Welcome to Page Curation on Wikipedia. This new feature aims to give curators better tools for reviewing new pages on Wikipedia, as well as help page creators improve their articles. Currently, page patrol tools like this one make it difficult to review new pages quickly and accurately and can be frustrating for both patrollers and creators. Page curation aims to offer a better experience by providing two integrated tools, the new pages feed, and the curation toolbar. Here's how they work. The new pages feed lets you quickly see what new pages have just been created on Wikipedia. Helpful information is provided for each new page with a color-coded icon showing its status. For example, this page was just marked as reviewed, as shown by its green icon, and this page is still unreviewed with several possible issues highlighted in red. The new pages feed can be sorted by date or filtered by a variety of criteria, so you can easily find articles to review by type or even by username. If you're an auto-confirmed editor on Wikipedia, click on the Review button to examine any page on this list. This takes you to the article you selected and shows a curation bar at the right edge of the page. This toolbar includes a number of useful tools for reviewing new pages. You can get page info, contact page creators, mark a page as reviewed, add tags, mark the page for deletion, or jump to the next page on the list. Let's go over these tools one at a time. Page info lets you view information about this page, including its status, its creator, and last reviewer, as well as possible issues such as lack of categories or references, and the page history. WikiLove lets you send a message to page editors to show your appreciation for their work. You can quickly select which editors to thank, then pick the award of your choice and post it with your comment on their talk pages. Once you've reviewed a page, you can mark it as reviewed to let others know that you've checked it and did not find any serious problems. If you like, you can also add personal message on the creator's talk page to greet them or help them improve the article. A green icon then appears so that other patrollers know that they don't need to review this page. If you find issues with this page, you can quickly add maintenance tags such as this one so other editors know what to fix. You can select as many tags as needed and add them to the page all at once. If you think a page violates Wikipedia's policies, you can mark it for deletion with a special tool. This will tag that page so administrators can easily find it and delete it. Finally, you can use the next tool to jump to the next page in your list until you find another article to review. So that's page curation in a nutshell. For more information, click on the Learn More links. This first set of curation tools was designed in collaboration with the Wikipedia community. We aim to create an experience that's easy to use by curators while providing better feedback for creators so they can improve Wikipedia together. We hope you'll find page curation useful. Enjoy!


Hi, baby girl. You're so beautiful. Thank you so much. You look amazing. Thank you. Thank you. I just want to know how you're feeling right now. Let me just be honest. From the minute I woke up, I was very anxious. I'm very nervous. I'm one person who doesn't like watching themselves on TV. So I feel like us watching episode one today, I'm just very nervous. But again, I don't know. I'm happy. I don't know. Why do you feel nervous? Is there a scene that you're just worried about or you're just easy? Yes, there is a scene that I feel like, well, I shook up things nearly, nearly too much. But you know what, it's life. One thing I did is live a reality life on this show. And I've never done that. And I thank God that I'm doing a reality show that people can see that the slay queen that you see playing Mariah on single KSC, Crystal on my Impress is actually a wife to a man. I've been married for eight years. I'm a mother. So people actually come to my world and see that, you know what? I'm so different from what you guys see on TV because people see me and think, oh, Mariah, wait, wait, why are you talking to her? Why is she slaying you? But in real life, I'm married. And I thank God that I actually came to tell my story on Real Housewives of Nairobi. Yes. I know you're the youngest among the housewives. How does that make you feel? I'm a threat to these women. I mean, come on, I'm young. I have achieved everything.  I'm an actress. I'm doing it. So I'm a threat. Okay, okay, we can't wait to see that. Now, as an actress, you've been in so many scenes, you know, in so many films, Ratha, what is different when you guys were shooting this one?  This time around, your house is the set. I feel like my space was invaded in a way. You wake up and there are cameras all over. The crew was like 50 guys. I feel like my space was invaded. But again, it's a reality show. If I didn't want to do it, sing a song in your contract. And on the show, I have been real. I speak Swahili. I speak Shang. I'm a girl who grew up in Huruma. Everything I have, I have achieved. I have achieved by myself and through my hard work. So me, I'm real. I'm a lady. Yeah. So I'm a woman. I'm a woman. I'm a lady. I miss no time. Are you European or African? Choose a struggle. And I'm very Kenyan. Now talk about that. Do you have a favorite housewife and at least a favorite housewife? I don't think I have a favorite. They're all my favorite. I feel like these are phenomenal women. They're very independent. They're strong-headed. And I feel like they brought it. They brought it. They brought the A-game. They brought the fashion. They brought the lifestyle. They brought it. And their personalities are all great. So I don't think I have a least or a favorite. Nikoto Sawa now. Sawa Sawa, please tell your fans what to expect in there. You guys, from the real houses of Nairobi, expect women who are very bold, confident. Personally, I'm an alpha female. I don't walk in packs. I stand on my own two feet. The women are phenomenal. They're women who are exceptional. They're moguls in whatever they do. We've brought it. The fashion, the content, the drama. We have brought it all. So trust me, we have really represented Nairobi very well. Thank you so much, Mina. We can't wait to watch what you've brought in there. Thank you so much, girl. Trust me, it's very legit. All right. Guys, we are waiting for that first episode because I think there's drama. Like she mentioned, that was Mina K, actress and interpreter right here on SPN Buzz.


Can you explain already a little bit where will you still have faith in of what you suggest? Ok, let's put our energy in X or Y It's morals, it's ethics, it's philosophy it's humanism, it's religion it's personal people, good souls it's all of this package and of course at times many people think this is theoretical this is dreamers Professor Mahmoud Al-Haq he passed away he was a great mentor, I was very lucky to have great mentors of philosophers of thinkers from the Arab world and from other country he told me 20-30 years ago he was the mind behind the human indicators that the UN has developed not measuring our progress only by looking to GMP so he told me Farida until we vanish you have to know that there are the good and the evils so whenever you face evil close your eyes and keep counting how many good souls are around you and that gives you the power to continue and he's very very right so I don't think I'm naive to think that we are no longer going to have the evils the evils are going to be there all over around us always and always the evils where they are with greed for politics, for power, for money and from what I have been noticing even in Libya after the revolution I think it's incredible what power and politics does to people and the display they have to say I'm sorry to men well that doesn't mean that many women are not also affected by it but because the world is dominated by men everywhere everywhere they are responsible for this global chaos and this is why in my opinion now as a Libyan I will never leave again Libya to be controlled me or other women not necessarily me only by men not because I hate men I'm sorry they have proven times and times and times and I'm sorry to say also that I'm deleting from my list of my old friends who were in the opposition many names because once they reach positions of power other they are other human beings there are other creatures so again philosophically speaking you wonder how they were so good in the opposition because now what we are facing the intellectuals have to be blamed the thinkers have to be blamed the oppositions have to be blamed because in my opinion at times there are many floated eagles in other ways people are really dreaming up there and the reality down there is different and in this regard I think this debate is going on in the Arab world I think for the last 40-50 years intellectuals have been too much in their own close circles with the language that the lay people are not understanding what exactly happened in Libya today today Libya are starving last week Libya went in the street talking about we are starving imagine a country of 6 million people with all the oil well with all the oil that everybody is becoming a millionaire corruption has tripled maybe from the time of even the old regime I'm sorry to say that so I think it's a long journey I don't know the international organization the international community I'm sorry maybe you heard me even on Alexandria saying that I'm tired of saying you and us you and us now it's us together because you are also thinking with us


Science in this country and science in the world used to be democratic. All voices could be heard to find the truth. In particular, if we don't have the truth, if a hypothesis is as totally bankrupt as the virus hypothesis that hasn't saved one single life, we are killing 180,000 people with ACT. We are paying an army of 50 to 100,000 scientists who cannot even predict the spread of AIDS. That is the time to say, where's our market economy? Does that make sense? Is the patient getting its dollars worth of treatment? The answer is clearly no. Okay, when I was starting the ARBIS, my weight was 28, my CD4 count was 66, my viral load was 750,000 copies. Since I've started the ARBIS, this is my fifth year on ARBIS, then my weight now is about 65, and then my viral load is undetectable. My CD4 count is about 850. I'm very, very much healthy and I can do everything better. Suppose you and a friend are arguing about whether or not James Earl Jones was in Conan the Barbarian. You say he wasn't, your friend says he was. You argue for a time pointing out that there is no way James Earl Jones would do such a cheesy movie after just finishing Roots and Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back. You point out it would be totally out of place to have a middle-aged African-American character in whatever setting Conan takes place. But your friend pulls up the internet movie database. He finds James Earl Jones' biography. He plays an old VHS copy of the movie and shows you the actor in several of the scenes. He shows you the credits at the end of the movie. What do you do? Do you admit you were wrong? Get on with your life, comfortable in the knowledge that you are not an expert on Conan trivia. Or do you continue to argue the points looking for flaws in the evidence? I think many of us have done this. We allow ourselves to stubbornly cling to beliefs that are contrary to evidence. That's denial. It's a natural human response to things we don't want to hear. It's different in science, however. The difference between a good scientist and a zealot or a kook is the ability to admit mistakes in the face of strong evidence. In my own graduate career, my thesis project involved a viral protein that I was certain, based on circumstantial evidence, was a key protein in activating dormant pro-virus. But experiment after experiment failed to produce the result I wanted to find. After 18 fruitless months, I had to switch projects. Admitting failure was one of the hardest things I had to do. But that's what good scientists do. We have a duty to the truth, and we admit we are wrong in the face of evidence. Peter Dusberg, a scientist at UC Berkeley, had a theory. He believed that AIDS, or grids, as it was called in the earliest days, was caused by long-term drug use, lifestyle, and especially poppers, a club drug used frequently by certain members of the male homosexual community. His theory was plausible in the absence of any other evidence. The early risk groups for the syndrome were mostly IV drug users and gay men. Very little was known about transmission and causation. It seemed like a reasonable theory and was published in journals alongside other possible explanations. But then, human immunodeficiency virus was discovered in 1983. And the epidemiology of the disease made it obvious that it was being transmitted by intimate contact and by transfusion. The first transfusion patients and the first hemophiliacs were diagnosed. Some cases were only linked by the dentist they used. Dusberg's theory was becoming less and less plausible with each new discovery. Now, a good scientist might have walked away, admitted his theory was not supported by the new evidence, and gone back to his work on cancer. If he had, the world might be a better place. Instead, he dug his heels in. Hemophiliacs are getting the disease? Well, factor 8 is immunosuppressive. Add that to the theory. What about transfusion patients like tennis athlete Arthur Ashe? They must have had some other condition. What about the 47 laboratory workers who have contracted the disease from occupational exposure? They must have all been secret homosexuals or injectable drug users. What about the millions of Africans dying from AIDS? Well, they're just sick with malaria or bacterial pathogens. Everybody knows Africans have always been sick. Add that to the theory. Dusberg had entrenched him to his position and would not be budged. His papers on the topic were initially printed. But as the evidence began to go against him, his papers and grants began to be viewed with more embarrassment. His colleagues recognized that he was too invested, that his theories were becoming more elaborate and less scientific. He responded with vitriol, accusing former friends of suppressing his research, of being complicit in a cover-up. He became more and more of a contrarian, objecting to each new discovery out of hand. He continued to attempt to publish reviews of the work of others on the topic of HIV-AIDS, poking holes and insisting on artificial standards of proof. What he didn't do was to produce positive data for his own theory. His work was never on HIV. To my knowledge, he's never had HIV in his lab at UC Berkeley. His virology experience has been on animal retroviruses unrelated to HIV, which is a specialized kind of retrovirus called the Lindy virus. So he abandoned a serious effort at research and took his pet theory directly to the public. He wrote three books, including co-writing credit on Inventing the AIDS Virus, which was published by Harvey Beali, who may be the topic of a future episode. The other co-author was a grad student in his lab, Brian Ellison. The two of them had a falling out over the content of the book, and Ellison published the book without Dewsburg's approval. Dewsburg retaliated by successfully suing Ellison. Then, according to Ellison, Dewsburg also saw to it that he was denied a PhD and was thrown out of Berkeley. In Dewsburg's book, he makes a number of assertions about HIV, most of which have been refuted. For example, the drug theory has been soundly refuted. Poppers, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin have all been examined for their possible effect on CD4 or CD8 counts, and have been shown repeatedly to have no effect. Meanwhile, HIV-positive Americans and Canadians are over 1,000 times more likely to develop AIDS-defining diseases such as PCP and Kaposi sarcoma than those who test negative. Dewsburg argues that the antiretroviral drugs, which have increased the lifespan and quality of life for so many HIV patients, is actually causing the symptoms. This is in direct contradiction to the evidence. Modern three-drug combination therapy reduced the risk of AIDS and death by over 80%. What makes Dewsburg more than just a harmless crank is his involvement in national health policy in South Africa. Quoting from Wikipedia, In 2000, Dewsburg was the most prominent AIDS denialist to sit on a 44-member Presidential Advisory Panel on HIV and AIDS convened by then-President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. The panel was scheduled to meet concurrently with the 2000 International AIDS Conference in Durban, and to convey the impression that Mbeki's doubts about HIV-AIDS science were valid and actively discussed in the scientific community. The views of the denialists on the panel, aired during the AIDS conference, received renewed attention. Mbeki later suffered substantial political fallout for his support for AIDS denialism and for opposing the treatment of pregnant HIV-positive South African women with antiretroviral medication. Two independent studies have concluded that the public health policies of Mbeki's government, shaped in part by Dewsburg's writing and advice, were responsible for over 330,000 excess AIDS deaths and many preventable infections, including those of infants. A 2008 Discover magazine feature on Dewsburg addresses Dewsburg's role in anti-HIV drug-preventable deaths in South Africa. In the article, Max Essex, a prominent HIV-AIDS expert, says that, history will judge Dewsburg as either a nut who is just a tease to the scientific community or an enabler to mass murder for the deaths of many AIDS patients in Africa. A number of scientific criticisms of Dewsburg's hypothesis were summarized in a review article in the journal Science in 1994, which presented the results of a three-month scientific investigation into some of Dewsburg's claims. In the Science article, Science writer John Cohen interviewed both HIV researchers and AIDS denialists, including Dewsburg himself, and examined the AIDS literature in addition to review articles written by Dewsburg. The article stated, although the Berkeley virologist raises provocative questions, few researchers find his basic contention that HIV is not the cause of AIDS persuasive. Mainstream AIDS researchers argue that Dewsburg's arguments are constructed by selective reading of the scientific literature, dismissing evidence that contradicts his thesis, requiring impossibly definitive proof, and dismissing outright studies marked by inconsequential weakness. The article also stated that although Dewsburg and the AIDS denialist movement have garnered support from some prominent scientists, most of this support is related to Dewsburg's right to hold a dissenting opinion rather than support of his specific claim that HIV does not cause AIDS. I'm sad for Dr. Dewsburg because he has ruined what might have been a promising career in cancer research, not for holding views in contrast to his peers, not for being controversial, but for failing to recognize when he is wrong. The legacy of his denialism makes the world a darker place.


315 on that screen. And by 315, it should say 215. I just didn't change my computer clock. You can press play. You're not going to drive. Oh, sure. Probably do that, huh? OK, welcome. Hi, everyone. We are at DrupalCon Nashville 2018, and you are currently in the session. It's all in the dysfunctional family. If you did not intend to be in the session titled, it's all in the dysfunctional family. You can sit awkwardly for the next 24 and a half minutes, or you can gracefully get up now and quietly make your exit. We will not take it personally. We will take it personally. We'll all just avert our heads while you leave. So today, it's Lee and myself, David, are presenting this. And I want to begin with a quote from the book that's sort of inspired and gave us the, led us into the experience we had that we're going to relate to you today. And it's by Patrick Lancioni. It's the five dysfunctions of team. People here have heard of this book, maybe read it. Nice. It comes with a companion workbook. And if you get a chance, if this is something you want to be trying with your teams, I really recommend getting that companion workbook. Because while the book itself is interesting and tells a great story. Come on in. We just started. You haven't missed anything. It doesn't tell you how to implement the ideas. And the workbook is what you need to do that. So I just want to begin. Not finance, not strategy, not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and it's so rare. There you go. Just a little food for thought as we kick this off. So here's what we're going to be going through today. We're going to do brief introductions of David and myself. So you have a sense of where we come from and why we are speaking on this topic. And then we're going to discuss the problem. We're going to use actually an example that David himself experienced on a team he was a part of, to sort of set up a problem and give you an example. And then we'll go through the model that's established in the book to give you a sense of how his team at that time worked through the problems they were facing. And we'll relate it back to sort of our experience more broadly. And then we actually are not going to do the example workshop today, because we're not going to have enough time. But we'll give you a couple of tips of things you can try on your own time. And then we'll have some time for a Q&A at the end. So I'll start with the intro. I'm Lee Bryant. I'm the content manager at MyPlanet. MyPlanet is a software studio up in Toronto. We've got people co-located all around the world. And my experience in terms of team development and teamwork, I've had about 36 jobs in less than 15 years. I averaged more than two a year for a while there. But I've been at MyPlanet for a few years now. And a lot of my jobs were in spaces like camp counseling and support work and working with sort of dynamic groups and people who had a lot of really strong personalities or a lot of difficulty dealing with other people's emotions and other people's individual identities, I guess. So it was a big part of my early career trajectory was establishing those things in my career now is focused on content, yes, but a lot of also community building and establishing networks and groups of people and bringing people together in sort of trusting relationships. So that's where I come from on that stuff. And currently I'm at MyPlanet as well. I'm a customer success manager there. And previous roles I've had there have involved me being a scrum master on a team and a product owner on another team. And working with my teammates to try to do the best work we could and try to get better at how we get our work done. And the experience I'm going to relate to you comes out of that motivation on one team in particular. My background originally was in manufacturing, printing, the old printing industry back in the early 70s is when I started in that and here I am still going, but in the digital world. And I made the move to digital publishing in the early 90s and through various paths I ended up five years ago joining MyPlanet and I'm very happy there. But I'd like to bring some of the work I've done focusing on team building to your attention. So first I'm going to describe the problem we had. And this may be a problem that some of you have experienced on your teams or see on other teams. And what we were failing to do was to deliver value. And value has a number of meanings but in this case with a development team is we weren't delivering the code we were supposed to be delivering, the functionality we were supposed to be delivering on time. And what are the symptoms of this? Well, we failed to meet our commitments. We were a scrum team, we were running sprints and we weren't meeting our sprint commitments. We'd make them week in, week out, set ourselves challenges and goals and we would not make those. Some of the things slowing our progress, technical debt, defects in our work. And we were doing the scrum practice, the agile practice of retrospectives. Does everyone here understand what a retrospective is? Don't have to explain that, good. But instead of discussing our problems as a team and discussing what we could do to actually meet our commitments, we were discussing things like the amount of light we would have in our room during the day where the lights would be on or off or which set of lights would go. How smelly your food could be. We were discussing anything, it's typical bike shedding, right? We were just discussing anything but our actual problems. But these anything seemed like insurmountable problems to us in the discussions. These are symptoms of a problem with a team failing to deliver. So some of the familiar symptoms, and Lee and I are gonna go through these, are in attention to details. The retro's not able to talk about what actually was going on, the defects. Those are in attention to details. In attention during meetings. So a lot of people on their laptops are looking at their phones and scrolling through stuff or taking calls in the middle of meetings, all those kinds of things. I mean, it runs the gamut from just twiddling your thumbs to some truly egregious behavior, but not being present in the actual meeting and listening to what your colleagues are saying is a pretty good sign. It's the best with someone falling asleep in a team meeting. Who else has experienced that at a curiosity? Yeah, there's a lot. It's not uncommon, unfortunately. But these are symptoms. And these are things we can either as observers or as part of a team go, oh, wait a minute. We also had people weren't asking for help. We were creating code that had defects in it, but people weren't asking each other for help. There was silence during our meetings. No one asking questions. No one asking questions. I'm willing to risk that level of vulnerability to say I don't understand or I'm curious about this or what if we tried it this way? And I've mentioned the defects that we kept putting into our code sprint by sprint. And there were others. Anyone here have an example they wanna share pile on here or not? Piling on would be a really good example actually. Piling on's another great one. Anyway, there are obviously a lot, anytime your meeting is kind of derailing or your teams are not producing to the degree that you know they should be able to do, there's probably gonna be a lot of signs and symptoms of what's going on. So it's a good time for some self-examination. And in David's case with the team, the realization that they came to was that the solution to the problem actually had to begin with David and a few of the other sort of key core players on the team. So I'll let him speak to that. Yeah, so initially as we tried to, the people were motivated to see the team improve, tried to seek improvement in our retros. We were looking for the wrong things as well. We were trying to focus on who was making the mistakes or non-route causes of the problem, why we weren't working together and collaborating. And finally, we just weren't working in a vacuum and trying to solve this. We were, all of us, doing a lot of reading, at least those in the group, the three of us who were trying to get the team moving again. And we stumbled across Patrick Lake, like Gionni's book, and we realized that improvement in the team had to start with improvement with those of us who were in the role of a leader of some sort on the team. And that we had to begin the process by changing ourselves and how we related to the team. And as someone who came from the traditional manufacturing and traditional corporate world, having people in a leadership position recognize that they might be the problem was an entirely new concept. One that I'd been aware of when I was in that world, but I'd never actually applied to myself. So that's where we started working and looking at ways to work with the team to improve. One more quotation, do you wanna take this one? Success comes only for those groups that overcome the all too human behavioral tendencies that corrupt teams and breed dysfunctional politics within them, lots of heavy words to parse out there. So these are the five dysfunctions of a team. You can see it's something of a pyramid building its way up. It starts with absence of trust, which is an unwillingness to be vulnerable within the group. And one of the things that's really highlighted in Lynch Gionni's book is how much you cannot really do anything if that core component of trust is missing. If people don't feel safe to speak up and raise a real issue, you're never gonna be able to address the issues in a meaningful, absolutely constructive way because they're not even being brought to the fore. So that absence of trust is a huge, huge, huge cornerstone of how to solve the problems to begin with. Fear of conflict. Conflict isn't necessarily a bad thing. Conflict is how we exchange, in this instance, means an exchange of ideas, some of which may not be compatible. There may be two ways to solve a problem or three ways to solve a problem. Which paths should we take? That's a conflict that a team has to be able to discuss and resolve. If you don't trust each other, you can't have that discussion because you're not gonna open up, you're not going to, have you ever heard someone say after a problem stopped the team and you had to go back? Well, I knew that wasn't gonna work. Oh, well, why didn't you talk to us about that in our decision-making process? So without trust, you can't have those conversations around conflicted ideas. And without having that conversation, you can't get to the best resolution to whatever problem you're trying to solve. So the next tier, lack of commitment. That one's an interesting one. It's sort of a feigning buy-in for group decisions which creates some ambiguity. And it creates some ambiguity sort of throughout the whole organization. If you don't have the kind of passion and commitment to the situation at hand and you're just going along with it, sort of to what David was alluding to with that fear of conflict, they're quite closely connected. If you're not willing to speak up and raise the conflicting opinions and you'll just go with it because it's easier, then you're not actually trying to find the best solution. You're not actually trying to create the thing that's gonna work the best. And it creates a real structural mismatch and you're gonna end up on a lot of different roads. You shouldn't have been on in the first place just because everyone was going with the flow in a really kind of negative way. So the next to last one is avoidance of accountability. And when we're on a team together and I'm a big fan of some other business thought which says that motivational rewards should go to the entire team, not be individualized. But there are times when individuals on a team need to take accountability for what they've done. And a team where people won't take accountability for their individual actions is a team that will allow mistakes to be passed through and the defects entered through the code that won't support each other and that won't step up and take the actions necessary to see the project succeed. And the final one, inattention to results. So focusing on personal success or status and ego before team success. And this is, I would say the other thing Lincioni really highlights as one of the key bits. If there's no trust, a lot of what's happening is people are really caught up in their own ego and their own agendas and they're really feeling that vulnerability anytime they're exposed for having made an error in the code or for having a thought that actually doesn't pan out an idea that's just not gonna come to fruition. So that inattention to results stemming from putting their own ego and their own desire to be the unicorn that's the best in the room and is a 10X dev or whatever it is. I'm not a developer, I probably misused all of those references. That's a real problem creator, that's a really big issue. And so once you've got all those building blocks you can still find it completely toppling off because people are still so attached to that thing and that they don't care about the end result as long as they look good. That's a really big issue. So remember teamwork begins by building trust and the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability. And what does invulnerability do for us? Well if we're invulnerable we don't need to ask for help. So one way that a team can not make its sprint target is because people are not asking for help spend a day, two days working on a problem which if they had raised the issue with their teammates might have had a solution inside a half an hour or an hour. So that team eventually came to, was able to say to themselves, they got to the point where they could say hey look if you've got a problem we're going to ask for help within two hours of having the problem and not being able to solve it. Previously the team, the members of the team would go the entire week without asking for helping a problem and their ticket would never be done. So the sense of invulnerability that you can't make a mistake or you can't be shown to be weak is the thing that stops people from trusting you. And without that trust at that very bottom level you can't achieve any of the other points along that pyramid. So how did we do it? Well it's hard and it takes time and we had a lot of tentative steps forward that ended up with us starting back at the beginning again. And it comes back to that invulnerability piece and the trust and back to that previous slide where I mentioned that it was a decision by the three people with leadership responsibilities and accountability on the team who got together and realized that we had to start showing the change and be the change ourselves. And when we finally succeeded in doing that the first time that you show invulnerability to someone they'll go, oh that's interesting. I wonder what that was about. Maybe it was an interesting lunch or something. So one example of invulnerability to your teammates isn't enough to make this work. You have to do it consistently day in, day out over a course of a number of weeks. So working with the workbook in our retro from the five dysfunctions it probably took us six to eight weeks to get to the point where we could actually feel that trust was starting to happen with everyone. That we stopped protecting ourselves from each other and that allowed us to move on to a countable, not sorry, what's the next one after? Countability after... After trust? Yeah, I just turned 65. I have some problems. Fair combat. That's when we could start having conversations that were passionate about what our solutions could be to a particular story, but also a conflict in them without the conversation breaking down into, well I don't think you know what you're talking about or well I told you so. So once we crack those two bottom pieces everything else seemed like a snap because those two bottom pieces are the ones that allow the other three to actually occur. Because the other three can't happen without trust and without the ability to have passionate discussion with opposing ideas. The results. The results. It was a team that excelled. David's team turned around I think like you said it took six or eight weeks for them to get from that really kind of horrifying state of super inefficiency frankly. They were really underperforming to a team that was phenomenal producing beyond expectations several weeks out of the many that followed those first six to eight, which is a huge deal. They went from missing deadlines, from not being able to make commitments from being hugely, hugely, hugely in technical debt and increasingly kind of budgetary debt a little bit to meeting and surpassing the goals and overcoming it entirely. Which is obviously very, very important especially that budget stuff from a business perspective. But more importantly the team was just functioning. They were getting along. They were helping each other. They were improving individually and as a group. Those are all really, really important things. And one of the kind of best benefits that came out of it was that the team itself had some new innovations that came out of it that they were able to then proactively bring to the client and offer up new opportunities that otherwise, I mean, not only would they never have surfaced those opportunities, they were gonna miss the ones that were already present and we were gonna lose a lot of stuff. So they went from not being able to meet current expectations to exceeding them and getting new expectations put on them that they were also able to meet. Yeah, I just wanted to talk to that point. And it's in hindsight I recognize the great job our product owner was doing because the client wasn't happy with some of our delivery, a lot of our delivery. But he managed to maintain a good relationship with the client that when the team changed and did begin to deliver, the client's trustness also grew. So it's not just internal trust you can garner by being following this sort of process, it's external trust that you will gain as well. And we've got so much trust with the client that we were eight weeks into a project for them. And one of our team members in a team meeting said, you know what, I don't think this solution that we've jumped on at the beginning is actually the best solution and it's actually going to scale to do what the client needs. And we went back, our product owner went back to the client and said, we've got another idea. Will you pay us to work for two weeks on this other idea to do a prototype? And they said yes, and the prototype worked. And then we said, will you allow us to throw out these eight weeks of work and tack another eight weeks on to the end of the project and we're gonna do it this new way. And they went yes. From the business point of view, those opportunities and those innovations never would have happened if the team had not have improved their collaboration, improved their trust, and gone through that hard work they did going through the Five Disfunctions workbook. And it showed a result on our bottom line and it showed a result in a solution architecture that we were able to leverage on several other projects as well. So as David just said, hard one trust in each other resulted in deep trust from the client. So if this were a longer session, right now is where we would do this sample trust exercise but instead we'll just quickly talk through it because we wanna leave a little bit of time for questions and we're starting to get down to that point. We are. So a sample trust exercise, one of those sort of quick easy wins you can do a short workshop is to divide the group into smaller groups or if you've only got say a team of five or six, that's probably small enough. You wouldn't wanna go much beyond five or six people. I think that's probably the upper limit, David, you agree? And then you wanna explain three things. Where you grew up, how many kids were in your family, and what was the most difficult or important challenge of your childhood? Not your inner childhood, not like a hugely traumatic, horrifying revelatory incident, but something that's a little bit personal, something that says a little bit about how you came to be the person you are. Just kind of the most important challenge of being a kid and the most important challenge of being a kid, keep in mind is often like, I was always, I'm the youngest and so I got the smallest portion at dinner and that's like, fine, you're probably fine, but it probably informs a little bit how you feel about trusting other people to give you your fair share of things and how you feel ownership over things and that kind of stuff. And you can change out these questions and adapt them as necessary, but an exercise that just gets three really quick, reasonably straightforward pieces of information out into the group, shared among the group is a great starting point in terms of exercises. And if I can give you a tip about this, it's, we're not Dr. Freud, we're not psychoanalyzing each other. Thank God. And try not to get into the negative things, try to frame the questions and the discussions around the good things that happen in people's lives. Those things can still inform us and provide us with insights into each other, but it means someone doesn't have the feeling, particularly at the early stage, when they may not have the trust in the process yet, the feeling of being arm twisted into revealing things that they wouldn't reveal to people normally. So you get people to reveal things that they would tell over a drink in a pub or something like that. What was their proudest moment in high school or what was the name of their grade school teacher and talk about that, but don't talk about how many times did you get strapped when you were in kindergarten? No, so that you don't want to go there. That is very grim. Hope you're enjoying this talk, everyone. I was waiting for the other student to drop, David. I need an example. Yeah. So that is it in terms of what we've got prepared for you, but if you've got questions now is the ideal time to bring them up. Anybody have any questions? Come on up to the mic. Yeah, please. I was wondering about if you could give a specific example of a conversation someone in leadership or on your team would, you know, being vulnerable, like what that would look like. Yeah, absolutely. So the question, I don't know if that mic is recorded, so I'm just gonna repeat it, was could we provide an example of someone in the leadership position sort of role modeling or giving an example of their own vulnerability in order to sort of prompt it with the group? I mean, even just in that last workshop example, being the first one to share what that challenge was is a great first step towards that or being willing to say, you know, last week I had a client meeting and I said this one thing, I promised we could deliver on it and I hadn't actually checked with our technical leadership team and I spoke out of turn, we weren't gonna be, I messed up, I made that mistake. I oversold our capacity. Owning that mistake is a really great example of your own vulnerability. One of the other members of the leadership group with that team is in the room we would often, without setting it up too much, would work together, so I would admit a mistake that I had made and his response would be to accept that, to make a suggestion to prevent that from happening in the future, but I would not be scolded or reprimanded so people got the idea that, oh, it's okay to admit to a mistake. You're not going to be in trouble because you admit to making a mistake, so we often would, it wasn't role playing because it's an actual mistake I've made but we would make sure that the conversation happened where it could be heard by other people so that we could expose my vulnerability and we could also expose that inside the team as long as you were working towards improvement that being able to say you made a mistake and identify it and identify corrective action kind of got almost rewarded without there being a cooking involved but there was a way that there was nothing bad happening because of this sequence of events. And if you don't have that sort of natural partner in crime to bounce that off of, then you can facilitate it yourself. I made this mistake, can anyone give me, I would love if you've got an idea of how I could have avoided that in the future. Ask for that help, that's a great. Asking for help, honestly, everyone in this room forever regardless of what you're doing, just ask for help. People want to give help, they feel so good when you give them the chance to help. You seem like so much less of a little tight hummingbird that is so fraught, it's just the greatest thing. You feel good when you get the help, everything about it is great. My number one recommendation to all people. Questions, sorry, before I go off on a help tangent. This is recorded in fact. Oh great, fantastic, I will not repeat it. So I'm gonna start by just asking, in your example, David, you had your three leaders who kind of banded together to begin the sort of introspection and improvement process and I'm gonna just start by asking, I know your role, but what were the roles of the three? And the second part of the question is, how did the three of you kick this off? How did, what was it like to talk to each other and begin that conversation and saying, this is rotten, what can we do to lead the team to improvement? So it was a scrum team, I was the scrum master. We had a tech lead on the team and we had a product owner on the team and we were the three that put our heads together and had been looking for ways, particularly the tech lead on myself, who had been looking for ways to get this team out of the rut it was in. And we were really good on this scrum ritual so we were having our regular retrospectives, they just were pretty ineffective and we just brought it up in a retrospective and said, look, we've come across this book, here it is and we shared some stuff from it and what do you think about giving this a try? Because there were developers, some of the, many of the developers in the team wanted to see this problem solved but they didn't have the tools to solve it and so this workbook gave us a way to put ourselves on a railroad track, so to speak and find a solution because it was a known method for finding a solution and particularly with devs, I mean, what better way to frame a solution to a human problem but to say, look, we've found this path that isn't too, you know, funny and it's kind of engineering-like. Let's give it a try and we got buy-in. It took, it still took a lot of time for that initial first rung to be crossed. I'm gonna cut us off now because there's another group in here afterwards but there are more questions we'll be just outside and thank you so much and feel free to send your information, take the survey, et cetera and join the sprints or whatever that other slide was that we're supposed to pick up and I forgot to do and have a great rest of DrupalCon, guys, bye, thank you. Sorry for running a little long there.


Hi everybody, Joe for Jaspy's casebreaks.com coming at you with 2018 Panini Prestige Football, pack break number 56 And it's the last filler we got to do to unlock that immaculate football first off the line We're giving away the final 10 spots. We'll do that randomizer at the end of the break first off big Thank you everybody here For getting involved in this all 32 are in And let's roll it. Let's randomize it one and a six seven times their names and teams one two three four five six and Seventh and final time after seven and six and a one one and a six seven times for the teams one two three four five Six and a one seventh and final time. All right, there's the first half of the list right here In this 2018 prestige pack, there's a second half right here. Let's just print and let's just rip You can blush. Do I want to watch? Local sports coverage I can get a little rough sometimes even in a big media market like LA What about some NFL total access keep us in the football mood here. All right So this break itself this the first off the lane off the lane first off the line break will be in a different video All right, here's the final printout right there.  There's some new dice. There's a new list and let's randomize that list three and a five eight times So once again top ten after eight. Good luck one two three Seven and eighth and final time after eight now from eleven on down Sad times But I appreciate everybody trying. Thank you Much happier times for the top ten. You're in that next break Andrew.  Hey, sometimes it works out that way. I'm Joe for Jasper's case breaks calm. Thanks for watching Thanks for breaking with us. I'll see you for that immaculate. Bye


Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Today I'm going to discuss a very important health topic. It's one of the most basic human drives and quite frankly we don't talk about it enough. This episode of the Dr. Gundry podcast is all about sex. In just a moment I'll answer some questions from you about libido and other sexual health issues. I'll also share tips for having a great sex life at any age. So stay tuned this is an episode you won't want to miss. So let's start with some questions about libido. What do you think about Viagra? Is it good or bad for your gut buddies? Well the good news is Viagra has nothing to do with your gut buddies but here's the bad news that I tell anyone of my male patients who's looking for erectile help from one of these medications. If you can't get it up without assistance from Viagra or any of the other compounds you have serious health issues. Serious and it has nothing to do with an erection. It turns out that the same process that's preventing you from getting an erection is happening in your coronary arteries and in the blood vessels to your brain. And countless studies show that the need for Viagra or any of the other medications like Cialis for instance means that your arteries in your heart and in your brain are incapable of dilating properly. And there's an expression in longevity that says you are only as young as your blood vessels are flexible and I couldn't agree more with that assessment. So number one I won't prescribe Viagra or Cialis or any of the other ones without a stress test first to show me that when you possibly can dilate your blood vessels with this medication you won't have a heart attack. But the point is if you need these medications that is probably the best wake up call that what you're doing at any point in your life is really a warning sign that there's something going on with the blood vessels in your heart and brain.  So this is a huge warning sign and that's the first thing that you should look for. Second many men don't realize that the inability to get an erection has nothing to do with testosterone and I'll get to that in a minute so please stay tuned. Is there a natural Viagra? That's a great question. There are actually many natural compounds that aid in dilatation of blood vessels. There's actually a very good study that suggests having about a half a cup of walnuts will produce more L-Arginine which is the precursor for nitric oxide which believe it or not that's what Viagra does. L-Citraline is the precursor for L-Arginine. I personally think it works much better than L-Arginine. Word of warning with L-Arginine. The herpes virus actually uses L-Arginine to reproduce. So if you have a history of cold sores if you're going to take L-Arginine make sure you supplement with another amino acid called L-Licine which will block herpes ability to use L-Arginine. There are several other compounds that dilate blood vessels. One is Hawthorne and interestingly enough there's recent research that shows that aged garlic extract will actually dilate blood vessels in a totally different mechanism so all of these are options for quote natural Viagra but the important thing is if you're looking for help in the erection department you need to totally examine your diet and change it immediately. It's one of the scariest things that you should be aware of. I have a very good friend in longevity who used to say men no matter what your age if you don't wake up early in the morning with a boner death is on the way and it actually makes an incredibly good point and all you guys who are listening you better be waking up with one or something's radically wrong with your blood vessels. Whoa is that scary or what? Next question I have low testosterone and it's affecting my sex drive how do I improve it? Well first of all are you sure you have low testosterone? The usual test that's available in most doctors offices in most labs is total testosterone but what you actually want is free testosterone. The reason for that is there are a large number of men who make this hilariously sounding compound called sex hormone binding globulin and if you make sex hormone binding globulin a great deal of your testosterone will be bound to this protein and it will not be available. So for instance I see many men who walk through the door with testosterone of a thousand and yet they are weak they have no muscle mass and when we measure their free testosterone their free testosterone is low because they have a very high sex hormone binding globulin which we also measure. On the other hand the vast majority of men who I see with low T with low testosterone actually have a normal free testosterone so you can ignore total testosterone as a useful test. What you want to ask for is free testosterone. Now here's the other important point most men who I see with low testosterone can absolutely positively have a normal free testosterone if they will give up sugars and carbohydrates. Remember those commercials when testosterone was available as prescriptions and you could advertise it? All those guys talking about their low T were sitting around the campfire eating chips and having a beer and it's amazing the number of men that I see who have pre-diabetes high insulin levels or diabetes who have low testosterone and they come in looking for a testosterone prescription and first of all I won't write for it because I have not met a man yet who cannot get a normal free testosterone by changing his diet by getting rid of the sugars and carbohydrates in their diet and these men come back shocked that they now have normal testosterone. The other important thing to realize if you are considering testosterone replacement is that testosterone will suppress your testicle ability to produce testosterone and your testicles will shrink to little bitty tiny balls and if you stop testosterone you in fact will take a very long time to regenerate your own testicles ability to make testosterone. Lastly on the same point the reason you do not see testosterone commercials on TV anymore is that the FDA banned it because most men who take testosterone don't realize that they convert a lot of that topical testosterone into estrogen the female hormone and the reason testosterone commercials are banned is because of this fact and we now know that topical testosterone replacement increased estrogen in men and estrogen is one of the leading causes of heart disease and strokes and that explains why testosterone replacement was causing more heart attacks and more strokes not because of testosterone but because it was converted to estrogen and lastly guys you'll convert the testosterone into estrogen and guess what you'll get in man boobs and that's not what you're looking for with testosterone replacement so lots of good reasons not to look for topical testosterone or those crazy testosterone pellets and I'll have more to say about that so women if you have a low libido what can you do to amp up your sex life so I've been taking care of women and men in my practice for over 20 years now and one of the things I've learned from listening to a great deal of men and women is one of the worst ways to screw up your libido is when you're busy with a project such as a child sex goes way down the line the other thing that you should know is that during lactation and during breastfeeding your child and your interaction actually suppresses your desire to have sex because quite frankly your child wants your undivided attention and there is a really cool hormonal interplay between breastfeeding and not having a desire for sex and this has actually been shown over and over again particularly in societies where breastfeeding is done until three or four years of age and it's actually a very useful way of limiting the population so number one don't feel bad that there's somehow something wrong with you hormonally because you're not very interested in sex your children are keeping you from doing that now one of the interesting things that I see in women particularly in the perimenopause or even the postmenopause period is there is a huge amount of information out there that menopause is going to decrease your sex drive or that perimenopause is going to decrease your sex drive and you need hormonal replacement to get your sex drive back quite frankly there's some very fascinating studies in psychology looking at the effect of a long-term monogamous relationship on sex drive in the women and it has nothing to do with hormones and this is going to shock a lot of people but check with Dr. Google you'll find the studies women in a long-term monogamous relationship tend to lose their libido their sex drive and it appears to have a psychological reason to drive the long-term sexual partner usually the husband absolutely crazy as to why you're not interested and it actually keeps the husband fascinated with trying to get sex from you now one of two things happen either the husband finds an affair a mistress and can't take it anymore and can frequently leave the marriage over that but what's fascinating is and I see this with a lot of my patients let's suppose either the husband dies or the husband does go off and they get a divorce the woman who supposedly has no sexual desire no libido then meets a new partner and that woman universally I've not seen it otherwise becomes phenomenally interested in sex again her libido goes crazy even though she's had no change in hormone status so there's really good psychology behind all this now how about hormonal replacement in females so I do use hormone therapy in females but it's not for often the reasons you think there are about five percent of women who are very vascularly sensitive to the effects of estrogen and those women as they go into perimenopause menopause they notice a distinct difference in the way their thought processes work and I was taught by an excellent gynecologist on our staff that a small dose of estrogen preferably topical please folks do not swallow an estrogen containing substance a small dose of estrogen will do dramatic changes in the way women feel and I can see that very small dose of estrogen on their labs but what amazing is the women without knowing their estrogen level will automatically say that was it that's what's missing and sometimes they'll actually forget the patch or change the patch and we'll see it on their labs and they'll come in and say something's not right and I'll I'll go what's with your patch oh that's right I you know I forgot it or I ran out and I didn't refill it so that's number one number two there are a number of women who as their progesterone levels drop as they enter menopause have great deal of difficulty sleeping now the nice thing about progesterone is that it is absorbable orally and it's easy to obtain from a compounding pharmacy and usually the dose of progesterone that works is about a hundred milligrams a day now the third thing I'll mention about hormone replacement is my good friend and colleague Dale Bredesen who wrote the end of Alzheimer's and it's probably I think one of the greatest neurologists in dementia there is told me a number of years ago now that one of the missing links is a another hormone called pregnant alone pregnant alone is sometimes called the queen of all hormones the master of all hormones because when we're young pregnant alone is made in our adrenal glands and quite frankly it's the precursor for estrogen progesterone testosterone DHEA you name it it comes from pregnant alone but what's fascinating is that as we get older our adrenal glands for most of us stop making pregnant alone in any amount whatsoever about 95 percent of adults don't make pregnant alone and Dr. Bredesen has shown and others as well that pregnant alone is probably very important in keeping neurons in your brain active and alive as we get older so what what Dr. Bredesen has shown is that he thinks and I certainly have come to agree with him that much of what we assume is forgetfulness as we get older is actually the effect of falling levels of pregnant alone now the good news is pregnant alone is over the counter in general and you know everybody's different because I measure the effects of these doses every three months of my patients in general 50 milligrams a day for women is usually the right dose 100 milligrams a day and men is usually the right dose now I'm not prescribing that to you I'm not suggesting it I've just found through the last few years of using this compound that that usually works out to the to the level that Dr. Bredesen likes but everybody's different and if you're going to take a supplement a hormonal supplement you've got to measure what it's going to do and it's actually easy to do with simple blood tests now the last big misconception about women's libido is that somehow testosterone either with creams or with pellets is going to drive women crazy wild about having sex about 85 percent of women will not respond to testosterone with sex drive and as my colleague in gynecology has reminded me through the years and I've certainly seen it in the last 20 years that if a woman is complaining about libido about sex drive then he wants to talk about their marriage rather than giving her testosterone because 85 percent of women in general will not respond to testosterone replacement with a sex drive 15 percent will and I have certainly seen this in my practice but it doesn't happen very much and I live in two communities where we have what are called doctor feel goods that all they do is a large amount of hormone replacement usually with pellets and what happens to these women is they will keep giving these women testosterone until I kid you not these women are shaving their arms they're shaving their beards and they still don't have a sex drive even though their testosterone levels approach that or exceed that of their husbands so I can assure you that testosterone is not the cure for a relationship issue and so talk to your family counselor if that's what you need okay so here's some more instagram questions partner less sex can you masturbate too much you know this is actually getting a lot of attention from mass media the idea of is partner less sex the new in thing and in quite frankly partner less sex is on the rise whether it is internet porn based whether it's subscription service or whether it's now AI models that use have replaced the old inflatable dolls there are now lifelike mannequins that can be purchased on the internet and the interesting thing about can you masturbate too much no you won't go blind that's the good news it turns out that the problem with porn in general is that what we're finding with men and women is that what happens with porn is you actually get this huge burst of dopamine and what you're actually looking for is this dopamine hit in your brain and what happens with more and more porn as was shown in a very famous call for is that you have to have more and more and you have to have more and more for lack of a better word erotic or kinky porn to have the same dopamine effect and eventually it really fails to work because you flooded your dopamine receptors and you no longer get the hit you're looking for so that's the danger of too much of a good thing there's nothing you know obviously it's big business but the problem is it's addictive in the same way any other addiction is addictive isn't that you have to have more and more to get the same result and that's the slippery slope now here's another great question is celibacy healthier than being sexually active or vice versa a few years ago a colleague of mine who's well known in health suggested and he's a male suggested that as you get older men should stop having sex and they should stop masturbating because he believes that your sperm your semen is your life force and that as you get older you have to conserve your life force and so the natural thing to do is to stop having sex and stop masturbating now quite frankly that goes against everything we know from an evolutionary perspective particularly for men and that is if you are sexually active or if you are ejaculating that tells your genes guess what i'm still in the business of recreating myself of making or at least attempting to make a new copy and from a genetic standpoint the more you demonstrate that you're capable of doing that the more your genes keep you around the interesting thing is we know that sexual activity particularly among couples is one of the best ways to promote a healthy lifespan now here's the other thing that's been fascinating to me for the last 20 years and that is listening to women in their late 70s their early 80s their mid 80s their late 80s begging me to get them some help for their husband to get an erection because they want it and they can't believe that hubby isn't willing to help out in that department so no there's i think evolutionary the the deal is the more you are sexually active or act like you're sexually active from masturbation the better your genes think that you're still involved in recreation so great question all right let's get some more questions from instagram can oral sex give you bad bacteria well the vaginal microbiome is actually very interesting and replete with its own set of microbiome that's actually different than the oral microbiome but here's the deal a few years ago a very famous actor got throat cancer and went through thankfully successful treatment for that throat cancer now i got a lot of talk in the tabloids but in fact we now know that about 75 percent of all oral and throat head and neck cancers are caused by the hpv virus the human papilloma virus and we all hear about hpv injection shots vaccines for young kids and prepubescent females and we're now actually finding that men can contract the human papilloma virus from oral sex now here's i guess the good news is that if you have a head neck cancer that tests positive for hpv and about 75 percent of them now test positive for hpv that the treatment the chemotherapy treatment the radiation treatment is incredibly effective at curing that problem quite frankly my long-term partner at loma linda dr glennon bailey eventually passed away this past year from recurrent head cancer and i am no way saying that was hpv because we didn't test for that back then but the point is that used to be a lethal disease almost no cures but now are incredibly successful at treating that disease if you're positive for hpv but be careful and that is a real consideration we now know that if you are infected with hpv that that's a consideration the same thing we know about anal sex number one please use protection in my community of palm springs a huge number of my patients are gay or lesbian and anal sex is a huge part of their lifestyle but just as you can get the hpv virus transmitted orally you can also transmit the hpv virus annually but we also see a large number of men get anal and rectal cancers from viral transmission so let's be careful out there that's all i'm going to say on the subject all right finally can you fix peronese disease with electon-free diet so peronese disease is where your penis is not straight but it's got a curve like a banana just like the things you see believe it or not peronese disease is an autoimmune disease caused by lectins and i have a number of men who've come to you with that problem and then we get electon-free diet and guess what willy straightens right back up so peronese disease is curable with electon-free diet i've seen it in my own practice okay time for the audience question following my lecture on hydration john hall on youtube asked i've been drinking distilled water for 30 years what about collecting fresh rainwater for drinking uh that's a great question and believe it or not there are a number of island countries particularly bermuda comes to mind where their entire source of drinking water is collecting rainwater off of their roofs and that's what they've been living on for generations and generations so yeah go collect rainwater it's a really great way of getting your water so that's a great question okay so that wraps it up for today i tell you we got so many questions on this subject that i promise you will have a part two in the foreseeable future so thanks for listening to the dr gunnery podcast before you go i just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on itunes google play stitcher or wherever you get your podcast because i'm dr gunnery and i'm always looking out for you


Just a couple of questions about the simulation. Those members of the two delegations, namely Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Are you guys here? Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia. Yeah, I'm in the two standing, and how about Jordan? Well, I should call King Abdullah next time. All right. Please make sure you know your team members. I mean, I tried to introduce you to each other last time just by asking you to stand up so that everyone can see everybody else and knows, of course, that he or she who is or her team member. So it is essential that you get together as soon as possible, as I indicated in my emails, and devise strategies to how to proceed. Next week, I'll be attending a conference in Paris on Thursday. So I'll be returning on Friday. We'll not have class on Friday, but we will have class on Tuesday, right? Don't forget this, and don't spread the word that professor will not be here next week. I will not be here next Friday. I'll be here on Tuesday next week, so please do not cause any misunderstanding. But for your convenience, I'm telling you right now that our next Friday's class will be canceled. That's why there's the reason, as I explained at the beginning of the semester, we are having four hours a week, at least for several weeks at the beginning of the semester. So it's to be able to compensate for the several hours that we'll be missing because of these conferences. Again, I was planning to show you a PowerPoint here. The computer, there is a problem with the accounts. I cannot open my e-mail account in which I had this PowerPoint file sent to myself so that I could show it here. I did not have a copy last time, so but I have this printed copy myself. But don't worry about it, you will get the PowerPoint as an attachment in an e-mail that I will send you. So please take notes because the PowerPoint consists of some bullet point type information, not very much detail, just headlines, sort of headings, subheadings. But the information that I'll be discussing here will be useful for you in your preparation to the midterm exam, which is casual as far as I remember, November 12th, right? Right before the bi-room. All right. Excuse me. Again, something or is there anything you'd like to tell us, everyone? That way, so that will increase your adrenaline and you'll be working better. Don't worry about it. In case there is going to be trouble for most of the class, we can maybe think about another date, but I don't think this should be unnecessary to discuss at this point. Anyway, last time we tried to sort of determine the basic characteristics, the fundamental characteristics of the Middle East, because this is the subject of this course. We are of course particularly interested in the security dimension of the relations in the Middle East. There are a number of factors that elevate Middle East to a very high position in international politics, and it is not a new phenomenon. It is not something new. Middle East has been one of the focus of international politics for quite some time. At least over the last century, the Middle East has been the battleground, but I mean per se, in real sense, where wars were fought, but also in political sense where big powers, small powers have fought each other in order to advance their own interests. After all, as I always tell my students, in my foreign policy analysis or Turkish foreign policy classes, foreign policy is the pursuit of national interest outside of the boundaries of that country. Therefore, we have seen many countries trying to advance their interests and pursue their interests vis-à-vis the advantages that they thought would emerge from being there, or just taking part in regional politics or intra-regional politics. Today, we are talking about Middle East primarily because of nature resources, especially oil and gas that exist there, and many countries in the world are dependent on Middle Eastern oil as well as gas. That is one particular reason why, especially big powers, both in the past and today, have displayed a lot of interest in their approach to Middle East, and they always wanted to be in a more advantageous position vis-à-vis other powers. Of course, especially since the creation of the State of Israel, as we'll be dealing with more in-depth and extensively throughout the semester, and also more recently because of more imminent security problems such as terrorism, Middle East again is in the focus of many, many countries. Therefore, it is an important subject. But of course, we can go, as I always say, as far back as many centuries in order to start or to set the clock, as to where to start studying the Middle East. There is ultimately no meaningful point or yardstick where you can just start history. The more far back you go, and of course, the more things you find which are interesting for understanding and explaining what is going on in the Middle East. But of course, because it's not a course or history course, history department course, and because we don't have much time and we want to devote much of our time to understanding contemporary issues in the Middle East, we will start from the post-World War II period. And we will look at the state of affairs in the immediate aftermath and also the period since the World War II. So what was or how was the Middle East looking like at the time? What was the situation in the state of affairs? What was the political situation, military situation, security situation in the Middle East right after the World War II? Actually, there were some quick important developments following the end of the World War II. Well, World War II, of course, is a very important turning point in history. There is no question about it. And the war itself and what followed afterwards affected many, many nations, many, many countries. New nations have borne out of big empires which have collapsed or some new relationship emerge between or among countries, one of which was, of course, the creation of the League of Arab Nations. Well, that was actually something that preceded the official or formal end of the war because it was in March 1945. But something that is, of course, important to bear in mind is that many of the developments that follow the official end of war had their origins in the years when still war was still going on, such as the creation of the United Nations. Many conferences were carried out among nations and some other institutions that would, again, follow the end of the war. The League of Arab Nations, or Arab League, so to speak, is one of the important developments that we have to bear in mind. And it still exists. It was started with six countries. And today, is there anybody who has any idea about how many members the Arab League has? Or approximately, you don't have to be very exact.  And you said 15. Far too much, 50. I don't think there are 50 Arab nations today. 15 is, well, not so bad. It's now 22 Arab nations who are members of the Arab League. Is it a very important organization? Well, it depends on where you stand and from which perspective you look at issues and what you expect from the Arab League. Of course, you have to go through its charter in order to understand the mission and the powers of the Arab League as to what it is supposed to do and what it aims at achieving or what is its ultimate goal. Of course, one part of the thing, as the name suggests, is to sort of create a more coherent relationship among the Arab nations. Maybe emphasize or strengthen Arab identity and help spread this understanding among the Arab nations because there are some countries where almost the entire population is Arab. There is no sort of significant number of percentage of minorities. But there are also some countries where Arabs are also in minorities, such as Israel, for instance. There are approximately 20% of the Israeli population today is Arab, but Israel is not a member of the Arab League. Well, this is something that would be pretty much unthinkable for the Israelis. Even though they have, as I said, one-fifth of their population today, which is not a significant, insignificant proportion. It is a significant proportion, but still, of course, due to other reasons, not only because of this proportion. Israelis, of course, are not an Arab League member, but there are also some countries such as Iraq, for instance. Again, they're like 16%, 17%, or according to some other figures, 20% of the population is not Arab identity, such as the Kurds. But it has been not only a founding member, but also one of the most important members of the Arab League. It doesn't have binding power on the nations. It aims at achieving certain goals through negotiation and also consensus finding, and this is, therefore, important. That is something that tells us about the post-World War II period, in that Arab nations have, in a sense, developed a sense of Arab identity, and they figured out it was important for them to emphasize it. This is, therefore, one important development. Of course, one very important development that followed the end of the World War II was the creation of the State of Israel. On May 15, 1948, Israel proclaimed independence. Of course, there is much history to this. I mean, it is not something that happened overnight. That was a dream for at least several centuries back in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. And this Zionist movement always aimed at creating a nation for the Jews who were being persecuted everywhere, almost everywhere in all parts of the world. But, of course, and there were some significant developments, some important stages that have paved the way to this ultimate decision. And, of course, the Jews have taken advantage of the United Nations resolution, which actually aimed at creation of a state for the Jews as well as for the Palestinians, because the territory that Israel today exists is Palestine, which was actually ruled for several centuries by the Ottomans. And this is a period where, which actually even the Israelis today sort of believe was a very significant period in history in the sense that Ottomans have kept peace and stability in this region, where there is all these different ethnic religious identities which are prone and also have actually fought each other and prone to fight each other. So, therefore, the creation of the state of Israel, in many respects, constitutes one of the most important stages in history of the world, as well as, and more specifically, history of the Middle East. And according to many, it's the beginning of everything in the Middle East, depending on, again, how you look at the issue. This is something that paved the way to very important developments, as I mentioned, and one of which, of course, is a series of wars between the Arab nations, which aimed at coming together in a coherent way, sort of strengthen their position, and create some sort of a unity among themselves. And this Arab identity, of course, could not and did not accept the creation of state of Israel and they launched offensive against Israel, which, of course, resulted not necessarily in a victory for themselves, for the Arab nations. And almost each time Arabs have fought the Israelis, they pretty much suffered the consequences in terms of regime change or in terms of sort of shift of power from one group to another, sort of within themselves. So we will look into this more closely, because these are important developments that have shaped, actually, the rest of the decades that follow the end of World War II, especially in the 70s and 80s. We see a certain degree of radicalization of the Middle Eastern, some of the Middle Eastern nations or the relationship among the Arab nations as well as between Arabs and Israel. And we see more sort of intervention into the region by extra regional powers, super powers, and sort of peripheral powers, such as Iran, for instance. Turkey, for the most part of this period, I would say throughout the post-Second World War period, up until recently, almost pretty much, I mean, in most cases stood outside of the Middle Eastern politics for several reasons that we'll explain in the course. But other countries like Iran, of course, Israel, has always been unavoidably in the Middle Eastern politics. One, of course, one important development throughout these years in the 60s and 70s, late starting from late 50s, although which had their presidents, of course, all of which had their reasons of their own, such as the rise of a pan-Arabic ideology or Arab socialism in the hands of Nasser, Jamal Abdul Nasser, the head of state, Egypt, who came to power, of course, as a result of some of the events that succeeded the military coup carried out by a number of military people. Of course, these are important topics that we will be going on. One particular development that we should bear in mind is that throughout history, at least for the last several centuries, we have seen or we meant Great Britain and France, particularly. To some extent, Germans tried to play a role, but they were not that much successful. But French and British used to be the great powers of the period in the 17th, 18th, 19th century. And they always exerted their influence on the region. And this is somewhat, well, this map is not a very good one. I, therefore, found one on the internet and sent to my account, which I couldn't open today, which I would think would better display the situation that would give you a better idea. But still, of course, the world is spherical. And some maps are so flat that people think it's all the way straightforward. But here, for France and Britain, I mean, because they had interest in India, for especially the British, and France and South Eastern Asia, and some in some other parts, Middle East has been on the crossroads or has been on the way to their ultimate destination. And that was, of course, not only to extend their political influence to as many regions as possible, but, of course, out of this, or based on this, or taking advantage of this, to make trade and to make import and export of certain goods. And more specific, of course, import of raw material and the manufacturer using their manufacturing of some goods and, of course, become a welfare nation. This is what capitalist powers in the past or imperial powers have done. And this is, therefore, something not new to you. But here, what we have seen in the particular period that we are going to talk about, more contemporary period, is that we see the decline of these two powers as major powers. The post-World War II period witnessed the decline of the British and French rules in the Middle East as well. But more so, maybe, in the further regions of the world, such as India, for instance, and we have seen India later on Pakistan emerging as independent powers, and which were previously ruled by the British. And this colonial rule was, or disappeared, with the free will of the British, maybe, on the surface. But, of course, there was a lot of reasons as to why the British have left or quit the region. We have not seen the same development here in the Middle East for another period, like up until the 60s, the British and the French were not necessarily so anxious to give up their privileges here of ruling these regions. Because not only that these regions were still rather closer when compared to other parts, so therefore they could still exert some influence, they could still project their power on these closer regions. But also, because of, again, the creation of state of Israel and some other sort of developments and oil and gas, these regions were so rich that could not be compared to the wealth in other regions. So they were still jealous. They were still not very much willing to give up their powers. But all in all, what we have seen gradually and eventually erosion of their powers, erosion of their influence, and they had no other choice but to sort of lead the region. And one particular development was, of course, the Suez Canal crisis, which was followed by, of course, maybe because of the reaction of the United States to the sort of, I mean, Israel, France, and Britain, who as a reaction to Nasser's closure of the canal and nationalization of the canal and sort of fought or launched an offensive against Egypt, they did not expect a reaction from the United States. And the Soviet Union, of course. So this reaction caused deep trauma in the mindset of the French, British, as well as Israeli politicians. And they have sort of looked at the region with a new sort of perspective. And they have then figured out that they could not still exert the influence that they used to do so in the past. And that they were going, and the United States was emerging as a power, as a regional power as well, in addition to being a global power. Well, the 50s is important in the sense that there were some approaches of the US administration under Eisenhower. There is this new deal. There is this new approach to many international issues, such as in 1953 with respect to nuclear energy and the spread of nuclear energy. And there is this famous Atoms for Peace speech at the United Nations General Assembly and things like that. So many developments in the 50s have, again, witnessed that Middle East was not going to be anymore a region where Brits and French were so much or as much as they used to do, you know, exert their influence, but the United States was replacing them. So that was an important note to bear in mind that British and French rules were in the decline. And US was rising as the power, the extra-regional power or outside power, which would somehow shape the future of the intra-regional politics together with the Soviet Union. I mean, we should not forget the fact that, yes, in the 1950s, the Soviet Union may not have had as much military capability as the United States had. But in the following years, throughout the 60s, there was pretty much a parity between the two and both of which have taken advantage of this situation. And we talk about a superpower rivalry in all parts of the world and more specifically in the Middle East. So starting from the late 50s and early 60s, the Middle East has become more exerted. I mean, there was much influence of this rivalry between the two superpowers on the region, on the Middle East. Again, of course, this period tells us that more and more Arab nations have won their independence. Yes, there were some developments in the 1920s. As we discussed here, some boundaries were artificially drawn by the outside powers, French, British, Sykes, Pico, I mean, in 1916. All of these developments have had their effects throughout the 1920s and 30s. And but during the Second World War, many things were paused. I mean, there was a sort of a kind of standstill position, which, of course, was an unavoidable consequence of the war, which lasted for five, six years. And in its aftermath, we have seen these radical developments. And with the decline of the French and British rules, we have seen more and more independent nations. I mean, Arab nations who have won their independence from the declining powers. So it was also a consequence of, of course, as I mentioned, of the US intervention, and also the Soviet intervention in the region. One impact of the creation of the state of Israel, as I mentioned, was the start of a series of wars between Israel, almost on the day they proclaimed independence. They were attacked by Arab nations who could by no means accept this. Therefore, we have seen wars, 48, 49, just right after the creation of the state of Israel. And of course, Israel, in some respects, was not only spiritually or mentally ready for such a reaction. They were not dreaming that they would be welcome in the region. So they were not only ready politically, but also militarily. And they could just survive these attacks. But most important of which was the war in 1948. I mean, the beginning followed by 1967. These are the major wars. And the state of war actually has never ended between Arab nations and Israel. There is still not an eternal peace, not a peace at all. Only a handful of nations, just a few of them, in the Arab world, recognize the state of Israel formally. Some have not recognized officially, but acknowledge, or at least act in such a way to acknowledge that there is this entity there, a political entity, with which true indirect fashion, indirect means and ways do some trade and enter into some cultural, political relations. But again, only a handful of nations, just a few nations among the Arab states recognize the state of Israel. Even today, and we do not see much prospects in the future, or in the near future, at least. Of course, we would hope for the opposite. Because Israel was created in Palestine in a region where Palestinians were living, side by side with the Jews. And the Jews have taken advantage of creating their own state. But Palestinians have failed to do so. Palestinians who had no nation, no state, of course, were directly affected from the situation. And we have seen, during the war and its aftermath, we have seen a large mobilization or movement of a large number of Palestinians going to many nations, to many states in the region. One of which was primarily known as Transjordan. And today, as we know, Jordan. So today, I don't have the exact figures in mind. But an overwhelming majority of Jordanian population consists of Palestinians. And some historians and politicians argue that there is actually no such in Jordanian nation, which is something not accepted by Jordanians. And that there is a distinct Jordanian entity. The name, of course, comes from the river Jordan, or Jordan River, which was, again, created by drawing some maps by the big powers earlier. And based on some of the promises that were given before and during the wars, Second World War, especially. But what is important today is that one particular consequence of this war between Arabs and Israelis is that the Palestinians were most affected and, of course, badly affected. Another one, of course, at the time, I mean, there were kings, emirs, sheikhs, such individuals who were ruling in sort of Arab people in the Middle East. And there, I mean, Middle East was consisting of such dynasties, which were sort of keeping control of their population, which had some, of course, legitimacy, maybe in the eyes of some other powers, outside powers, maybe also among their population. But the war showed, unequivocally, that they were not that strong entities. And that followed by the war, or right in the aftermath of the war, these dynasties have gone into trouble because they could not sort of protect their people, and they could not protect their position, their power, their sort of status. And that, of course, has led the way to the creation of or emergence of new regimes in the region, taken over by mostly Dmitry. And once Dmitry intervened in it, in the situations, and Dmitry within itself created other problems and sort of paved the way to other interventions by other members of Dmitry who have blamed their predecessor for not being successful or for not being as strong or as tough as they had to be against, of course, Israel. So what we have seen in countries like Egypt, Iraq, and Syria was that kingdoms, or kings, or monarchs, dynasty powers, so to speak, have been toppled down by Dmitry, and then Dmitry rules, Dmitry regimes were established, which, again, as I said, within themselves have undergone several problems because everyone wanted to hold onto power and become the dominant actor in the sort of administration of his country.  When we come back, we'll discuss this issue, and I'll try to figure out if we can open this account today.


Privacy has two facets. Data privacy, the one institutions most often focus on, and personal privacy, the one students and other people are most concerned about. Today's legislation, and therefore the default privacy focus of most institutions, is about protecting data privacy. But when people talk about privacy, they're worried about freedom from surveillance. The University of Michigan Six Words About Privacy Project is giving us insights about how people think. It's time to reframe the privacy conversation. Yes, we need to protect people's data, but we need to recognize the people behind the data and focus on protecting them. So start with restoring data privacy so it applies to all contexts, but then evolve privacy to focus on people as well as data. To transform, reframe the privacy conversation as one about individual freedom and institutional trust. We've learned a lot about how to create better privacy environments for students. Students care about their privacy, and they have questions about how their data is being used and how it will benefit them, and they don't want today's data to backfire tomorrow. But today, few students know the answers to these questions. Remote learning has also spawned remote assessment and proctoring, and privacy is one of the major challenges with it. On the bright side, many students trust their institution's use and safeguarding of their data, and they have far more trust in colleges and universities than in corporations. Institutions need to reform student privacy or risk losing the trust that many students still have. Institutions need to develop or update policies and practices to ensure students know how their data is being used and how it benefits them. And what needs to evolve? Well, as the 2021 Information Security Horizon Report recommends, students increasingly expect higher education institutions to allow them to opt out of personal data collection and use. Well, what should be transformed? Faculty and academic leaders committed to online learning should rethink assessment entirely.