Who are you fighting? Uh, I'm fighting my own demons. What's going on, guys? You guys are streaming, right? I saw you open your hands a little more. You don't want to do that. You want to open your hands a lot.  I come out now? I can see it, man. I've been trying to hang out with this guy for a year. I'm healing. You're breathing too much. You want the quantum blast? What are you doing? What's up, guys? Welcome to the Creator Clash Open Workout. Forgot to... Guys, we're here. Creator Clash 2. You know? Here, I'll get that for you. Yeah, you're fine. Okay. Some guys just like laying down in there. Why are you looking back? It's all right. Give me this. Hey, watch your head. You don't want to get a concussion at the boxing gym. Wade is going to be joining us here. What's going on, guys? The boxing guy? You know what I mean? I am the boxing guy. He's the boxing guy. I am the boxing guy. Why don't you check out some of the boxing guys? Let's go do it. Let's do it, man. Is everybody in here working out? Working out cameras? Game plans, you know? Yeah. You guys are streaming now, right? Yeah.  Got a little bit of Joe dirt going on. Yeah, he kind of looks like Rambo with a mustache. I'm digging this. People are just getting warmed up. There's going to be an open workout. We're going to see everybody here. They wanted me and Wade to show up, because we have a lot of boxing expertise. You said, we? Yeah, we.  For me, I think there does need to be a little bit of saying how great I am at all sports, but specifically boxing. And we're going to coach them up a little bit today. We're going to critique them. I just want to make sure you said, you're going to coach them up. Yes. I can coach you, coach them. Okay. I'm also very good at coaching. Yeah, okay. So not only am I good at boxing, I'm good at coaching, so, like, I can coach coaches. Wow. You jump in there and help him. Yeah. Throw a jab. Simple. More weight, more power. More weight, more power. Yeah, go. More weight, more power. That's good. I saw you open your hands a little bit, because what happens is, I see what you're seeing. Because if you close your hands, then all the force stays inside. It's like a curve. But if you open your hands, it's like you're shooting from your palms. Boom. When you have gloves on, you can't do that, but the power comes back. You go out. It comes back, and then it shoots out like this. I broke my thumb because I'm not good at boxing. I'm not good at boxing. I'm not good at boxing. I'm not good at boxing. I'm not good at boxing. I'm not good at boxing. I was hitting a boxing bag, and I didn't have my hands open enough. If I had my hands more open, I wouldn't have broken my fingers. If the gloves on, it bounces back. If the gloves on, it bounces back. So more power. First law, physics, is force can be neither created nor destroyed. And that was Benjamin Franklin, who said that. What do you think Benjamin Franklin would think of this? That's power. And just a simple sprinkle of coaching, might up to become a killing machine. My methods are unorthodox, but my results are inarguable. One word to describe it, for sure. Oh wait, is this live? Can I come on now? Let me show you. Okay. All wrong. I stopped watching, I was just so, I couldn't watch anymore, I got disgusted. Yes sir. You need much more movement. Yes sir. Speed.  He's expecting to be able to hit them. Where does all movement start from? Feet. The feet. So when you're boxing, you do a lot of this. Right? Yeah. Chop your feet. You're right. That actually looks better. Try to aim. Left. Go left. Let's go to the left. This is the right. Punch. Punch. Punch better. If you go in there, I'm exhausted right now. I don't know if I can do that. But you do that every day. I'm exhausted. 20 minutes a day. You'll have the best cardio, highest speed. He will not see it coming. That's true. I will have the best cardio. You should be training people. I know it's because I'm too expensive. Solid work. Right now, I think there's a lot of room to grow. I have a program that if you would like to purchase, there's 17 payments of $89.99. They're TikToks, actually. Each one. That's the program. I start Sabrina, and she's one of the few people that naturally has, like, really high volume. Like, and she'll... Too loud? I know a guy with a tech tone who's like that. Many punches. Quantity. Yeah. It's a lot. You could say that. You could say that. That's what I like. It's scary.  Hey, how do you feel about items calling you scary?  Sounds about right.  Wait, you made him bleed? Yes. Really? Get away. It's a lot. Hey, the most important thing that you could possibly do in the sparring session, she's wearing the jeans. I was actually going to say the same thing. How's it going, dude? How's it going? Good to see you, dude. Do you know Mr. Beast's shirt? No, no, it's a... It's a cup from the bathroom in the 90s. That's right. It looks like something Mr. Beast's shirt. Hi, Chad. How are you guys doing? Did you guys see people punch each other? Was it fun? Like, three people died. It was great. Really? Yeah. Sick! Good to see you guys here as well. Dad is always here. Dad is always here. We're trying to hang out with this guy for a year. I know, I know, I know. April 16th. The day after the fight, I'm going to Texas. I'm coming over your house. Okay, do it. Yeah, but seriously, the day after, we'll go to Texas. The sparring. Danny sent me a message, too. Yeah, I was talking to him. We're going to hang. Yeah, I was talking to him. I said we should all hang out. I'll see you get wailed on. Well, I'm just going to show myth how to absorb the blow. I didn't bring my coach, so S-Fan is filling in for my coach. You want to hit on somebody? You want to say boom? You want to come inside? I said boom. Yes, boom, come inside. Okay, I have to pretend. Boom, come inside. Yes. Boom, come inside. Boom, come inside. Boom, right. Come inside. No, no, no. No. You want to, no. Boom. Boom, come inside. At the same time. No. No? No, no. You didn't say boom. Oh, sorry. Ready? Boom. No. As it comes out. Yes, yes. Okay. No, here's the thing. Okay. You're breathing too much. Yes. Hold your breath. Whenever you punch. Hold it. It's like a balloon. If you take a balloon and you let the air out, what happens? It deflates. Keep that air locked up and you're nice and tight. That way you have more force. That's not correct at all. Ready? You want the quantum blast? Need to work on your head movement. The only movement I need is straight for the cemetery where AB is going to be burying. You need to work on your head movement. All right. And conditioning. Throw more punches. Yes. Like that. Did I do it? Oh, I stopped. You're not supposed to stop. That's good. Some good work. It's good to see you again. Good to see you too. What's the big difference going from boxing the creator clash last year versus now? I know what to expect. There were little things I didn't even think about, like how I feel walking out. Like taxes? Yeah. Have you been training getting hit in the face specifically? I would say specifically, but... But you're going to start just working on getting hit in the face. Right. That's good. That would be my biggest point of advice, is always just practice getting hit in the face so much that your face goes numb and then you feel no pain. That's pretty smart. Yeah. So that's what I want to leave you with. Okay. Okay. Congratulations. Thank you. For learning something today. Very good. All right. Thanks, Haley. She learned a lot today. Dude, look. He hit me so hard, it's still moving. The heck? Where can I get one of those bags? Where can you get one of those bags? These are custom made. I got a doctor. It's Mika, right? Yeah. All right, good. I was like, Mika, I was like... I sensed a presence behind me. Oh, that is usually...  Those are really? Yeah. That makes me want to get a lot more mass just so I can command the room by walking into it. Yeah, you walk in and it's called the commanding presence. So if people are very small and frail, then they walk into a room and you want another there. Wow. Yeah, that's true. So what is the biggest thing that you've learned? What is the biggest thing you've learned since you started training? I have learned how to make segues better than you just did. I wasn't a segue. What you were supposed to say is the thing that I just taught you. To be a commanding presence when I walk into a room with like the muscles I've built, I also have to learn how to hit friends. So I'm fighting... I think my match is the only match where we're actually friends, like close friends. Yeah. Because Alana and I... You were. No, we still are. I'm just hoping I look good enough when I hit the ring that Alana will want to kiss me instead of punch me. So... That's not what she said. What did she say?  She was... she had some wars for you. I bet she did. That was bad. She was saying... That's what I love about her. Yeah, Alana was like, she doesn't stand a chance.  That's what I meant to. Yeah. She said I'm gonna show her who her daddy is. And I'm like, okay, cool. She already knows she's my daddy, though. Oh, okay. So... Well, then there you go. Yeah. Who are you fighting? I'm fighting my own demons. What is your least favorite thing about Alana? My least favorite thing about Alana is that she is in a relationship with someone else that's not me. Okay. So... Yeah, this is a boxing match. Yeah. You don't know where to go with this, do you? No, no, no. I don't know where to go with this. Alana and I was there after our match. That was our public thing on Twitter. So what if... what if it's a tie? If it's a tie? Then nobody can cuddle anybody? I hope it's not a tie. So if it's a tie, then you both lose? Yeah. If it's a tie, then I can't cuddle Alana. Yeah. And then what's the point? I have to beat Alana. I have to beat Alana so I can wrap my arms around her and watch the VOD together in our hotel room in Tampa. Wait, it's in Tampa? Yeah. Frick. What have you been saying? I was thinking it's in Florida. Oh, my God. You were good. I don't feel very good. Is Dr. Mike around? You might need to ride to the hospital, because... No, we don't talk about that, guys. These pythons are pretty safe. Okay. Thanks for watching. Check out the Creator Clash. It's happening April 4th, 15th. April 15th. April 15th. But stuff's going to be happening all around it. It's going to be happening all around. We're going to have all sorts of vendors handing out snacks all over Tampa. And shawarma as well. They're going to be in unmarked vehicles giving out candy to people. CreatorClash.com. The Creator Clash.com. We'll see you guys later. Bye.


Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Senior Vice President of Strategy at Rackspace, Jim Curry. Hey. So I'm really excited. I'm going to do a quick intro of a couple of people. We've got a topic we want to talk about that we have been investing heavily in since we got OpenStack started in 2010. Both training, helping people learn about OpenStack, helping people get involved with the community, helping them learn how to deploy it and use it. And we're going to have Tony Campbell, who runs our training program and has been working in this area since the very beginning, come talk about some of the stuff we're doing in training and trying to help get the community up and running, not just here in Hong Kong but around the world. And I'm also excited to have Jonathan Prue, who is a Senior Technical Architect for MIT's Computer Science and AI Laboratory in the United States. He's a very smart guy. He's going to talk a lot about what they're doing with OpenStack and what they've been doing at MIT. He's also a great community member. He's a role model for what we like to have within the OpenStack community. He actually contributes heavily back to the documentation and in fact was one of the co-authors of the OpenStack Operations Guide and puts a lot of time and contributing back in that way. So without saying a lot more, I'd like to invite Jonathan to the stage to talk about what they're doing with OpenStack at MIT. So Jonathan. Thanks, Jim, for that wonderful introduction. I'm Jonathan Prue, Senior Technical Architect with MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. And I do have slides. Good. We're one of the largest independent research lab within MIT. We have a lot of people doing a lot of different things and that's where we differ from a lot of the people you hear about at the other talks here today. We have a lot of people doing a very wide variety of things and we need to be able to change what we're doing very quickly to meet our research needs. So the size of our deployment is nothing like what you're getting from folks like Rackspace and CERN. We have one really dense rack, 768 physical cores and our initial deployment strategy was to get a cloud on this as quickly as we possibly could. We had researchers coming up on a deadline who needed a thousand virtual systems in order to test their research. We took Ubuntu and Puppet, which we use internally for our other systems and we were able to turn around a deployment on this hardware in about a week using the community-supported Puppet modules and mostly the default configurations that you see in the documentation. We varied a little bit from that using Nova Networking HA multi-node setup. This was in July of 2012. Just over the summer we moved to Grizzly and went to Neutron Networking. We did a very big rework of how we were doing networking behind this hardware so that the VMs were plugging directly into existing VLANs in our data centers. This is going to help us migrate some of our legacy workloads. We're looking forward to Vana. Since people are relying on the system much more heavily, we're going to have to delay that until the end of term, which is December when utilization is a little bit less than it is right now. Oh, forward, please. I'm going to talk mostly about what our users are doing on this hardware. If you want to know how we set it up and why we made the choices we did, I'd be happy to talk to you afterwards. As you can see, even without very much internal advertising of this resource, we have 38 different projects set up on this with 114 different users. It may actually be more than that since once the projects are set up, the primary investigators can have more people join without any intervention by myself or my team. We've run a lot of hours on this, and I picked just six of these research projects to focus on based on who used the most in the month before this talk. So the Alpha Group was the first group that we had on the cloud. They are the ones who had the immediate need, and they had been using public cloud resources, but they needed to do a lot more than they had funding for, and they also liked to turn around their VMs on a very short cycle, much less than an hour. So for public clouds that bill one hour minimums, that was really something that they couldn't do. They're working mostly on machine learning and knowledge frameworks. All these slides have URLs at the bottom if you want the really deep research details on what these folks are doing. The Text Retrieval Conference is knowledge-based acceleration competition, is another one of our big users. They tend to run more steady state than the Alpha Group does, so they have a number of VMs that are running more or less continuously. MIT's team is the organizing team for the competition. There's a number of different groups across various universities. I believe they're all in the US, but I'm not certain of that. They have a large content stream of texts that they need to go through and apply their learning algorithms to, and they generate a knowledge base, which is something like Wikipedia. So they have a big stream, and they need to process that into something meaningful as output. Ubic is a new research project that has been accepted for publication, but isn't quite out yet, so if you want to watch Daniel Sanchez, who is the primary investigator on this, he has a website there for when it does come out. It's a hardware and software system that is dedicated to working on the problem of systems in the cloud that have high latency sensitivity, working alongside systems that are more throughput based and are not as sensitive to short-term fluctuations. So this is something that will make all of our lives easier once it actually is proven and worked out into a more production rather than research world. We can run interactive systems alongside batch processing systems and have them do the right thing on their own. Our network and mobile systems group has a few different things that are going on in the cloud. They're doing machine learning algorithms and student congestion control algorithms based on corpuses of mobile network data that they're trying to improve how our mobile networks for our phones and things work. One of the future ideas that I've been talking to them about is research on intelligent VM placement in clouds so that machines that are talking to, virtual machines that are talking to each other can be moved closer together within the network to reduce contention within the data center. Learning intelligence systems group is another one of our research groups that's working in yet another area. They're doing artificially intelligent robots. One of the robots that they're a little bit famous for, you can find pictures of them on YouTube, is their cookie baking robot. The researchers in this group are working on object recognition systems so that vision systems like what's in this robot or what might be in other applications can identify the object that they're looking for. So they have a number of systems that sit in our cloud and run different recognition algorithms against the visual data from the robot. Julia is a programming language that was developed in my lab at MIT. It's a very high level language with explicit parallelism so it can run across multiple cores on a single node or across multiple nodes in a cluster. It's now an MIT licensed community project that you can install on your favorite operating system. The group that developed that is serving an iJulia cluster on our cloud. So they have a number of front-end systems and a number of worker nodes behind that. And students are using this for a number of mathematics courses at MIT now. And this is why I have to wait until I end the term before I can go to Havana. So we have a number of areas of future work that we're looking into. Since we have this cloud platform that we own, we have the hardware in-house and we have complete control over that. We're able to use the infrastructure as our research platform. So groups like our networking systems who want to look at scheduling and traffic flows underneath that cloud have something to work with. And one of our challenges is trying to provide a stable cloud environment for people who are working on top of the cloud, within the cloud, as well as providing researchers access to the underlying systems and using things like host aggregates or availability zones to provide sandboxes for them to actually start working on these lower-level components and thinking about how those can be improved. We're also moving in some of our internet-facing applications and consolidating our legacy virtualization environments onto the cloud, which is, you know, more of a standard thing that people do. It's not very exciting, but over the past year we've seen that in addition to being a very exciting research platform that lets us rapidly adapt to the changing needs of our researchers, it's been a very stable platform, so we're able to bring in our production workloads and deprecate these older virtualization systems so that we don't need to support so many different environments. We have a number of researchers who are not able to make use of virtual systems because they need access to the very low-level registers for the actual real hardware. We have a large computer architecture department who are working with hardware. They want hardware. GPUs are another area that our researchers have some needs for which aren't really provided for in the default open-stack world, so we're looking at what people are talking about in some of the PCI pass-through or bare-metal provisioning again to provide GPUs within the cluster. We just heard a wonderful presentation about the things you can do with desktops in the cloud. Again, we don't have quite the scale, but we do have some ideas of putting these desktops into the cloud so that people can have actually more computing resources. If you have a laptop with maybe two or three cores, two or four cores, we can provide 12 or 24 core workstations within our cloud that will put a lot more computing power behind the students' resources. One of the more interesting things is one cloud per student which will be able to provide quota sets for individuals that aren't tied to any specific research goal. In research and in any type of development environment, providing an area for people to play around that has relatively few risks. It's just their own sandbox. You can get some really amazing creative ideas out of that. Being able to provide just this blue sky green field environment to our students to just do whatever they want and see what comes out of that is definitely one of the things that I'm looking forward to seeing. That's what we're doing at MIT these days. A little bit about where we're thinking about going. I'd be happy to talk to anyone afterwards about the deeper details. This is a pretty high level. I think we're going to bring up Tony now to talk about what Rackspace is doing with training in the academic space and Tony. Thank you, Jonathan. All right. Really excited about what's happening at MIT. Good afternoon, everyone. Are you guys alive? Good afternoon, everyone. All right. There you are. It's good to see everybody. My name is Tony Campbell, Director of Training and Certification at Rackspace. So I've had the privilege over the last year of training people all over the world, including a group of students at MIT. At MIT last January in their IAP, that's Independent Activities Program, we were able to go out to MIT and train up to 50 students on OpenStack. We introduced those students to this awesome technology that this community is building. And I'm really excited about the things that they are using OpenStack to do. How about it for that cake-making robot? I hear there's another robot that makes coffee. So there's some real cool things happening. But in addition to that, it's awesome just to see the impact that OpenStack is having all around the world. OpenStack is enabling academic research. Now through OpenStack, we're driving efficiency in research labs all over the world. OpenStack provides a low-cost performance compute resources that these schools and universities and research labs can use to extend their research capabilities. We are equipping computer science engineers with free and open cloud operating systems. That is all work that this community is doing. And I think for that, we ought to give ourselves a round of applause. So how do we accelerate this? How do we get more universities using OpenStack to do their research? How do we get more students introduced and involved in OpenStack? Well, that's one of the things that RackSpace is really trying to help out with and be a leader in the community in this area. One of the things that we've introduced over the last year is what we call the RackSpace Academic Seminar for OpenStack. What we will do is we will bring our training team out to any university that qualifies, and for that university, at no charge, we deliver a four-night seminar. During that seminar, students are able to get access to our master instructors, and those instructors are able to teach them about OpenStack everywhere from installation to operations to architecture. We talk about the flow through networking, how to spin up VMs, spin them down, attach storage, everything you need to know to leverage the OpenStack platform. We're able to introduce students to this new and exciting technology. So it's a four-day seminar. It's on campus, so we bring the seminar to the student's location. We're on campus for four nights, three hours per night, and we give exposure to all the different OpenStack projects. The first one was at MIT. Right now, as we speak, we're at a university in Texas back in the United States, and there's several more universities that we'll be visiting this year. If this is something that you are interested in, stay tuned. I'll have a link for you where you can also sign up. Some of the other universities that we've been to include University of Carnot Word, Oregon State University. We've also gone out and done training in Australia for the Nectar Project, and our hometown university in San Antonio, Texas, the University of Texas at San Antonio. So for those of you that want to join us in this mission or who may want to take an opportunity to have the Rackspace Training Team come out and provide the seminar at your university or research lab, you can do one of the following things. You can join the OpenStack community high-performance computing lists, high-performance computing mailing lists for more information about HPC in the community. We also have an OpenStack academic initiative. It's been kind of quiet lately, but we like to see that pick up again, so we encourage everybody to join that list and join that group and begin to participate there. And then finally, if you want to bring Rackspace out to do an academic seminar at your university, you can look us up at training.rackspace.com slash academia. In addition to our academic seminar, we have several classes that are designed to get you up to speed on OpenStack quickly. We have an OpenStack Fundamentals course. We have a Neutron Networking course and a Hadoop on OpenStack course, and also a Building Cloudy Apps course. We're also pleased to let you know that we are beginning an on-demand training program. For those who may not be able to travel to one of our courses, you will be able to take our courses on demand in the comfort of your own living room. If you're interested in any of that, you can find information at training.rackspace.com, or come see us at our booth over in the Expo Center. We're real excited about what's happening in OpenStack, in particular in the academic community. We really believe in OpenStack and the magic of this community and everything that is coming forth from it. We encourage you to get students, if you know students, our faculty members, our researchers who are not already using OpenStack, tell them about what we're doing, point them to the website, and let's come together and change the world. Thank you very much.


My work here on YouTube is supported by viewers. Please take a look at the link in the description below and visit my page at 50th Street where you can become a sponsor. Here I am again making an individual book review. This time because I've encountered one of the most exciting unexpected finds that's come across my desk in a long time. I've mentioned the name Connie Willis a number of times because I keep seeing her name and to date I had never read any of her books. Well, I found this copy of All About Emily at a library sale. It is a 96-page novella and it is one of the most exciting things I have read in a very long time. It's very unusual for me to find a book that leaves me thinking about it and waiting to get home so I can pick it up and keep reading it. Everybody who enjoys reading understands that feeling. Anyway, this is an interesting little science fiction piece set in the near future. Starring an aging Broadway actress who finds herself face-to-face with the threat of artificial intelligence, the threat specifically being the threat of taking people's jobs away from them, and it is happening from a direction that nobody expected. And yes, as the title implies, it is a parallel to the 1950 Betty Davis movie All About Eve. The only thing more I will say about it is that the writing is amazing. The dialogue, especially, is gripping and a hundred percent believable, and apparently Connie Willis has a tradition of writing a Christmas story every year, and this is one, and it has an appropriate ending for a traditional Christmas story, and I loved it start to finish and I give it my highest recommendation. Thank you for watching. Please subscribe to my channel here on YouTube and please be sure to press that thumbs up button. That's how videos get recommended and seen, and please take a look at the link in the description below and go to my 50th Street page where you can become a sponsor.


Live from the Congress Center in London, England, it's theCUBE at MIT and the Digital Economy, the second machine age. Brought to you by headline sponsor, MIT. Welcome back to London, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE, and we're here covering MIT's initiative on the digital economy. Roberto Rigabon is here. Roberto, welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you. Thank you so much for inviting me. So tell us about the billion prices project. What is that all about? So several years ago, I would say actually nine years ago, a student of mine, Alberto Cavallo, decided that he wanted to try to compute alternative measures of inflation rate. And he was motivated because in Argentina, he's from Argentina, he was motivated because in Argentina they intervene in the statistical office and they were lying about inflation rate. So he wanted to construct the truthful inflation rate, in fact. So he started with food and things like that. And then I realized the tremendous potential of just taking that to all the sectors, not only food, and we started working together. And right now, we download from more than 70 countries worldwide. We download on almost every sector information from the web on service prices and stores as well. I mean, stores are the easy ones. Getting the price of a taxi in London is a little bit harder. What we do is we have to make reservations every day from the airport to the hotel and they tell you the price of taxes. So you have to be kind of creative about how to get the data. But then you have to collect everything. So is a robot doing that? No, no, no. A person cannot do that because you have far too many cities in the world to actually do that. No, so it's actually a robot. Make sure you cancel those reservations, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do it. Actually, we ask for a quote, not a reservation. Ah, that's right. It's a quote. Okay, good. So we ask for the quote. It is perfectly fine.  It's not a sampling of data points as we talked about offline. You know, big data, we talk about Hadoop, sampling is dead, and you've gone right to the heart of it. So what does the data show? So, I mean, they're very surprising in some countries, for example, the inflation rate that we compute online is very similar to the one that is computed by the statistical office. Which countries do a good job? I would say that all developed nations do a very, very good job. So the numbers are not identical, and the numbers will never be identical month by month. Sure, right. And the reason is that the online business just moves faster than the offline business. Imagine in Italy, if you want to increase the price of pasta, well, you increase first to the online users because, you know, they're probably richer, they don't care about the price, they have no memory, but you will not increase the price of pasta in the streets and expect it not to be burned in the store, no? So imagine increasing the price of bread in France. It will be there. So they don't increase the price of bread, they just make the bread smaller, and that's my version of how the croissant was invented, no? It used to be this size. We just put it that way. So, indeed, they move at different periods, but when you look at the year-on-year, for example, in the United States, I get a little bit more inflation than the BLS, and I would say that this is on the .02, .03 percent. So it's nothing. The numbers are very small. In Japan, I always get a little bit less, and that would be about 10 basis points less than the official data, but that's the order of discrepancy. Now, when you go to emerging markets, for example, in Brazil, our inflation rate is 2 percent bigger than the official one. So their official one will be, let's say, 6.5 or 7. The one that we will compute will be at least 2 percent more than that, on average. And it's not because we have price controls or not. We collect the prices from the items that have price controls. I just collect way more items. What happens in the statistical office is that they put too much weight on the products that have control prices. By construction, you have a lot of items that the prices are flat. And then Argentina, our inflation rate will be three times the official one, not 3 percent. So if they say 8, we will get 24. Okay, so in the former example, the developed nations, it's more of a timing issue, maybe. But in the less developed nations, you're saying that it's essentially the government's hiding the ball. Is that right? Well, in some sense, when in some sense it's a statistical capacity, it's how much can you do? I mean, the poorer the country, the less resources the statistical office has. So it's a flawed measurement system? It's a flawed measurement system because of resources, some of them. In other countries, it's just manipulation. So, yeah. If your country's name, Argentina, Russia, Venezuela, they are just manipulating the data. So the other ones might be... So they don't like you very much. I would imagine that. Yeah, no, they don't. What's been the reaction through your project in the data? Well, so what is interesting is, for example, in developed nations, like a country like Australia, where they produce the inflation rate only once every quarter, actually our data has been very well received by the central bank, by the statistical office, by everybody in the sense that we are actually complemented. And for example, Australia is one of our earliest countries. We have this data from 2008 and it's just remarkably close to the statistical office. So in that sense they use it very actively, as a measurement of daily inflation rate. So in developed nations it has been very well received and in countries like Brazil it's well received, they just disregard it and say, that's the inflation rate online. I said, yeah, yours is inflation rate offline. It's not clear which one is better. Well, the academics in Brazil must appreciate that. Yeah, so that is very well received. But it's interesting, central banks like the Chilean central bank really appreciates the data because it gives them a very early signal.  So as a central banker when I can see this very fast shift in the online inflation rate and I can infer from that what is going to happen in the economy is actually very valuable. So central banks are using your data to make decisions. And I imagine some private sector and financial system also uses the data because of the same reason. Yeah, I was curious, do you know are there businesses or traders that are watching what you're doing and being able to take advantage of those opportunities? I hope they are. In some sense what we do is we distribute this, a big part of our research is about three years ago we did a spin-off. This was incredibly expensive to do with resources from MIT which, by the way, this was created entirely with resources from MIT. So we did a spin-off and now we actually distribute this through a bank, a state street bank and we distribute the index. So I really hope that somebody's using it. So how do you distribute? You have an API into the data set? No, actually because I'm not very good at selling so we just have an agreement where they distribute and they are the ones that sell. I just give the index to them and then they are the ones that distribute. They have a research webpage and what we do is to what is publicly available is the inflation rate of Argentina and the U.S. that is entirely publicly available so you can go to Alberto's or my webpage and you can see the inflation rate of these two countries. But except for those two the rest are distributed through the state street bank. For pay? And I think it's for free. But then state street bank is funding essentially? Yeah, state street bank is actually funding a big part of what we do.  Can you speak to we were talking a little bit before off camera just the growth of this and how much resources I mean you said you named it a billion prices before it was a billion and now it's over a billion prices a day. Yeah, so indeed when we started my goal was to actually try to get one billion prices in a quarter and remember I'm collecting every day so this is totally cheating, no?  So I wanted a billion in a quarter and today we have the ability to download way more than a billion in a day. So I mean we don't because we don't want to. I mean there are certain items that you don't need to download all the items like books for example. If you go to Amazon.com for example they will have about 17 different million books sold on that particular day. So now how many of them do you really need to compute the inflation rate of books? Probably 500. I mean you need a very small sample of books which are the hot books. Everything else is sold once a month or once a week so you don't need the prices. So even though we have the ability to download now what we do is we restrict ourselves we know that we don't need all 17 million to compute the inflation rate of books so we don't need to go all that way. So in this process we have learned that you don't always need all the data. Now in some sectors you need electronics. Electronics you need all the data otherwise you will make humongous mistakes because I need the new iPhone to be in the data and the old iPhone to be in the data to be able to compute an index. Oh we're getting the high sign but we have to talk about 1000 Big Macs before we go. Our new index what we have done is borrowing from the economics idea of the Big Mac the beautiful idea is that you get the exact same item to compare across nations and we said well in our data we actually have a lot of items that are identical worldwide I mean I have Sarah's data so I have the same t-shirt and H&M the same t-shirt Nike the same shoes and so what we did was to create this index that compares identical items worldwide and it's a thousands of them and I call it a 1000 Big Macs project because it's in that spirit and the beauty is that this is more or less tells me how expensive the tradable products are in my particular country and when you think about it all the tradable products are online food is online electronics are online clothing online cosmetics are online I mean everything except cars you can find it online and therefore what we can do is we have a massive set of the basket and we compare it so we've detect what I call macro-economic imbalances so when Brazil becomes more expensive on everything gasoline, food, electronics when it's too expensive something has to happen to the exchange rate and in fact we are actually finding in our research that nine months down the road when we find these signals nine months down the road they tend to depreciate they take action oh yeah so for example right now in England there's a lot of questions about what is going to happen to the pound dollar rate there's a lot of political volatility yeah what's happening with the sterling well actually I think in the sterling for example in our data looks that is right about the equilibrium that there's no trend so there's going to be a lot of noise due to politics but I don't think that the trend will drive in too far from the 150 and so it is it's in our data roots exactly where it should be in other words I and in England versus the US we have thousands and thousands and thousands of items is that okay it's reaching a big number when I look at all of them and I ask who is too expensive and who is too cheap the proportion is very small between England this actually the data is from yesterday okay so it's balanced you would predict stability well I mean volatility due to politics but there's no trend in that sense so that is mostly noise yeah you can normalize that line over time exactly you can normalize exactly that's the way we did it so it's kind of very interesting and anyway I'm very excited about this and this is the first time we're going to present that research we're really excited to hear this your conversation this afternoon we'll be broadcasting it live so Roberto thanks very much for coming on the tube no thank you thank you for having me congratulations on the research and appreciate your sharing oh no thank you thank you guys for having me alright keep it right there we'll be back with our next guest right after this we're live from London this is MIT IDE this is the cube we'll be right back


Okay, welcome back after the break. I just have one request. I'm supposed to be recording these classes. You know, sometimes we are, we have so many things now with the camera, with the microphone, with the audio, everything. So in case we forget or miss to record, then we'll have to do another whole session. Again, just, I guess it happened. So it will be nice if you can just remind us, you know, when we begin class recording. So I recorded it, but just in case, you know, it'll be good if you can help the faculty in just reminding them to record it. When we start class, even after break, every class when you begin, like my first class on Wednesday, I had completely forgotten to record my, the class for the third years. And thankfully, there was an online student who said you've not recorded and I just was beginning to teach the class after all the initial introduction. So this is grace of God. Okay, the grace and mercy of God in our own weaknesses and our frailties. Okay, so we are on page number five in fulfilling God's purpose for our life. And we looked at second Timothy chapter one, verse nine. Okay. And we see here that God has called us according to his own purpose. And we are called to partner with God in fulfilling his plan and his purpose for our lives. Isn't that wonderful? You know, we are called to partner with God, partnering with his great, mighty, awesome God. So we're called to partner with God. And we're not living our own purposes, but we are living out his higher and his greater plan and purpose for our life. Okay, now, when God gives us reveals his will plan and purpose, it's not something he'll just say, okay, take this is my plan for the season, do it. It's not that. Okay. He's such a loving God and a gracious and a compassionate and a merciful God that he also gives us the grace that we need to fulfill his purpose. He comes, he's given us the Holy Spirit, the Greek word for Holy Spirit is paraquely tossed, which means somebody who comes alongside us. Okay, so the Holy Spirit is somebody who comes alongside us and he's there to counsel, aid, support, guide, teach, equip. So somebody who comes alongside us. Okay, so when God gives us reveals his plan and his purpose for our life, he also gives us the grace to fulfill it, fulfill it, which means he gives us the divine empowerment, the power we need, the skills we need, the abilities we need. And he accompanies us in his divine calling. They're not alone. Okay, he comes along with us, he aids us, he gives us. And just as an example, you know, when God called me to full time ministry, again, I wanted to work with drug addicts and alcoholics to something that I wanted to work. So I stayed in Kolkata for seven, seven months, worked with street children. I mean, I didn't work with street children, but I wanted to work with drug addicts and alcoholics as writing my PCs in Bible college on drug addiction. But you know, God has different plans and purposes for our lives. I went to minister to the drug addicts and alcoholics. And of course, I did that. But then I stayed with children who they picked up on how our platform also ministered to street children, ministered to children of commercial sex workers, to their children as well. So I just saw God even in Bible college, you know, when I wanted to do, we were put into different ministry teams. I was again with children ministry. And after Bible college, I wanted to go back to this organization in Kolkata. And I wanted to continue ministering with addicts because there was no one working full, no one available to work full time with women addicts, residential women addicts would come, they didn't have homes because they did not have anyone full time. So the boss told me, you know, I was there for internship.  But when I went there and I was ready, he just looked at me and I know it's just God speaking to me. He said, I think you're very tired. You need to go back home, take a break and come back. And I didn't go back because God had different plans and purposes. He wanted me to work among children. And you know, when I started way in 2000, that's when I finished my Bible college and started ministry. In 2000, there was not much of children's ministry and material and everything that was available. But I know that, you know, I'm not a very creative person, but we have a creative God who gives us his creativity, who gives us his talents and the abilities. And every time I had to do something, I would receive a download, no download from heaven and say, God, what do I name this project? It'll be a download. What do I do for the, for VBS, for kids conference? There'll be a download. What do I write in this curriculum? There'll be a download. You know, so it's just my experience that when God calls us to a specific task, we might not be skilled and trained in that area. Even in Bible college, we didn't have, we had Christian education, a very scarce kind of material, which was not very good.  He gave me the skills and the abilities. So don't be afraid when God calls you to do something or God sends you to a specific place. So when God is showing you his will, don't think about how am I going to do it? I've never done it. You know, where am I going to go? What am I going to do?  The important thing you need to do is you just first take the first step. When you take that first step, you know, he does everything that is required. You just have to follow. And of course, it's not easy. You have to work hard. You have to do things, but God gives you the grace, the strength and the enabling. Okay. And his call and his purpose is given to us in Jesus Christ. Okay. So remember that, you know, we are here to partner with God in doing that. And we can only know what God's will and plan and purpose for our life is when we align our will, when we position our will and partner with God in carrying out his purposes.  Some of us here are figuring out, sorry, some of us are figuring out what we need to do with our lives, but God is not. Okay. He's already figured it out. He's already planned it out even before time began. Okay. And God is fulfilling his plan and purpose in your life. Okay. So let's move on. God's plan for our life is good. How do we know that Jeremiah chapter 29 verse 11, can one of you please read that? Can one of the men read it? Jeremiah 29, 11. Thank you. So here we know that God's plan for us is not something that is bad or evil, but it's a plan that gives us hope and a future. So don't be scared. God's plan for your life is, is, can everyone say good? Good. Okay. It will take you to the best places, the better places than where you are now. Okay. And we also see that his thoughts towards us is peace. Now, here is just peace. But if you look at it in the Hebrew word, the Hebrew word for peace is shalom. And shalom is not just peace, but it's a very holistic word. It's a very comprehensive word, which means well-being, prosperity. It means health. It means protection from every kind of harm and danger. It means preservation. So all of this is in that word shalom. So shalom means peace, well-being, wholeness, prosperity, good health, preservation from harm and danger, protection from every work of the enemy. That is the meaning of the word shalom.  Okay. Let's look at Romans chapter eight, verse 28. Can somebody read that please? Thank you. So all things work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose. So there's nothing better in your life than following and pursuing God's plan and purpose for your life. Okay. And so we know that God is for us. He's not against us. His plans and purpose for us is good. And it is shalom. His thoughts towards us. And there's nothing better than pursuing God's plan for your life. So God has a plan and purpose for our life, but we need to partner with him. We need to cooperate with him in fulfilling his plan and purpose for our lives. Okay. Yes, there are some people who have never even got into God's plan and purpose for their life. Why? Because they are pursuing their own plan and purpose. Okay. There are some people who have asked God for his will, for his plan and purpose. They know it. They have begun with it, but half somewhere in between because of the troubles and the difficulties they have given up. But there are some people who have taken hold of God's plan and purpose for their life and they have run through with it till the very end. Okay. So yesterday, we looked at the life of two of God's generals, and we saw that both of them, they had God's, they knew God's calling over their life's plan and purpose, but did they pursue it? No. For the first few years of their life, they did not pursue it. They went through a lot of difficulties and hardships, and they came to a place where they said, we better pursue God's will and plan for our lives. Okay. And they ran with it. But then we saw William Brentham in the end, what did he do? You know, he fell out of God's plan and purpose for his life, and we saw how his life was so messed up. Okay. So, you know, it says here that we need to cooperate with God in fulfilling his plan and purpose. Corporate means not just saying, okay, God, I'll do your will and plan and purpose and just sit down. You know, it doesn't happen automatically. We need to work hard. Right. Fulfilling God's plan and purpose for our life is easy to receive because it's not mysterious, but it is something that we need to work hard. Okay. And we see a apostle Paul, an example. Right. He was a very educated man. He studied one of the best scholars in this time. One of the best teachers, Gamaliel, he studied. He was so scholarly in his Old Testament, the Old Testament, and he was so learned. He was so brilliant. We see that in his writings. But we know that life was not easy for him. Right. We read in 1 Corinthians all of the difficulties in one of the chapters, he's listed it out.  So an apostle Paul, who was such a great missionary and a great apostle, he faced so much of difficulties in life. And so also we see the other apostles, Stephen and Peter and all of the other apostles. We even see Jesus. Right. Was it easy for Jesus to fulfill his mission here on earth? No, it wasn't easy. It was very difficult. Every time he had people coming in the crowd, trying to find fault with them, trying to see how they can catch him and, you know, pin him down. Okay. And he knew about it. So life is not going to be easy in fulfilling God's plan and purpose for our lives. We need to endure. We need to run through with it. And we need to work hard. Okay. And that is what Paul says, you know, he says, I finished the race. I've run my race and I finished the race. And we need to also be able to say that in our own lives. Okay. God has already a blueprint for our life, which is planned even before the foundations of the world. But he's looking for you and I to bring it about here on or to execute it here on earth. And that is why he created us. That is why he created Adam and Eve as well. Okay. So we must discover and pursue. Pursue means what? What does it mean that we must discover? What does it mean discover God's plan? We need to find our God's plan. And what does it mean to pursue God's plan? I like that word actively go ahead with, you know, doing God's plan and purpose for your life. Okay. So is God willing to reveal his will to you? Yes. Ask and you shall receive. Okay. Yes. He's willing to reveal to all those who seek him. Okay. So you might be wondering and saying, I'm not hearing God's will. Ask him. Okay. And keep pursuing that and he will reveal it. Now, in this book, we are going to look at this nine guide posts. Okay. Or nine ways we can discern God's plan, his will for our lives. Okay. The first thing is recognizing it's on page number seven in the book in the PDF copy. The first one is recognize the general teaching and instruction of God's word. The second one is recognize the seeds in your life. The third one is recognize the steering within. The fourth is recognize the grace of God given to you. The fifth one is recognize the circumstances. Sixth one is recognize the leading of God's spirit. Seventh is recognize Godly counsel and wisdom. Eighth is recognize the times and seasons. The ninth one is recognize God's pattern of working in your life. Okay. I'm not going to be explaining each one in detail because we will be looking at each one of it in detail, but we just listed it out here. Okay. Just a few more points in this chapter. God will prepare us to fulfill his plan and his purpose. And how long does God take us to prepare for his will to be done in our lives? How long? Anyone of our online students would like to answer that question. How long does God take to prepare us for his plan and his purpose in our life? Okay. Viku says it's life long. Yeah. That's true. Until you're ready and equipped. Okay. Yes. Yes. That's one way true. You know, the quicker that you are, you know, receiving or hearing from God and your build your relationship with him is the quicker the process of launching out into doing what God's plan for your life is. Like for Jesus, when did he start his earthly ministry? 30 years. How long did it take? Three years. God is not, you know, a respecter of time. He can do what was not accomplished in 10 years. He can do it in two years. And we saw that yesterday when we looked at God's general Maria Woodward Itta, we saw that, you know, just in a couple of years, God accomplished everything which, you know, for which he had delayed God's call in her life. And we will look at some of the biblical characters later on, how long God took to actually prepare them for their calling and how he fulfilled his calling. So preparation time is not wasted time.  He's having a big church and he's having 500 members and look at me. I'm not doing anything. You know, don't compare yourself with others. Okay. You just look at the time and season you are in where God is taking you, what he's doing with your life in this time and season and be sensitive to that, follow through with that.  Remember what we said, God has places you have to go. He has lives you have to touch.  You can do that. You don't have to run ahead of him. Don't lag behind. Just stay alongside with him. You know, wait when and discern what he's asking you to do if he's getting you to be prepared, prepare yourself. He's saying launch out, launch out, do this, do this. Just do what God is saying and remember that preparation time is never wasted time. Okay. The greater the call, the greater the preparation that is needed. Right. You don't become a doctor in one year. You take four years and then you do one year of internship. So when you do earthly courses, you have such a long time to, you know, prepare. You don't go from grade one to grade 10 in one year. You have to go to grade two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and then you reach grade 10. Even if you don't like schooling, you can't go sit in grade 10 and try to finish schooling. Okay. We also, when we pursue God's call for our life, can we make mistakes? Can we face failures? Yes, we can. You know, but what do we need to do when we face failures, when we go through difficulties, when we mess up, when we make mistakes? What do we do? Yes. Repent. Okay. Do we give up on God's call? Say we're not worthy. We can't do it. We're good for nothing. We'll think about something else. No, we all make mistakes.  So as we journey in fulfilling God's plan for our lives, we will surely make mistakes. And we all have weaknesses in our lives, but if we don't conquer our weaknesses, Satan will use that against us. Okay. So the last four days you've been studying about laying the ax, the root of various things in your life. Okay. And those are weaknesses. And if you don't take the step and the measure to those things in your life, to totally shut those doors, to stop doing those things, you know, Satan can use that against you.  That means don't say, you know, I made a mistake and you like reach this end, this is the end of your life, the dead end, the wall, there's nothing more I can do. I've messed up. I can't go further. Don't say that, you know, you need to conquer your weaknesses. If you don't conquer your weaknesses, it'll become a tragedy in your life. Okay. And God is there to help us even in the greatest mistakes or failures that we make in our life. So your enemy is not outside of you, your enemy is actually inside. So who is the enemy inside? It's your own weaknesses. Remember yesterday we read James talking about temptation. What is temptation? Temptation is when you're led astray by your own desires because of your own lusts. So it's our own selfish, earthly, evil desires that lead us a way that causes us, that can be a hindrance, a weakness from pursuing God's plan for our life. So we need to overcome that. So our greatest obstacle is usually birth out of our own doing, our own desire and not Satan. Okay. Sometimes we can blame Satan. But what we need to do is, you know, we need to realize that our greatest weaknesses, our obstacles is birth out of our own wrong thinking, our own evil selfish desires. We are feeding our own sinful nature, our fleshly, carnal nature. And we are not feeding our spiritual nature. And that is what we need to do. Okay. Let's look at 2 Timothy chapter 4 verses 6 to 8. Can somebody read that please? 2 Timothy chapter 4 verses 6 to 8. Thank you. So who's writing this? And who is talking about himself here? Okay. So Paul came to, you know, he received salvation at the age of 35. Okay. So 35 years of his life was just passed in following Judaism. Okay. And now he's become a believer.  He's not going to come out free from this Roman imprisonment like he came out from the first Roman imprisonment.  And so he's saying that, you know, I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. So he started out at the age of 35. And yet he was able to do everything which he felt, you know, God had plan and purpose for him. So what do we understand from this that, you know, age is not an hindrance for God to fulfill his plan and purpose in our life. Okay. And we look at 2 Timothy chapter 1 verse 9. Can somebody read that please? 2 Timothy chapter 1 verse 9. Yeah. So here it says that we are saved according to, you know, it was Christ who saved us and we're not saved according to our own works, not because of our good works. There's nothing good in us, nothing that we do can be, we can say is good that, you know, has brought about salvation in our lives that has saved us. But, you know, we are called according to God's purpose and his grace. Okay. So what do we learn from this verse that God is not looking for perfect vessels? Okay. We don't have to be perfect in the way we speak, in the way we, you know, we feel we're not too talented, we're not too brilliant, we feel we're not too smart. You know, God is not looking for perfect vessels. He's just looking for vessels who are submitted to him, willing to obey him, vessels that are obedient to him. So God chooses us not because of our abilities, our skills, our talents, our education, the amount of gray matter that we have, you know, that we can remember things so well. God is looking for our willingness. He's looking for our availability. He's looking for how faithful we are going to be in what he has will be entrusting to us. Okay. So he's looking for submitted vessels. Okay. For people who yield themselves to him, submit in obedience. And that is what he is looking in each one of us. And whatever is lacking, his grace will be sufficient for us. His power will be made perfect in our weaknesses. His power will be able to enable us to fulfill everything he has for us. That's the read second quarantine chapter four verse seven. So what does it mean here? What does this verse mean? Treasure in earthen vessels? What is earthen vessels? When you think about earthen vessels in, you know, when we look at vessels, what is earthen vessels? The very normal perishable mundane thing is actually made up of clay. You know, mud clay, clay pots, earthen vessels. They can also be vessels of gold and silver. Okay, that we use it for very special occasions, special crockery and all of those things. But all of these earthen vessels is simple everyday use. So what is it saying there is, you know, we are like these earthen vessels. There's nothing so great about us. Okay, we are very simple, fragile, you know, made out of dust. But we have this treasure that God has put his treasure, his will, his plan and purpose in our lives. And he has given us the power to enable us to do what he wants us to do. Okay, so anytime you think that you are not fit for God's calling, remember that it's not about you, but it's about God's power that's going to be manifest in your life. Okay, so we all make mistakes in our lives. There can be failures, okay, but God can recover everything. God is greater than the time. Okay, God is greater than our mistakes that we make.  He can use it to fulfill his plan and purpose for our life. Okay, and Satan will also try to stop us from pursuing God's plan and purpose for our life. We can face demonic oppression, but you know, those delays are not from God. And an example given here is from Daniel chapter 10, verses 2 to 14. Actually, Daniel was praying and was looking for an answer from God. But as soon as he prayed, God sent forth the answer, but he received the answer after 21 days. Do you know why? Yeah, the king of Persia, which means a demonic spirits were actually stopping the angel from bringing the message to Daniel. And this angel was fighting these demonic spirits for 21 days. So when it became 21 days, then finally, the archangel Michael comes and he fights and then they're able to bring the message to Daniel and tell Daniel that, you know, the answer was delayed because not because God sent it late, but because, you know, these demonic spirits had stopped them from bringing the answer to Daniel. Okay, so Satan can stop us from fulfilling God's plan and purpose for our lives.  He attempts to weaken your desire. He attempts to weaken our drive for God. He attempts to weaken our determination from God. But what we need to do is we need to be, you know, vigilant, we need to be sharp, sensitive, and we need to understand. And then we need to, you know, fight our battle and God has given us every weapon we need to fight against the evil one. And we have the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God. So we speak the word of God, and we continue running our race. Okay, and we must remain focused to God's call. Okay, I like what Paul says, you know, I continue running my race, fixing my eyes on Jesus, the author, the protector, and the finisher of my race. Okay, so it's important that, you know, we know that the Satan can bring delays and distractions. Okay, but like for we looked at Maria Woodward yesterday, what was her distraction from pursuing God's call for her life? Her family, she actually wanted to marry a mystery, but she ended up falling in love with a soldier and marrying him and having six children. And then she found herself in just being a wife and a mother and taking care of those responsibilities. It's only when God took away, I mean, not God, but it's only when she lost her five children and she's looking for answers, she realizes it's better to come back and align herself to God's call and purpose in her life. So sometimes, you know, Satan can bring in distractions in our life, which can waste our time and energy. You know, what can be some of the distractions that Satan can bring when we are in ministry?  So you think, okay, I'll do business or I'll work in a corporate or work in the secular and also, you know, do ministry can kind of detract you and waste your time and energy. What else can be those subtle eaters of our time and energy in ministry when we're serving God to fulfill his plan and purpose? Money, okay? You can also be people, right?  Being in ministry now for the last 22 years, you know, I've had all these kind of things come in like eaters and I always tell God, God, I have no time and energy to fight people, okay? You take care of them. I'm just going to continue doing the ministry and I just leave it and I've seen how God wonderfully just, you know, removes them away or he deals with them or he handles them in his own way, okay? So we are not here to fight flesh and blood. We can't because our fight is against powers, conspiracies in the heavenly realms, okay? So people can also beat those time wasters, energy. Sometimes it can be even our parents, you know, saying, okay, this is not what you should be doing. You should be doing this, this, this, something professional in life. What is ministry going to give you? You can always be doing something secular, something and also serve God, okay? What will you get in ministry? Nothing. There's no future, okay? So you can be tracked and go away and that can be a time waster and also waste your energy, okay? So don't, you know, turn right or left. Like Paul, continue running your race with endurance, fixing your eyes on Jesus, okay? So fulfilling God's plan for our life is not a 100 meter dash, okay? It's not like, okay, I got it.   First five years, they work night and day and then the next five years, 10 years, the health is down and out and they're not able to do anything much to serve God. We need to be wise in what we can take up, what we can do. We need the discernment of God for that God to show us, okay? So it's not a 100 meter dash where you sprint fast but it's a marathon. Marathon is slow, steady, keeping that steady pace, steady speed. If you increase your speed, you'll lag behind. If you keep that constant speed and continue running your race is running with, you need to run with endurance, okay? And also knowing God's plan for your life, you also have to stick with it, okay? You need to take hold of it like Paul did, like others did and you need to continue running your race, okay? So that is chapter one. Any questions from our online students? Anything you want me to explain again online students? You've been very quiet. You can unmute your mics, you can unmute your videos so I can even see y'all and if you have any questions you'd like to ask? Good morning, can you hear me? Any of you in-person students have any questions? Oh yeah, I got it, sorry. Krisha, should we cut off from the secular things? Yeah, okay. Good question, Krisha, should we cut off from secular things? What do you think? Yes? Okay, so one of our in-person students says yes. Why do you say yes? Okay, it reduces your fire for God. It can be a distraction, yes, very true. It can also waste your time and energy. Imagine you just want to say, okay, let me check Facebook but it goes, you never realize it goes on to one hour and one and a half hours, right? Or you're just watching a movie for entertainment but you could have used that even more in a meaningful, in a purposeful way in reading some good material which will help you enhance your relationship, your growth with God, okay? Or if somebody was just sitting around and chatting, you can use that time to, okay, I'm not saying don't chat, I'm not saying don't read, I'm not saying don't read the newspaper and all of those things but I'm saying don't give so much of time and just wasting your time and just sitting and chatting for one hour, two hours every day when you can use that time praying for the nation, praying for people with that person as well, talk but also engage in some good in activities. So yes, to be a good minister you would realize that you would actually have no time for secular things, yes. By the time you run through your day you won't even have so much of time to read God's word and pray, read and leave alone just scanning through the newspaper or just looking at your WhatsApp messages and all of those things you just don't have the time for it, right? Sometimes we're so caught up in ministry that we don't even have time to go for family gatherings because you have, but yes, we need to balance God's family and your personal time when we are, when we give the first place to God in our life and we spend the first few hours of the day with God, he orchestrates the whole day for us. So yes, we can be engaged in secular things, we can go shopping, we can take a vacation, we can meet up with friends, go out for dinner, but what we're saying is in secular things and indulging in a lot of those things like constantly watching movies or spending time in YouTube videos or reading just books or some of us can spend so much of time in just household chores, cooking.  So things like that, yes. Yeah, and yes, we do have to deal with it, but what we're saying is we need to know how to use our time very wisely and God will give us the wisdom and the discernment how to use our time wisely, how to cut off the unnecessary things. I'll just give you an example about Pastor Ashish, I mean, he handles so many things, but I'm amazed, we are all amazed that, you know, he runs a church, he also runs a software company, he writes books, he preaches, he teaches, he also goes home and cooks. He also used to spend time playing football with his son or doing something what excites his daughter. Now, how does he manage all of these things? He has his specific things, you know, if somebody wants to meet him, he does not go to their house, he asks them to come to office so that, you know, that there's no time wasted in his travel, what he's able to do in that one hour traveling from this person to that person's house, he's able to engage in meaningful ministry work, and he can at least meet two people in that one hour. So he asks people to come to the office to meet him, and then he doesn't, you know, do a lot of house visits because that's time draining, it's energy draining, it's also causing a lot of excessive fat and the sun. So I mean, these are some of the things that he thinks can be done without, you know, disturbing the important things that has to be done in ministry. And he also in the year plans when he's going to take a vacation with his family, so everything is planned and ordered, and so it's important for us to even do that. Okay. So our online students have some questions. Did that help, Krisha? Did that help? Okay, our teaching assistant one has a question. Okay. Okay, Surya says, can we minister according to God's will or our will? According to our own thoughts while ministering, can we minister according to God's will? Yeah, we need to, when we are, when in life, we need to ask God what is his plan and his will, and we need to pursue his plan and his will. And yes, we can come into ministry and we can say I'm in ministry because it's God's will, but we can go off in a different tangent doing what we want to do. For example, if God has called me to work among children and I continue working among drug addicts and alcoholics, because I like it, I might be in God's will doing, you know, I say, I can say I'm in God's will because he called me to ministry, I'm in ministry, but being in ministry, I am not pursuing God's will. God wants me to work among children, but I am doing what I want or what I like. I want to, you know, work among drug addicts and alcoholics.  So you can say, okay, I pursue God's will, I'm in ministry, but in ministry, you are not actually doing what God is specifically asking you to do, and you can be a hindrance wherever you are, and you cannot be fruitful, and you cannot experience the power and the anointing of God to flow through you, because you're not in the right place in the right time doing the right thing. So can we minister according to our own thoughts while ministering? Yes, we can, we can do whatever we want, we can say whatever we want. Like for example, yesterday, when we were looking at this great man of God, William Brunham, he was called into doing healing ministry, God said, he would be such a powerful healer, and people will be healed, and we, you know, he healed thousands of people, even healed people with cancer, the, he raised dead people back to life, those who could not see, he gave them, they got back their sight, and those who could not walk, could walk, but in the, when the revival fire of healing ministry died down, you know, he did not ask God what was God's next plan for his life, and he ventured into preaching and teaching, which was not his, what he was good at, he was not a good speaker, he was not learned in the Bible, he could not read the Bible, but he went into an area which was not his calling, and because he was in the wrong place in the wrong time, in the wrong season, he brought about such wrong doctrines, which was very sad, which led many of the believers away from God because of the wrong teachings and the wrong doctrines that he had. So yes, we can minister on our own thoughts, but you know, like Paul says, you know, he receives revelation from God, the scripture is inspired by God, but you know, God uses, you know, because he gives us the message, but he uses the person with their own style, their own skills, their own abilities to write, to preach, to teach, so we can receive revelations from God, but we can use our own style of teaching, teaching, the way we bring it about and minister to people, okay. Jethro says, what becomes of people that don't fulfill God's purpose for their life, they keep running around in circles, they are frustrated, they are, they don't, they're not bearing fruit, anything, anything they put their hand to, they see that it's not coming through, it's not working, they're totally dissatisfied in life, and then some of them realize it's better to go back and do what God's plan and purpose for their life, and they come back and they do it and they find great satisfaction and purpose in life, okay. Vishal says, would it be wrong to serve God along with having a professional career? No, it's not wrong, you can still serve God, you know, he's called in a professional career, you can still pursue the professional career, and you can also, you know, pursue God's call for your life, you can serve God, because you're very sure that, you know, this is what God, this is a career God has called you to do, you'll be there, you can fulfill God's specific plan for your life, and through that specific plan for your life, God will pursue his greater plan, his eternal plan, his greater purpose, which is, you know, that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of Jesus Christ, okay. Okay, so I hope I answered all of the questions that our online students had, thank you for your questions, good questions, we have one student here in person who has a question, yes. Okay, he wants a reference where he wants, you want to give a reference, okay, he wants to help us, he wants to give us a reference where it says in God's word that we can do ministry and fulfill God's call for our life. Second Thessalonians chapter 3 verse 6, yes, okay, 6 to 10, okay, thank you so much for sharing that insight, so he's saying this is second Thessalonians chapter 3 verses 6 to 10 where Paul is writing and saying, you know, don't be a burden to others, you know, if you're serving God and you need money, don't be a burden to others, go and work and you know, in that way you can satisfy your own needs and wants and not be a burden to others as well. Yes, he writes this even to the church at, when he's writing to Timothy, he's writing to the church at Ephesus, he says, you know, don't, if widows in the church, the widows, if their family is able to take care of them, let the family take care of them, their children take care of them, but if their children are not able to take care of them, then the church will be able to take care of them, so he says, you know, don't be lazy, be diligent, work with your hands and we also know that Paul was a tent maker, okay, he had his own business, he was not dependent on the churches that he established or the people that he was ministering to, he was, he helped himself, he earned his, through his tent making business, but also he was a mighty apostle, he did mighty works for God, okay. Okay, thank you so much for joining class today, thank you online students, have a blessed day ahead and blessed and a refreshing weekend, all of you and see you next week, bye-bye.


I'm working as an serial liability engineer in the OpenShift dedicated team. And I've joined from a software engineering role one and a half years ago. And since then some of the practices have been different. And I want to share today with you what I deem most useful from the classical agile practices like things you find in Scrum for SREs and what was not too helpful for us as a team. So teams of SREs typically consist of people from the software engineering world as well as people with more of a operations or administration background. And you put that in a ratio of 50-50, that's what usually happens. And then the hope is that magically people from with more an operational background will learn from the software engineers on the other side will learn from the operations folks how to, what it means to maintain to run a system. And then you get that new species of engineers which is the site reliability engineer who's striving to automate all the operations tasks that you have in an environment. But when an incident happens has all the professionalism to resolve it as quickly as possible. So the idea of site reliability engineering is to apply software engineering best practices to operations tasks. Some say it is what naturally happens when you tell a software engineer to operate a system because the software engineer would then naturally try to automate things when they do it the second or third time. But what also happens is that the software engineers will bring their favorite agile framework like Scrum, Kanban or Extreme Programming and try to fit that into the operations world. And because of that, it felt quite natural for me when I joined the OpenShift SRE team that from my previous team where we were doing Scrum, it felt quite natural that we had three week sprints, we had daily stand-ups and all stuff like that. So that felt very familiar to me. But then what happened in the probably second or third week was that we out of a sudden dropped the stand-up meetings altogether and that was really hard for me because I think in the six years of software development I had before, I guess in most of the days I had a stand-up meeting and that was the most natural thing to me. So we removed them because it turns out site reliability engineers are not very interested in having regular meetings on their calendar. And that is because software site reliability engineers are trained and comfortable in very stressful situations and need to resolve incidents very quickly when they come up. So they are, when an incident appears, they start working on it and work on it until it's fixed and that there is no meeting that will stop them from doing that. And that means a meeting with the whole team, scheduling meeting with the whole team, like a planning meeting which can for three week iterations can take one or two hours conducting such a meeting is very hard because people will just drop out or they aren't shift so they won't even show up or are working on an actually important customer ticket. So scheduling something like that is very hard and you anyways need to make sure that all the information that you have in the meeting somewhat persisted so that whoever wasn't able to participate can still know what was happening in the meeting. And additionally, SRE teams are typically spread across different time zones because you want to have 24 seven someone available to work on issues. And that means it can be hard or even impossible to find a spot in the calendar of everybody if the team is spread across the globe. And that's especially true for meetings that happen daily like standard meetings. You can't expect people to get up at night every day to join the daily standard meeting of the team, right? So that's, here you see a calendar, a typical calendar of scrum. There is a lot of meetings in there, stand-ups, planning, grooming, review, retro and many of them they consume a lot of time. So is this just not fitting at all to SRE or what do we need to do to have a good agile practice in an SRE team? And we found it helpful to stick to the iterations and we still do three weeks prints. But we dropped all the things that were not helpful to us or adopted them. And today I want to share with you what for our specific work environment were the most helpful things to keep. And now that I bashed about meetings that much, let me say three out of those five practices that I want to share are actually meetings. But all of them don't necessarily have to be meetings. You can also find ways to do them in an asynchronous way. And if your team is very much distributed this is probably what you want to do. So let me start with the first one that might be a surprising one. The retrospective is often deemed not very important but for me it is one of the most important tools that you have in the agile world. And that is because the retro is the tool for the team to get together and talk about what happened during the sprint. Not just we finished this item and now we can support this feature and we fixed that back but also focus on how did we perform as a team what went good and what went bad and define action items, how to improve how you work and also improve the agile practices themselves. So for example, I said we dropped the stand-up meetings at all and we utilize the retrospective meeting to bring them back in and talk about how can we make stand-ups useful and evolve also our personal agile framework that we want to adopt in the team. Often those retrospective meetings are considered very boring and not very helpful and people come up with all kinds of ideas to make it more interesting, more fun like put retrospective games in place. You can look up several different games to play retrospectives. But I can't recommend that because I think those retro games just make the retrospective less authentic. So I can only advise to focus on the content and that is what did go good and what didn't go good and then define action items from there and improve and check in the next retrospective if things are better. So really focusing on the content and instead of trying to play games to make it more fun. So now we talked about the stand-up already and that we brought it back in. What we had in the end had or what we are doing now is performing stand-up meetings twice a week, not every day. And this is in the end an outcome of the retrospective. I brought that point up because I think it's really important to stay in touch with the team and to have a feeling of what everybody is working on and also a forum where everybody can put questions, everybody can raise concerns or tell what's blocking him and where they need help. And I think it's very important to have some meeting where everybody with the whole team gets together and talks about what's going on. So you have a feeling what the direction of the overall team is that you're working in. So how comes you put daily stand-ups in question? And as I said before, if you're spread across multiple time zones, it's hard to find a spot where you can meet every day. And so some of the teams in the SRE organization decided to do the stand-ups, not in-person, but have a daily reminder on Slack where then everybody puts the stand-up. That's what I did. That's what I'm doing today. That's what's locking me into that Slack thread. So everybody can do the stand-up when they join. But for us, since we're not too scattered in this team, we do the in-person stand-up at the time that it's suitable for everybody on the team and do it only twice a week, which was for us enough to update each other and talk about what happened. And as I said, I can only encourage to utilize the retrospective to figure out the right way to perform stand-ups rather than just dropping them at all. The next agile practice I want to advertise here is the planning meeting. It's also something we adopted from Scrum. Probably we should relay with it because what you typically have in Scrum, a long planning meeting in the beginning of the sprint of the iteration where you commit to sprint goals, estimate, and commit to a sprint goal. But what we do is we conduct a meeting every week on Monday, which is only half an hour to talk about the backlog items which are currently in the sprint and rebalance the priorities that we have in those backlog items. So what often happens in an SRE team is the team which is on shift realizes some bug, something that is creating, that is a source of a huge amount of toil that you want to fight immediately. And by rebalancing the sprint priorities every week, we can quickly react to such situations, create new backlog items and put them into the sprint and probably at a high priority because they might be very painful to whoever is currently on shift. So it's not exactly a sprint planning, but it's more a rebalancing and making sure that the top priorities that a team is working on are understood by everybody. So everybody is able to pick up the next top priority item when the current item is finished. We even estimate those backlog items even if we don't commit to a sprint goal, we still estimate them because estimating items is useful to foster discussion about the backlog items. So it's not about finding out a velocity, it's more to make sure everybody understands what this is about and why somebody thinks it's complex and somebody else thinks it's less complex. Okay, so that's enough for meetings. Another thing is testing and why did I put this here? In the SRE world, we often write software that replaces things that have been previously manual actions or bash scripts. And then sometimes you think, why should I test this rudimentary operations tasks? And now that we are writing, automating those operations tasks in code, we actually have the ability to write tests for it and we can make use of tests just as in every other piece of software. And what tests do everywhere else is they increase the confidence in the code that you write. They not only ensure that there are no bugs, they help structure the code, make it better readable and they do just the same for that simple operations script that you're now automating. And yeah, when you have tests refactoring your code to make it more readable is much easier because you don't have to fear everything breaks because you know you have a good test suite that will ensure that the base functionality is still in place. And this confidence is even more important in an SRE team where the code that you're writing is running unattentedly on a number of customer systems, customer clusters and performs operations in parallel on all those systems. So when I push something to the production environment, I want to really make sure that I don't wipe accidentally customer data. So I really want to get all the confidence that I can get into my code. And that's what you get from a good test suite. Okay, so speaking of confidence, the next topic is as well about confidence in the code and quality of the code. And, but first let me share with you the my worst and best onboarding experiences I made in my carrier. And the worst one was I joined the team and my mentor gave me a book and told me, read this book and we meet at the end of the week and you tell me what you learned. So I spent the whole week not knowing which parts of that book are important, which part of the product I'm even supposed to work on. And if I should reach out to my mentor with questions and I didn't have much confidence in what I was doing in that week because it was also my very first job that I ever joined, right? So this was not the best experience. You shouldn't do that. And the best onboarding experience was when I sat down with a member of the team and we worked together on the current task that that team member was currently working on. And thereby we created all the accounts that I needed. You know, when you're joining your team you need to create, I don't know, GitLab accounts and account here and generate keys, distribute keys there. And we did all that while working on that task. So I got already used to the tools that a team was using and I built a relationship with the team with the members that I set together. And at the same time, automatically all my accounts got created and I was productive and contributed content to the teamwork on the first day. So the next practice that I want to encourage everybody to use to make use of is pair programming. And that's especially useful for onboarding new team members especially in a distributed environment where you can easily feel lost or disconnected especially when you're new and they're sitting together with somebody to just work on whatever you're working on is very helpful. It's not only helpful for onboarding it's also useful for all the code that you develop in the team. The code will benefit, it will be a better quality because if one developer is working alone on a code you on one hand you get stuck easily and when you're working with another developer the other one might know an answer to your question or might have a new idea to follow. And also when you're working in a pair it's much less probable that you will take a shortcut and do the quick and dirty way than the clean way because the other one will point it out and say, shouldn't we do it like this? And also the knowledge of that part of the code that you're working on, that new feature or that bug fix is automatically shared with a pair. So you don't have to sit together and talk to it later to describe it because you already at least in that pair know what's going on and so the knowledge is spread automatically. And even the code review as you have it today might not be too important because you already have one review automatically. That doesn't mean you shouldn't perform reviews when you do pair programming. You can do that when you think you need something but you don't need to have a review for everything. Your code is automatically reviewed or seen by at least one other developer. But not only for the development is pair programming useful it's also when performing manual interactions with a system as SREs do from time to time to resolve incidents. It's useful there as well for the confidence again that whatever you're doing your manual interaction and the commands that you're entering in the command line that they don't break the customer system because someone else will see them. So you already know that at least two developers think it's a good idea to do what you're trying to do. Okay, those were the five practices I wanted to share with you. And if I can give you only one to take home I would say take the retrospective to your team and start talking about how you're performing and what do you think where you should adopt to get to a better place to adopt your practices so that you all feel comfortable with and have the right amount of meetings and asynchronous ways of communication. And in the end that means the agile framework that you have shouldn't be static you should evolve it over time and after every iteration talk about how it went and improve how you're doing and how you're working. So that's all I have for today. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions you can ask questions now or reach out on Discord or by ML. Thank you, Manuel. We have one more question in the Q and A from Balash Bokharadi. Would you prefer a retrospective with or without the manager participating? So we do retrospectives without manager. I think it's up to the team. You can ask the team to decide that. You can even do that in a retrospective, right? I've seen managers who wanted to take part of some of the retrospectives but then the content is a bit different because some people might not feel comfortable talking about some things while the manager is there and think they need to look good in front of the manager or whatever. That might be true or not but it's, I think you should at least have the content of everybody on the team. Everybody should feel safe to talk in their retrospectives. That's what you need to strive for.


Today we are living in a very nice new technology world if you look at the the technologies appeared in the In the labs around the the whole world in the universities in the industry They are changing the way we are living nowadays, but If we look at the living conditions the real world we are living in it's not every problems or challenges already solved So we look at the cities in China like air pollution is still major problems Making a lot of troubles to the general health care. So Chinese people more than Hundreds of millions are suffering all this and decreasing their lifespan down to several years Another general issue is the global warming global warming is making fundamental changes on the global Ecosystems that the sea level is is rising and the glacier is melting. So all these factors together They are creating kind of unpredictable general weather changes that can lead to the disaster that you can always see in the science fiction movies energy issues is always the Swords of Democrelation around us all the time. So based on the detection all the Petroleum and the natural gases will be used up in next one hundred and several tens of years no longer than that So once energy crisis burst out, how can we survive with our kind of a modern economy? Health care is a major problem for most the people but even just a very tiny insects like a mosquito No, it's just annoying for most of us But for the people living in the tropical area, this is a major killer because they are the carrier of malaria and Even after several tens of years of International efforts malaria still killing hundreds of people every day in Africa all the time So we are we spend a lot of energy and resources to develop new drugs against the pathogens We can basically not alive without them all the day But the problem is all the pathogens evolves all the time So it's kind of arm race between antigen and the pathogens and we are kind of in an analyst war against them So it's really the situation. We are running in a technical innovation all the time Just like in in a kind of a cartoon So the problem is that the word is developing so fast How can we find solutions for all of these challenges? The only thing we can do is to find new paradigm of innovation and cultivate our next generation to be future innovators in the technical world but the problem is that in our universities all the paradigm or kind of pedagogy created to train our students was adapted from the Kind of 150 years ago from the age of industrial revolution So at that time all the students are just learning the knowledges and the skills and in the full field the functions needed from industry But nowadays we need a new format of training because they want they need to do innovation all the time to face all the challenges So in Tsinghua University this year we start a new program called the Shin Center It's a cooperation between Tsinghua and the Tel Aviv University in Israel to find out new solutions for this international Innovation and have young generations So the first thing we want to do with the Shin Center is to break the barrier between disciplines So we want to bring students and faculties from different disciplines in university and People from industry to work together and conquer the general challenges that people are facing all the day so the deep interaction between academia and Industry is very very key for this program because usually in universities that we see Labs University they focus more on original science and the technology and industry focus more on the tech transfer and commercialization of these technologies But this feedback between academia and the industry is really slow So it's not sufficient. It's not effective enough to create new solutions for the world So we do this cooperation between different people between different views and backgrounds to find come kind of a complementary resource To find new solutions. So in the Shin Center We really encourage people including students and faculties to come up with kind of out-of-box thinking Creative really crazy ideas because as I always say, I mean if an idea is not absurd It's basically hopeless to change the world So we ask students and faculties to really think and to take the risk to run into the kind of a cutting-edge innovations with a huge potential to make the field to be changed But how to make it that I mean the students are always suffered from this traditional educational system So in Shin Center, we're trying to save them by giving them complementary resources and know how facility Technologies and so on so what we try to do is to create an international program to give them a new kind of a PhD Training so it's a kind of a doctor degree for innovation basically So to help them to get everything not only locally from China from Singapore But also globally from other universities and industrial cooperators So in this way, we hope we can find a new solutions to get our young faculty young students to be future innovator So these come to the topic of our discussion in my session, which is about how to cultivate the next generation technical innovators Thank you very much