they could access unemployment. You know, there was, I don't know the particulars about the legislation, but a lot of the public policy committees work centered around ensuring that there was equity and that women had access to funds to keep themselves afloat. So that's the newest stuff.  And childcare, ensuring adequate access to childcare is a biggie. So also the Fair Pay Act, when that passed in early 2000s, I know we were championing that. And also, well, more recently, the, let me see here, paid leave, you know, paid leave is important, that whole childcare piece. And in a matter of fact, I'm going to tell you something. Way back when, when I was a college student, I majored in English because A, I loved reading and B, I loved books. And my, this is what I envisioned doing after I graduated, owning a bookstore so that I could have my baby in a playpen in the store with me. So very naive thinking on my part because we all know that children remain babies for a little, little period of time. But I was imagining combining work and family as the ideal. And for some women, that's why they start their own business. So, we recognize that one of the obstacles for women in business is childcare. So anything we can do to advocate for them is a big piece of the pie. That's great. Well, we're now at the beginning, we're actually getting towards the middle of May. Can you just project for our viewers what the next few months look like in terms of activities and things you want to make people aware of that they can participate? Sure. Well, again, like I mentioned before, we have our annual spring conference. It's a full day series of professional development. That is happening this year. It's happening virtually on June 7th from 830 to 430. And just to give you some of the highlights, the keynote speaker is Precious Williams of Perfect Pitches. And we have the keynote keynote is Cassie Morse of Northfield Farmers Market. And she'll be talking about how farmers were pivoting to online to keep their businesses afloat. So essentially, it's going to be a day long virtual gathering. There's going to be small group breakout and peer to peer networking sessions. And the title, the theme for this year for our spring conference is building back better. What comes next for rural small businesses? That's great. You're talking in with the agriculture, we being an agricultural state. And I know we've had the secretary on discussing that type of information. And so you can get a lot of networking just even being virtual, I suppose. Yeah. So that's coming in. And again, we are partnering with main street lines from to get the word out. We do a lot of coalitions with other organizations, VBSR and CWE. Tell us what they are because a lot of people might not be able to do that. Yeah. Businesses for social responsibility, B Corpse. And also a center for women in enterprise. Two great organizations here. Tell us what you need. One of the things we like to do is give our guests an opportunity to speak to the general public or to legislators or anyone else who is listening as to what we want to do. Whether it be membership or other kinds of support. So why don't you let us know something about that? I guess, you know, being on this program.   And, you know, we believe in gender parity and gender equality. We believe in an inclusive Vermont economy. So anything we can do to support women business owners. And there are a lot in agriculture too. I didn't mention that before, but yes. A lot of women business owners in agriculture. But mainly. Join become a member of WBO head. That's my message. That's great. And people who maybe want to become women business owners. And I think that's what I think about. Let's say a woman is in college or maybe. Working at a certain job or an agriculture, whatever. What can she look forward to? And what can she get from your organization? Well, I would say. Seek advice, reach out. We love to help each other. So as a matter of fact, that's what I did in 2018 when I started my business. The very first thing I did was I. Reached out to three women I knew who were consultants. To ask about pricing. How do I set up my pricing?  And I reached out to a couple of other women saying, okay, how much should I charge? You know, so. Seeking advice. We are here for people and we're ready willing and able to help others. I mean, our mission is to ensure that women businesses thrive. That's great. And you have a website that tell us what else, how people can get in touch with you. Sure. WBO and.org. And you have the office hours or any other contact information like that. For the organization. Not necessarily office hours, but that's on the website. They can get that, that type of. Yeah. That's great. I'll tell you, this has really been very informative. And I know that our listeners will and viewers will also. But let me give you this opportunity to conclude. Maybe give us a parting thought to everyone who's watching. Well, I just want to say that. WBO and women business owners network. Is a wonderful organization. We do provide support and resources and. Everyone needs. Help. In their professional development. And we are one of those opportunities. Here in Vermont. That's great. Well, thank you very much. My guest today on positively Vermont. Has been Marie Eddie. Who's the founder and CEO of. Any career services in Heinsberg. And also a member of the board of the women. Business owners network. And we're going to provide the information with the website and all of that material. I want to wish you the best of luck and thank you for appearing on positively Vermont. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you all for watching.


The university actually facilitated the students, they know the students need and they try to fulfill the students need. The relationship between the lecturers and then the students. To study in Australia is at research quality and it's teaching quality. It's recognized and the courses that I'm taking are recognized for certification. If you try to study hard you will get the good result and the university, they create all conditions for you to have the good study. The lecturers are very enthusiastic in terms of your success. Research integrity I think is the best thing here that I wouldn't have at all. You're able to make friends not just from Australia but across from anywhere else in the world. The degree is valuable, it's really important when you go back home when you apply for something even if it's for the study or for a job they will say which university you got the degree from and when it's UQ is just so different you're special.


Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news round up. Well, what the people seem to want is us to return every week on Friday this appointed time. This is give the people what they want 98th episode. In two weeks, we'll be at our 100th episode. A landmark event. If there ever were one. A landmark event just before the elections in Brazil seems to me looking forward to that episode. You're with Prashant and Zoe. They are from People's Dispatch. I'm Vijay from Globe Trotter. Well, very strange situation. Joe Biden, US president goes to Saudi Arabia earlier this year. Fist bumps, leaders in Saudi Arabia, my buddies, my friend, and so on. Turns out, of course, when push comes to shove, the Saudi government decides that the United States and its needs not that key. What am I talking about? The US government deeply wanted Saudi Arabia to pump an immense amount of oil out of the earth in order to stabilize oil prices. Well, the reason the US government wanted oil prices stabilized is to somehow contest the problem being faced now in several countries with the fuel price inflation and then the food price inflation. We're going to come back to that in a minute when Prashant talks about the global hunger index, what the impact this has had. The US government was putting pressure, essentially, on Saudi Arabia to pump more. Saudi Arabia, after all, is supposed to be this sort of pump where the United States controls the handle. Turns out at the OPEC and OPEC plus meeting, Saudi Arabia decided not to go in the direction of the United States. What does this actually mean? OPEC is since 1960 has been the major controller of oil prices. It's the organization of petroleum exporting countries. Saudi Arabia dominates OPEC for good reason. It has the largest reserves. It also plays a dominant political role over a number of OPEC countries, including of course the United Arab Emirates and so on. Well, having a really quite a considerable stake in the production capacity for oil, what OPEC does in fact determines the price of oil despite the fact that there are many non-OPEC members that produce oil and natural gas in the world. Well, as a consequence of OPEC being a closed club, a grouping was created called OPEC plus, which includes Russia, major producer of energy. At the meeting just recently, OPEC and OPEC plus was told by the Saudis that Saudi Arabia was not going to increase oil production. In fact, they were not keen on this. They said that, you know, if Saudi Arabia and OPEC plus agrees to a reduction in supplies, that will push prices up. Now, where the United States is understanding this is this is going to hurt the US attempt to give some relief to Europe as the war in Ukraine continues. Don't forget, this war in Ukraine has cut off Europe from a principal supplier of energy, which is Russia. Norway is trying to fill the gaps to some extent, United States to some others. There was a hope by the United States that if the oil prices came down as a consequence of increased supply, this would have a big impact on oil prices in Europe and undercut the US's desire to continue to prevent Ukraine and Russia to come to negotiation. Well, interestingly, because Saudi Arabia decided to go in the other direction, the US is arguing this helps Russia. Russia is a big exporter of oil is of course going to benefit if prices remain high. That's the US position. There's been a lot of discussion within the United States about punishing Saudi Arabia. What would this punishment take? Stopping arms sales. That's going to hurt the arms industry in the United States more than it would hurt Saudi Arabia, which is now finding itself anyway, on the back foot in its only ongoing war against the people of Yemen. It's not going to hurt Saudi Arabia that much, at least in the short run, maybe a Saudi Arabia will find different suppliers for arms. Perhaps Russia, the head of government, the monarch of the United Arab Emirates was in Moscow shaking hands with Vladimir Putin. The United States might pass legislation to condemn Saudi Arabia. This is going to have minimal impact in Saudi Arabia. The kingdom of course is a kingdom. Doesn't really care what other people think. We're in very difficult and interesting times. If we're going to see the Gulf Arab states pivot away from the United States, this is going to have a considerable outcome for the fragility of US power around the world. Quite an interesting period. Russia oil prices seem to remain high. Therefore, hunger is going to remain a problem to some extent. Perhaps not sure. Tell us. According to the Global Health Index that is recently published, I don't think hunger is just going to remain just a problem. It's going to maybe even intensify in some parts of the world because what the report says is that there's been almost some degree of stagnation in combating hunger over the past many years. And this is extremely alarming because what we see is according to the Global Health Index, according to many other reports that have come out in recent years, despite the fact that we talked about this before, despite the fact that this is 2022, we are at this advanced stage of civilization, so to speak, where there is so much profit that are globally being made. The core issue of hunger, which is supposed to be an issue that humanity addresses first of all the issues it is concerned, which is one of the sustainable goals. The second sustainable goal I believe for the year 2030, it is unlikely to be met because of the situation that is right now. And we have a host of problems with this conflict. For instance, there is climate change, which is actually expected to accelerate some of these trends around hunger. And what this report shows is that over the past many years, we are seeing extremely serious situation. The numbers say that about 830 million people were undernourished across the world. And that's like a substantial amount of the world's population. That's just undernourishment. There's a spectrum of hunger, so to speak, when in many of these reports. And undernourishment is just one aspect of that spectrum, more serious aspects. So what we're seeing is like a multifaceted failure across the world. According to the report, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are the two regions which are worst affected. And South Asia, especially a huge population, a large chunk of the world's population actually living there. And this is one of those regions which is the worst affected. It in fact has the world's highest child stunting and child wasting rates. And in terms of Sub-Saharan Africa, undernourishment and child mortality are more high than any other part of the world. Now all this ties into a number of other problems we talked about. We often talk about on this show, of course, there's a question of war and conflict. Like we mentioned, there is a question of the kind of development, so-called development that is promoted by international financial institutions, which force countries into further indebtedness, which prevent countries from undertaking programs which can actually support, say the free distribution of food and other projects like that which try to reduce hunger. Now we've seen, for instance, left governments in many parts of the world, even progressive governments in many parts of the world actually undertaking some of these schemes. India is well known for its midday meals scheme which provides midday meals to school children. That has proved a huge, been a big step in actually improving education as well as reducing hunger. Certain other states, for instance, introducing breakfast, bringing about canteens where food can be available for very cheap rates. But for all of this we do need, the governments need to have a kind of fiscal flexibility to actually invest a huge amount of the money they have in these kind of social programs. Whereas many countries across the world are caught in the spiral of debt. They're spending all that huge amounts of their money actually servicing these debt, taking more and more loans to try to deal with it. And we have this entire global financial system which is really geared to actually accentuate hunger. And I think this is one thing that reports such as these sometimes are not really acknowledged. We talk about climate change, we talk about conflict and we talk about underlying issues with infrastructure, underlying issues like corruption or say pre-existing poverty, etc. But we often do not spend enough time talking about the way the world is organized, so to speak, the way our governance is organized. The reign, the tyranny of international bodies and finance capital, which together make it so easy for corporations to make billions and trillions at this point of time, whereas a vast majority of the people are really struggling with hunger. Now, there are at least five countries where hunger is at alarming levels in Central Africa. Republic Chad, the Congo, Madagascar, Yemen, Yemen, of course, you mentioned it as well. The DRC, again, a very interesting case because the DRC is home to actually some of a vast variety of resources which are so essential today for our digital age for all the things we hold dear in terms of technology. But to imagine that the country which is home to so much of these resources is one of the countries which is undergoing these levels of hunger. Actually, I think shows you a very clear idea of how the world functions right now. Yet another depressing report and one of the most alarming things being that the 2030 goal is nowhere close to meeting a problem. It's a real tragedy, but you know, the thing is, we're at the point, Zoe has a piece up at People's Dispatch called, Brazil is in a fierce second round for its election, fierce second round. One of the candidates was the person who most fought hunger in his country, that's Lula, through Forme Zero. Zoe, fierce second round, tell us what's happening. It is fierce. The words and the phrases and the discourse that we're seeing right now after this first election of the first round of elections in Brazil has, I wouldn't say radically changed because that's also not true, but it's really intensified. And so while, you know, maybe before the first round, there was a lot more focus on talking about the programs, talking about, you know, concrete proposals. This has continued, but really, I mean, if you just go on to Twitter or any social media platform and go on to pages of people who support Lula, who support Bolsonaro, what you're going to see is a lot of sort of attack campaigns in a sense. I've been going through the Twitters of Jared Bolsonaro, his sons, close political allies, and I would say every other post is a post attacking Lula. Some of them are fake video montages, what they call the deep fake, where they'll take, you know, some audio recording of Lula of him saying something, though we put it together so it sounds like he's saying something else. There was a pretty bizarre accusation that he's Satanic, he worship Satan. They've been saying all sorts of things that he has close relationships with the largest gang in Brazil. They posted videos of with the audio message of one of the gang leaders saying that Lula would be favorable if he won the presidency. So all of this is happening at a very, very quick rate. And for those of us who are following the presidential elections in 2018, I think we can see a lot of similarities. Of course, it's a little it's a little different for those who weren't following those elections. The fake news was coming out and an alarming rate, which has made the Brazilian state respond and trying to limit the amount that's being published and being circulated. But those were news items that were almost absurd. I mean, it was saying that Fernando had distributed baby bottles that had phallic phallic tops on them. So things that were and saying that he was going to convert everyone to homosexuality. I mean, really, really, really absurd. This continues, of course, but we're seeing it mostly linked to the fact that Lula is a criminal, Lula is corrupt and all of these things. And that's really what is dominating this second round is that a fierce, fierce, intense campaign to undermine the other opponent opponent, not really talking about their programs. There's been a lot of focus on Lula's relationship to other progressive leaders in Latin America, specifically his relationship to Daniel Ortega, making a lot of accusations that he's going to close churches that this happened in Nicaragua. So it's almost a daily, hourly update. It's not really that people are coming up with new campaign proposals, new platforms, but that every single hour there's a new kind of pace of fake news or new allegation and new declaration that they're having to respond to. That's happening kind of in the media, social media sphere, but at the same time there's a very intense street battle that's happening. And Lula has shifted away from these big rallies where he's on the stage and then people have to come and watch him and he's shifted towards these caminatas, these walks through the neighborhood. And so he's going to these popular neighborhoods, he's going to the favelas in Rio, he's going to the poor neighborhoods in the Northeast, and he's walking amongst the people to greet them, to have interaction with them. And these are humongous acts. Bolsonaro is also organizing his big rallies. He went to the Northeast. It was yesterday attempting to win some of this vote. The Northeast is historically a PT stronghold because of their socioeconomic development. And Bolsonaro tried to hold an act in Hesife, which is the cap of Pernambuco, and it was quite empty. So he's probably not going to focus that much on this reading. Region, the Southeast, Center East region is really the focal point. This is where Lula lost. This is where Bolsonaro won. And so this is going to be the biggest battleground area. We're just two weeks away from the second round. And I think it's going to continue getting more intense, continuing heating up. It's a big election for the world. Interesting to see what happens. Of course, you'll update us again next week about this. You're listening to Give the People What They Want brought to you from People's Dispatch. There's Prashant and Zoe, crackerjack reporters waiting for your selfies. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. Haven't heard from you for a while, our friends. We're looking forward to getting your inputs. Meanwhile, disastrous situation for the Palestinians. Collective punishment, say some people, Prashant. What's happening in Palestine? Right, Vijay. Over the past, I think one week, the biggest, it is hardly a week that goes by when Israel has not been up to something or the other. But one specific incident over the past week was the siege of the Shafath refugee camp in occupied East Jerusalem. And this is a camp at about 100,000, over 100,000, close to 130,000 people stay, I believe. And this is a camp which is administered, which is built by the UN Relief and Work Agency, which is responsible for Palestinian refugees. A lot of the inhabitants there are those in the descendants of people who fled from the Nakba in 1948. The original crime, as they say, where people across Palestine were displaced due to the wild craziness that was being created. And Israel basically claiming to search for a suspect in the killing of a soldier basically besieged the camp for nearly five to six days. And this is, you know, it's kind of difficult to conceive of in today's time in some senses, in any other place, maybe except Palestine, where you have, say, close to 150,000 people being surrounded on all sides by security forces. There are people not being allowed to go out for health reasons, basic essentials being denied to them, you know, any kind of, say, armed raids taking place throughout. And this, which is why it was being described as collective punishment. And of course, this is happening on one side. On the other hand, of course, you have the violence continuing in Jenin, which has become like one of the key points of resistance as well. Not only Israeli atrocities, but also resistance by Palestinians. The latest news there saying that a Palestinian doctor who was trying to treat the injured has died after sustaining injuries. There are yet another instance of professionals such as doctors, journalists, of course, being targeted while doing the duty by Israel. And this is, I think the number overall this year of Palestinians killed in such incidents, Israeli raids, Israeli attacks has reached close to 160, close to 40 people in Jenin alone. And I think it's important to also not see this as just an incidence of violence as much as the fact that for all innocent purposes, Israel is carrying out by their standards a low intensity war right now in the occupied territories. I mean, we have seen the regular war, so to speak. We've seen the bombing of Gaza, the brutal bombing that took place last year, for instance, and many multiple times before. But what this is also these kind of operations, for instance, also mean is basically that every day is basically a kind of everyday life in Palestine is like living in a war zone. There's no other way to describe it. We recently got an article with a health activist who said exactly the same thing, that every day is an instance of Palestinian or more being killed in Israeli operations. And this exactly goes to show what the United States, its allies, countries across the world are enabling Israel to various ways to direct diplomatic support, the kind of commercial and military and other kinds of agreements they have is basically enabling this kind of everyday warfare in the occupied territories. And it's important to note also, of course, elections are coming up in Israel and this could also as well just be a kind of election tactic. And again, we just talked about an election. So here you have political parties on all sides. When Netanyahu was in power, he did exactly the same thing. Now that Yale Lapid is in power, who was technically supposed to be a moderate, so to speak, he's doing exactly the same thing. So irrespective of what part of the Israeli political spectrum you're on, the only way to ensure you do not lose support, not even you get votes. The only way to ensure you do not lose support is by continuously attacking and killing Palestinians. This seems a message that the Israeli political class as a whole is giving out and it is completely backed by its European and US allies. I think I saw a tweet by Joseph Burrell, who made some very disparaging remarks about Israel calling, about Palestine calling Israel some kind of beacon in a very difficult place of water. So this really, I mean, I think because since we get so much news about Palestine so often, it's important to not just record these as incidents or instances, but as much as, so there is technically a war going on. We talk so much about some of the other wars, people will get indignant about it, but this is a 365 day war that is going on in the occupied territories in Gaza, which has been under siege for one and a half decades now at this point, and in these years for that matter. In fact, as you said, it's a violation, the whole occupation is a violation of, or at least the way the occupation is conducted is a violation of Article 3 and additional protocol 2 of the Geneva Convention, which forbids collective punishment. This is a war crime by itself. I'd written about the situation in Haiti a few weeks ago, four years nonstop protests. There's been an appeal made by acting President Ariel Henry to the United Nations. Very interesting appeal. I followed up on that Zoe. Very interesting what the UN is now deliberating whether to intervene again into Haiti, whether to intervene, tell us what's going on. Well, for many people, and I think it's not a lie, but the UN represents peace, it represents a body of multilateralism. Not all those other great things about global diplomacy, but for Haiti, the UN is a much different thing, and it's interesting that this request was made by Ariel Henry for military intervention in the country. So on October 7th, Ariel Henry, who's the acting Prime Minister and President, acting being the key word because he was not elected by popular vote, he sent a request to Antonio Gutierrez, he passed a resolution calling for foreign military intervention in the country. This is in response to widespread gang violence, to widespread territorial control by different gangs in the country, and essentially he says, you know what, I can't control this, they're blocking the imports of fuel, there's a lot of material impacts of this, the circulation of goods, people's ability to go around about their daily life, and so in this sense he's framing it as, I can't control the country, I need help from foreign military. Activists, however, are painting a much different, you know, telling a much different story. This isn't a case of a poor helpless president who has been overrun by gangs, this is the case of a president who is not elected by the people, who has insisted in staying in power, who has links and proven connections to criminal activity in the country, who has essentially let these gangs run wild because he prefers a state of chaos and who has disrespected the people's will. I wrote in this story for four years the people of Haiti have been on the streets demanding concrete structural changes to how the government is formed, to who is elected, to actually addressing the horrible acts of corruption that have happened in the country from the ruling party, and they've come up with extremely concrete solutions. There have been a number of instances of deliberation of diverse sections of the opposition, not only people's movements who, you know, we in our camp might have more relations with, but of the churches, of small businesses, a really, really broad sector of society that's come together and said, the way that things are going is not right, and we have a solution for a transitional government, for a council that's representing all different sectors of society that wants to have a say in how things go. And so the latest version of this was the Montana Agreement. This was created after, of course, the assassination of Jovenel Mois by Colombian mercenaries who might have a proven connection to Ariel Henry. This is under investigation whether he is implicated or not in the assassination. Many people think he is. And so following the assassination of Jovenel Mois, which of course plunges the country into even further crisis and political instability, they come up with this broad section of opposition of civil society of people's movements, of churches, of all these different people come up with the Montana Agreement's proposal for transitional government, having these different spaces of interlocution and dialogue. And this proposal is presented not only to the government, but to many different instances. And at the behest of the United States, the core group, which involves the United Nations representatives from the European Parliament or the European Union, the government of Ariel Henry is upholded and this proposal from people's movements completely ignored. So it's in this context that now Ariel Henry is calling for military intervention and people are back on the streets and saying, no, we need an end to the cost of living crisis. They're dealing with extreme inflation, extreme currency devaluation. The situation is untenable economically. It's untenable in terms of security of people being able to go about their daily lives. And now there's a threat of military intervention, foreign military intervention. And just in a couple seconds to say that there have already been several missions of the United Nations in Haiti of military intervention, of military occupation. And this brought hundreds of thousands of infections of cholera, tens of thousands of deaths from cholera, horrific cases of human rights violations of rape, of murder, of many different instances. And so for the people of Haiti, an intervention, a military intervention of the United States of the United Nations is unacceptable. And people are on the streets. People are standing in solidarity across the world to demand that this cannot happen. Interesting. While this is happening in Haiti, there have been two military coups in Burkina Faso this year, one in January, when Colonel Dhamiba came to power, overthrowing a government that has been around since the big protest movement that overthrew the government of Blase Comparé. And again, then on September 30th, a 34-year-old captain, Ibrahim Tarore, comes into power. Very interesting development, though. Mr. Tarore comes into power saying that Colonel Dhamiba was not able to exercise what he said he was going to do, which is to defeat the jihadis in the northern part, who actually hold about 40% to 50% of the territory of Burkina Faso. All that is said and interesting that there was a second coup within a coup claiming itself not to be a coup, because Captain Tarore says, well, we're just changing the administration within the coup regime. He was called upon by his supporters to become president of the country. Rather than do that this morning, today in Burkina Faso, Friday, a major assembly was held in Burkina Faso's capital, a national meeting was held in Ouagadougou, which brought together a range of people, people, of course, from the army and the police, but also religious organizations, tribal organizations, civil society groups, trade unions, various political parties and representatives of the people who had been internally displaced. This is now up to millions of people who have been displaced. They had this major national meeting today, where according to Colonel Major Celestin Kampare, no relative of Blaise Kampare, I should say, the objective was to create a transitional charter and designate a transitional president. Now, as of now, the meeting is just finished in Burkina Faso. As of now, it appears that Captain Tarore said he's not interested in becoming the transitional president. So very interesting development, friends. You've got to watch this closely. If this is true, if Captain Tarore is not playing Julius Caesar, you'll remember Julius Caesar was offered the laurel three times and he said, no, no. And then the third time he said, okay, fine, put it on my head. Well, this could be the game that Captain Tarore is playing.  Your supporters go there and say, Captain Tarore, you must be the next president. 34-year-old said, no, no, no, we need a process. We need to establish a kind of democratic process without holding elections, because you can't hold elections in a country. He made the argument earlier when half the country is in the hands of jihadis who are not going to permit elections to be held there. So this process is ongoing. Perhaps he's correct in his judgment to say, let's create a democratic process. I won't be the transitional president and so on, but we'll see. We'll see what happens in the days ahead. Perhaps that pressure will get to this young man and he will say, I'll take on the mantle. As it happens, a lot of pressure on France. France's military thrown out of Mali, now likely exiting from Burkina Faso. What will happen in Niger? What will happen in Mauritania? What will happen to G5 Sahel, which is the French political cutout for that region? What indeed is going to happen with French-Moroccan relations? Stay tuned. Only one place to find out in the English language. And that said, give the people what they want. Brought to you every week from People's Dispatch. That's Zoe and Prashant. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. See you next week. It's our 99th show. Send us those selfies on Twitter. We love to see them.


The key feature of a graph is the relationship between the edges and the vertices. We define the following. The degree of a vertex is the number of edges incident on it, and an isolated vertex is one with degree zero. So we might try to find the degrees of the vertices in the graph shown, and for that we'll just count the number of incident edges. So vertex one has three incident edges. Vertices three, four, and five have, and these will be the degrees of the different vertices. In his solution to the Kennecksberg bridge problem, Euler observed in modern terms, the sum of the degrees of all vertices in a graph is twice the number of edges. That's because every edge increases by one the degree of two vertices, and this leads to a remarkable result known as the handshake theorem. Suppose you're at a party with 100 people. Actually, the number of people doesn't matter. At the end of the night, everyone has a handshake number, the number of other people they shake in hands with at least once. The handshake number can be anything between zero and whatever. Can we say anything about the handshake numbers? Let's hope so, since otherwise I don't know how I'm going to fill up the rest of the time. So remember a graph represents connections between objects, so we can let the vertices represent the partygoers, and if two partygoers have shaken hands, we can put an edge between them, so all the handshakes of the party can be represented using a graph. Now to avoid learning anything, skip ahead to 6.18. But remember, it's the journey, not the destination. You shouldn't try to learn mathematics, you should learn how to create mathematics. And a useful approach, if you build it, they will come. So to analyze the problem, let's gather some data, and let's start with a small case. Suppose there's four people, and we'll use an ordered four tuple to record the degree of each vertex as people shake hands. So initially, everyone has degrees zero, and so we can represent her degree of four tuple, but sooner or later, someone shakes hands, and we'll put an edge between the people who've shaken hands, and now our four tuple will be, and maybe they shake hands with someone else, making our degree tuple, and as the party continues, some partygoers increase their degree. Now notice that every time two people shake hands, both of their degrees increase by one. This means the degree some must increase by two, but since the degree some started at zero, then the degree some must always be an even number. Now, some degrees are even, and some degrees are odd, but since the sum of all the degrees is even, then the number of odd degree vertices must be even. And this gives us the handshake theorem. In any graph, the number of vertices with odd degree must be even. A useful strategy for learning to create mathematics. Once you've proven something, prove it again in a different way, and then find more proofs. The first proof relied on the fact that adding an edge increased the degree sum by two. Can we use the fact that it increased the degrees of two vertices by four so that it increased the degrees of two vertices by one? So again, let's add an edge between two vertices. There are three cases. Both vertices had odd degrees, both vertices had even degrees, and one vertex had an odd degree, and the other had an even degree. If both vertices had odd degree, both would now have even degree, so the number of odd degree vertices would decrease by two. If both vertices had an even degree, both would now have an odd degree, so the number of odd degree vertices would increase by two. And if one vertex had an odd degree, and the other had an even degree, the first would have even degree, and the other would have odd degree, so the number of odd degree vertices would be unchanged. And so summarizing, if we add an edge to an odd, odd pair, the number of odd vertices decreases by two. If we add an edge to an even, even pair, the number of odd vertices increases by two. And if we add an edge to an odd, even pair, the number of odd vertices stays the same. Since the number of odd vertices is initially zero, this means it will either increase by two, decrease by two, or stay the same, and so the number of odd vertices must be a multiple of two. And again, this gives us the handshake theorem. But in fact, we can prove the handshake theorem in a third way. Since the degree sum is even, then the number of vertices of odd degree must be even. And consequently, in any graph, the number of vertices with odd degree must be even.


So, Meltano is a lifecycle tool for data science, and what it allows you to do is to get data out of a source and go through the whole data lifecycle and get in the end some dashboards that show you all that data. So the way we say it is that Meltano is data source to dashboard. And so what we do is that Meltano actually stands for model extract, load, transform, analyze, notebook, and orchestrate, which is a lot of different things, but the most important thing is that let's say for example that you have some data in Salesforce, and Salesforce has a ton of data, and you can analyze that data with different tools that Salesforce has, but not the way that data scientists really want to use it. And so we built this tool around data scientists and exactly what they want to do. We have data scientists on our team, and we've been using them to make sure that this is exactly the way that they want it to be done. And so the first step that you would do is you would extract data out of a data source, and then you would load that data into what's called a data warehouse, which is just a database, and then you would transform that data so that it's useful to the user. You would model it, and then you would analyze it in a tool like this, which is Multano Analyze, which will show you lots of charts and graphs, and then in the end you can show some really nice dashboards for a CEO that would maybe sit on his big screen TV in his office, or maybe it would be for the sales team to view. So currently you would use something like Looker, and things like Looker, or Tableau, or anything like that. These are really expensive tools, and Multano is open source, and with all those different tools to do the extract load transform, well just to do the extract and load you might have a tool like Singer, and you would use Stitch, and that costs money, and then for the transform you might use DBT, and then for the this you would use that, and all these different things have a lot of different tools that are associated with them, and what we're trying to do, and none of them are open source, and none of them are version controlable, so what we're trying to do is create one tool that does the complete data source to dashboard, and make it open source and version controlable. So bringing those concepts of software development to the data science world, where a lot of data scientists, you know I've gotten calls with them, they're still using Excel spreadsheets and emailing them around, they could use a tool like GitLab to do all their version control, and use the Web IDE to edit their different modeling files, and then eventually get into like things like machine learning and AI directly in Multano, and have it all version controlled, and have one data team work, because you have data analysts, you have scientists, you have engineers, and have them all work together on one project. So I'll just give you a quick demo here. If you can see my screen here, if anybody's ever used something like Node, or Rails, or any like framework that you use for software development, that's kind of what we modeled this around. So let's say you're in your projects directory, you can create a Multano project by calling Multano in it, let's call it sales data, just for fun here, and what that will do is that'll create all the necessary files that will be version controlled through GitLab. We're going to make a really nice integration through GitLab, but you're able to use any thing that you want. So in that case you would use GitLab and everything would be really nice, but obviously GitLab can work for anything that's version controlled, so it will already work for GitLab. And when you run all these different things, they're in their individual sandboxes. So right now it's creating a sandbox for the transform layer called dbt and that's an open source tool just done for transformations. And it's running a little extra slow because I'm sharing my screen on Zoom as well. And what this does is this creates this Multano.yaml file, which I'll show you in a second, which manages all your dependencies because you're going to have a bunch of different extractors. Maybe you'll have an extractor for greenhouse because you want to track your hiring process and maybe you'll have an extractor for Salesforce. So maybe the GitLab data project will have a lot of different extractors and maybe they'll load all to Snowflake and then sometimes to Redshift so they'll have different loaders. And so now we have a sales data project. We can go into it and we can open it in an editor and you can see it created in a nice little package here. And if we were to say Git in it and we say Git status, you'll notice that a lot of the stuff is not included in Git because it doesn't need to be. So for example, this dot Multano folder, which has dbt installed in its own virtual environment is not included. And that works by when someone gets this project, they can run Multano install, it'll install all the dependencies needed for them to run this, but you don't have to pass those dependencies along. And then your Multano dot YAML file, which has all the dependencies which we currently don't have, but we will in a second. So we can say Multano dot discover, actually let me say Multano dot discover all so that it discovers all of the extractors and loaders that are available. So we have tap GitLab, which is an extractor. Tap is the way that Singer, which is a specification for extracting and loading. They call them taps and targets instead of extractors and loaders. So now we can call Multano add extractor tap GitLab. And hopefully this works because I was just, oh extract, we need extractor. I was just developing some stuff with Ben. So hopefully I didn't break anything before Joyce sent me a message. But what that's doing here, you can see that it's in the Multano directory. You can see it's created an extractor directory and it's installing tap GitLab, which has all of its crazy dependencies in its own sandboxed environment so that it will always be able to run tap GitLab without any issues whatsoever. Now this makes the project a little bigger, but it makes it so that you can have some crazy tap that somebody else wrote mixed with another crazy tap that somebody else wrote and they won't conflict because it's always hard to mix two different taps that two different people wrote. So now that worked. And if you look in our Multano dot YAML, now we have a dependency. We have a dependency on an extractor called tap GitLab and it needs a GitLab API token. So what we'll do is we'll go into our dot ENV directory and this is where we would update our GitLab API token, which it automatically inserted for us. It knows we need that and it has a default database that ships with it. So we will also need a Postgres password username address and all that sort of stuff. And so you would insert your GitLab API token there. And we also need a loader. We're going to load through Postgres. So we'll say, Multano discover all to see what sort of loaders are available if we go back to that. And we can see that we have a couple of loaders. We have CSV, Snowflake and Postgres. We're going to use the Postgres one. So we'll add that. We'll say, Multano add loader target Postgres. And that will add that specific project that's available. And all of these loaders and these taps and targets are sitting in their own individual Git repo on GitLab. So anytime someone wants to create a tap, all they do is they create a Git repo and that makes it installable through Multano. They just update a discovery file and that makes it available to Multano. So that was added. And if we go back to our Multano.yaml, you can see it updated the file with a loader called target Postgres. And it's saying that it's going to need these environmental variables that need to be available. And so in our .emv directory, we've updated all of this. And then what we can do is we can actually extract, load and transform that data by running Multano ELT, ELT stands for extract, load and transform. And what this will do is it'll do the entire extracting and loading based on the extractor tap first and the loader target Postgres. And based on the environmental variables, because I give it this GitLab API token, it's going to download just the GitLab information that's specific to me. So we've now in like, you know, five minutes because of my talking would be a couple, two minutes, we've now been able to get the entire process going. Extracting, loading and transforming. Where previously you would write all these crazy scripts to make this happen. I'm not sure why it's asking me for a password. So this is, yeah, right before I was working right on this, but luckily I have already extracted this data and you can see it right here. So I'm logged into Postgres right now and if I say, let's look at all the GitLab runners because that, let's see, there we go. You can see that that GitLab tap extracted all the data from GitLab from just specific to me, which was a small amount of data, I told it to give a small amount of data. And you can see it brought in GitLab runners, which is the CI runners, the things that run all the CI jobs. So we can say select everything from GitLab runners and you'll see that there are actual GitLab runners in there. Now previously this would take weeks because you'd have to write an entire script, it would be really complicated, but because we have different taps and targets that are like plug and play that are based on a specification that already exists, we can put all this stuff together and our data team is already using this. Now the really cool thing is that once they do all that, once they extract all that data, they can then start up a web server. If you type meltano www, they start up a web server and that actually allows you to now analyze that data, which is, this is a huge step already because now we're into a second tool that you would be paying a bunch of money for. So I already have this running so I'm going to show it to you. So what happens is I've already added two modeling files that are based off of a specification that is that a lot of data analysts know, which is, but we're going to be changing that because it's a proprietary specification and we want everything to be open source. But it's, it looks a little bit like JSON data. So we want to model this after that runners, those, those GitLab CI runners. So we're telling it that it's going to look for some connection called runners DB and it's going to explore through a view called runners. Here's that view. It's going to look for active description and that's going to be called GitLab runner IP address is shared name, all that stuff. And then to measure stuff, it's going to have a count and because we're writing very simple things here, like if you type count, it knows the complicated SQL that needs to be generated in order to do a count on any database on my SQL, on Postgres, on Redshift, on any one of those. So you're just saying count and it's going to generate the SQL for that. And I'll show you how that works. But first of all, our models is going to need a connection to a runners DB. So if we go to our connections, you can see that we've set up a connection called runners DB at a specific database. So you can connect this to many, many different databases and it will go out and fetch the data and it'll be able to analyze it a bunch of different databases. So in this case, we only have one DB, which is running locally for me. So now you can see here that we now have a model runner and a view runner. So we're going to explore that data and you see if we open this up, we now get all those columns that were available in the database and they're only available because through these files that we... Hold on, let me go back here. Through these files here that we created, these LookML files, which are now .ma files. So these ma files, these model analysis files, we've told it what we want to analyze. If we were to remove active dimension from here, then it would remove the active dimension from here. So in the case of, let's say, you know, user data, you don't want to analyze passwords because that's a bad idea. So we wouldn't include that in the analysis. That probably wouldn't be loaded in the extraction anyway, but if it were, there's many layers of changing the data up. So now what we can do is we can say, of all the CI Docker containers that are currently running, we're going to click, we want to find the active ones.  We want to count them. And so you can see that it now runs coalesce count based on the ID and it does all this crazy stuff to know the right SQL to run. Because, you know, you and I may know basic SQL, but the real SQL that you need to run might be much more complicated. When you click run, because it's grouping it by active, we're only getting two results back and you can see that it's actually counted. This count is not something that's in the database. This is what's called a measure and aggregate. So there are four inactive runners and 16 active runners. And if we click the chart, then you can see that in chart form. You can see that there are 16 active and we can see a bunch of different charts. And that's not very helpful data in a chart form, but let's do something that's a little more informational. So what if we want to know how they're grouped by IP address and we want to count them by that? So we look back at the SQL and we can see that it's selecting all the runners IP addresses and it's going to count by ID and it's going to group it by the IP address so that they're unique. And when we run that, now we get 15 results. And this is actually querying whatever data warehouse we told it to query. So it's going out beyond Meltano and querying a real live database. And so you can see that we now have four runners that have blank IP addresses so that might be something that needs to be fixed. We can sort this data if we click it. And when you click sort, it's actually updating the SQL that needs to run. So you can see now it's got an order by statement in there that says count, order by count descending. We could also order by IP address, although that's not very helpful, but you can see that it does also update the SQL that needs to run. But we'll order by count. And then you can see as soon as we do that, now we've got the count of all those IP addresses. Now this data is fairly simple. And if we reverse this, then you can see that the data gets... And every time that you do this, it's running the actual SQL against the database. It's not doing it on the front end, it's actually running it against the warehouse itself, the data warehouse with live data. So then you can also see a line chart and you can sort this data that way. And the data that we're actually analyzing in the data team is much, much more complicated where it's joining multiple tables, you've got sales data and all of that stuff. But this is just a very, very simple example of the data that you might analyze. And so that's what Maltano does and this is the analysis part of it. So what we're working on next is to actually orchestrate this so that you can schedule your extract loads and transforms to run. Right now we've got them scheduled through GitLab CI, but we're going to run them through what are called DAGs, directed acyclic graphs, which will allow us to analyze the data to create a bunch of jobs that get run in parallel and fail, if they're going to fail, they fail appropriately in relation to the other jobs and they retry appropriately in relation to the other jobs. So we're using an open source tool which is made by Airbnb called Airflow for that. And that's the next step for this. So what I just demoed would be about four different tools currently and right now it's one tool. And once we get the notebook and orchestrate, that's another two tools. That's like six tools that we're kind of doing all in one fell swoop. So that's Maltano as it is today.