Welcome to Encompass Live. This is Krista Burns at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Library Commission's weekly online event that we've been doing since January of this year, 2009 was when we started. We cover also the Nebraska Library Commission activities, library topics, anything of interest to Nebraska librarians. We have sessions done by NLC staff. Also, we have guests that come in sometimes. We do these every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time so you can attend live if you want to. We also record everything so you can listen to recordings if you're not able to attend our live sessions. Okay, this morning we are doing how to lead a book group for adults or kids. And we have Lisa Kelly here from the Library Commission and Vicki Wood from Lincoln City Libraries to take you through all of that. Great. Welcome. Thanks for joining us this morning, whether you're live or listening to this later. Vicki and I did a session last fall at NLA on this and it seemed like it was something worth reprising because Vicki and I are old book group folks. I've been in a book group for 15 years, either leading. How about you, Vicki? Yes, I think well actually I'm embarrassed to say I'm in several book groups but my oldest one has been about 15 years also. Great. Well, Vicki does the training for the Lincoln City Libraries, one book, one link, one book, one link and leaders. And she was a great choice to work with because her perspective is a little different from mine. She works with kids, with young adults and I work purely with adults. So we had a great session at NLA last year I felt and as a result Vicki joined my book group. So we have book group tomorrow night as a matter of fact. Anyway, we're just going to have a conversation. So I would like for you all will try to be mindful of what you want to say or have questions about because truly this is a conversation. We don't have a lot of things to show you. Just some websites that might be helpful to you and then we're going to promote our own book club kits that both of our libraries offer. So it's really going to be helpful to be interactive with us today. So if we say something that you particularly have a question about, want to take exception with, don't agree with. We would be happy to hear from you because we only have our opinions and basically that's really what I want to encourage you all to get books going to maybe get out of a rut if you're in one or to get some fresh ideas if you have a book group and perhaps you just need a jump start. So that's the purpose of the session this morning and please ask away or comment or disagree with us. If you do have a question and a comment, we're kind of cruising along on talking here and we don't notice it. Use the little hand raising icon in the top of your interface next to the green check mark that'll let us know as a little indicator that you want to say something that you have a question so that we don't miss it. Go ahead and click on that and I'll notice that. Thanks. Yes, we'd be happy to hear from you. So I've just got some questions. Vicky and I are going to toss them around and we'll add our opinions and please comment. So I want to ask really about optimum book group eyes, what we think that is, maybe what's too big, what's too small. And then within that there are sometimes folks who are conversation dominators. And then I want to talk about the content of the group in terms of women and men or that sort of thing. So Vicky, what do you think is the optimum? Well, I think when we talked about this last time, we talked about the fact that if your group is composed of 15 individuals that you can probably expect at any given time for about half or a little bit more to show up just because of the busyness of people's lives. Different people have different commitment levels to their book groups too. Sometimes I see it as really, you know, if I read the book, I'll show up. And some people are very committed and they read the book every single time and, you know, there's just different levels of that. So I think if you go over 15 and then you have everybody show up, you're in a little bit of a crazed situation. Plus if you have space constraints where you're meeting, it's difficult. But I think a book group size of 12 to 15 is a good size for an adult type of a book group. And you get bigger than that and it's hard to have discussions. Yeah, I guess I would only offer that for me that would be too big because I'd find you'd have two conversations probably going. Sometimes it's difficult to keep one conversation going with just eight people. Right. So Vicki says 12 to 15, I would probably go smaller than that and say eight-ish is pretty big. Six to eight would be my range. Yeah, I'm thinking 12 to 15 assuming that six to eight would come at any given time. Okay, okay. So they would be on your list and be part of your book group that you would assume that at any given time, especially around holidays or in the summer, you're going to have a lower. And that's true for our book group as well. I think that, yeah, we've nailed it. Yeah. But in conversational mode, I think six to eight is pretty maximum. Yeah, because you don't want the dreaded side conversation. Yeah, we both share that. Those are terrible. And yes. What about single sex or coed book groups? How have you found that to be in your experience, especially now that you're in a coed book group? Well, I find the coed book group is extremely rich in terms of getting a different kind of perspective. And I know that's a real stereotype to say men and women think about things differently. But you know, they really do. And I really love being in a group where there are men. And I have been in a group where there is a token guy. Usually the husband of somebody that and yeah. And I find it adds a real richness to it. But try finding men that want to be in book groups. It's not easy necessarily. I worked really hard to get men in my book group. But once I got them, they've been pretty devoted to stick around. Well, and I think that if you have that as an expectation and if you have that as something that you want in your book group, you do have to be a little bit more careful in terms of your casual chat. I mean, I'm in a book group that's all women. And one of the favorite things in the book group when we're done talking about the books is talking. We're laughing at our husbands, the foibles of our husbands. Which, you know, is not something that you would want to do.  But I mean, that's kind of a woman bonding thing that happens. And I think that, you know, that having men in your book group is something to really, that's interesting to strive for. But I can also see that some women might feel like they want that as their special kind of space. And if they wanted to limit it to women only, that would be a legitimate thing too. But I think you kind of have to have agreement among the book group members about what they wanted and what their expectations are. So it's important to know that if you're just starting up a group, then you need to give some thought about gender content, who you want to include. And I think Vicki and I have talked about this before, that the chemistry of the group is amazingly significant. And there's no telling what one person joining the group could really do to wreak havoc in the group. So I guess I'm thinking about this is a discussion of pretty intimate book group readers. Now there are certainly much larger discussions, like one book, one link, that are going to be just a one-time book discussion. So what we're talking about is a reoccurring book group and how you really want to build faith and trust in that group. Almost a confidentiality in some respects. Because people might share something in that group not intended to be widely known. So I think we can't take that too significantly, but you really have to pay attention to those things. Well, I know there's book groups where people actually have to be voted into the group. Like they come for a trial. I've heard about that too.  And I'm in a book group like that. And the dynamic is changing all of the time, which is fine with me. But I know that the people view that different ways. And some people think that if you keep the same members through all your years that it will always be the same. And it will be in some senses, but people do change. One person might leave, a new person might come in. And it really does, it changes the chemistry. And I think that you have to be aware of that because some groups just click and they do really, really well. And everybody is, you know, are kind of on the same page about their book group. And the problem is when you get someone that's different than that and then that sometimes creates problems. In your casual book group, or which do you find yourself preferring since you have a couple of options. You've got more intimate book groups and then that casual drop-in book group. Personally, I prefer a much more serious book group. And you know, I've stayed with my old book group because I like the people in it and it's kind of a loyalty thing. But I don't get as much out of it in terms of the reading and the talking about the book as I do with the other book group where it's much more committed. I mean, I feel like it's more committed, it's more structured and there's more book discussion and that's more satisfying for me personally. But I know that there are other people who are satisfied if you talk about the book for 15 minutes. I mean, that's just what their need is. So it really varies by the person, I think. Absolutely. Okay, how about what are the differences in leading book groups of different ages? And for those of you who are out there maybe thinking of turning a young adult book group for the summer, maybe taking advantage of the one book, One Nebraska Kids that's available this summer and you're thinking, this might be a good summer for us to get into that. How do you address and you brought some really great friends last fall? Yeah. When you're leading a kid book discussion or a young adult, what's your best counsel and advice for that? Well, when I train our new facilitators for our parent child book groups that we have at the library, I make a big point of talking about the job of the facilitator is much more difficult, I think, than with adults. Adults understand about forming ideas and speaking ideas and kids really don't necessarily have that capability. Now, some kids in Lincoln Public Schools, for instance, have been discussing books since they were in second or third grade and they get it. Other kids really don't understand. So you need to ask lots and lots of open-ended questions. Kids are also very focused on themselves and their own lives and so it's really important that you bring in some personal experiences. So with my leading some of those groups, some of the best questions, what would you do if you were in any place, that there's a crisis in the book or have you ever been in a situation where you felt like that? Those kinds of questions tend to elicit more discussion. And of course, that's also something you have to be careful of because you don't want to be probing into the kids' personal lives and having them express things that they may not be comfortable with. It's a good way to get them to interact with the text more by trying to bring some of their personal experiences in.  Oh, definitely. We had it happen one time at a book group that we were in where the mother was there and the parents had recently separated. It was a story about, actually it was a dog story, but there was a divorce in the family and it kind of evoked some things for this child that she wanted to talk about, which I think was fine, but I think the mother was a little wary or embarrassed about it, but I think for the child it was probably a good thing to talk about some of that stuff. So when the kids are a book group, are the parents usually there also kind of on sidelines? It really varies a lot. By the book group it's that chemistry thing. There's some where parents really dominate and the facilitator has to step in and let the kids have a chance to talk. And we have other ones where the parents kind of do sit on the sidelines. So obviously the best of all worlds is equal participation by parents and kids. I'm always fascinated by when kids really agree with their parents and when they really disagree with their parents. Because that to me is interesting. The parent and the child read the same book. And they're coming to the discussion with either very much in agreement or very much in disagreement. And both of those things I think are very interesting and make for interesting discussions. And we do explore that as part of our book discussion. And they've all read the same title, mostly in your Lincoln City book groups. It's all the same. Exactly. It is actually, there are themes and we select the four book ahead of time. And so the parent and child take home, they can take home their own copy. They can read it together. They can read it aloud together. What's the frequency of that? Once a week for five weeks during the summer. Just the summer time. Mostly June and the beginning of July. Is it part of the summer reading program that you offer? It is part of it. It's a more in-depth component of it. From that program we've had three groups that have spun off to be year-round groups. There's one at Gear, there's one at Anderson, and there's one at South Branch. Wow. And a lot of the parents that complete the summer book groups move into those groups in the fall because they really enjoy the experience and they want to continue to have that experience with their kids. I'm going to ask you all, just because I want to pick up our conversation a little bit, would you just checkmark yes if you're currently in a book group or you're running a book group right now? Would you just let us know by checking yes? Clearly we're just going to chat, but I'd like to hear. Oh my goodness. Okay. The three of you are in a book group or leading a book group? And the rest of you are probably... Okay, let me ask one more question then. How many of you are currently interested in starting a book group in your library? And if you could just click yes. Okay. Two. Okay. Excellent. That's great. Okay. Well, those of you who are interested in starting, please be mindful of whatever questions you might have if we don't address something. We'll try to get through what I think are the high points, but I'm glad to know that and thanks for letting us know. All right. Well, how to select a title? How to go about selecting a title? And from the interlibrary loan perspective, I've had people ask me some things and I'm sure you're a reader advisor. How do we go about selecting a book? How far in advance? What about the democracy of selecting within a book group? And then last but not least, and we got some fair discussion on this, do you allow genre fiction? And when I say, I mean, mysteries, romance, fantasy, do you think that's relevant for a book group? So what do you have to say about book selection? Well, I think once again, it very much depends on the group. I mean, I know there's book groups that only read Jane Austen and there's book groups that only read British literature. I know a book group of that like that in Lincoln. And, you know, but I think that a lot of people probably wouldn't want to be that limiting. And what I think works best in my years of being in book groups is to rotate it among the members for selection. And I also think it's good to have a mix of fiction and nonfiction. And so that's, I just think works best because then you get exposed to lots of kinds of books that you wouldn't normally read, which is the upside and the downside of book groups. And you just let's just say that right out. If you don't want to be to read things, if you have your reading list, your life list, and you know what you want to read and you don't want to be derailed by reading things that you don't like or that you would never read and you don't wouldn't enjoy that, then you shouldn't be in a book group. Because that is one of the great pleasures and it's also one of the great drawbacks of book groups in my opinion is that you get exposed to lots of things and I like that. But I know that there are other people who feel like they're wasting their time reading things that they didn't select. And I've heard book group people in my club say that is why I'm in this group because otherwise I would only read mystery, mystery, mystery, mystery. And so you do have to make a commitment to say, I realize I'm going to read things I don't really want to read. So I would normally have not bit. And I second your opinion about the fiction-non-fiction mix and I keep an excel list actually and I keep track of who's chosen, what books they chose, and then I can kind of go around and see whose turn is next again. And I give them quite a bit of advance notice because most of our readers are fiction readers and I make them choose one fiction and one non-fiction. And they have trouble with the non-fiction title. And our criteria is you have to have, the library has to own some copies as well. Some people always go by their book and you can certainly have your criteria but when you have democratic selection process be sure to be clear with your selector what their criteria is. I've had people say that 500 pages is that too long for a book group. So maybe your group needs to discuss very democratic criteria for selecting. Well, and I think it makes a lot of sense to choose your book, say, six months or a year in advance rather than waiting until the end of the meeting and saying, okay, what are we going to read next? I was in a group like that and then one person would just go, let's just read this. And that person shows almost everything. Yeah, that's not good, I think. And I think that you get a more balanced list if you're looking at it as a whole year or six months or however. And I know one group that actually brings, they have a selection meeting and they actually bring all of their, they bring the ones that they want to read and then they try to sell it to the other book members and then the book members sell out. And I think that seems like a good, they bring two things and they say, here's why we should read this book and whoever does the best job of selling their book gets to read the book, which I think is a great way of doing it and then they schedule out the whole year. That's interesting. I like that. We also integrate into my book group and the One Book One Nebraska and the One Book One Lincoln and that takes care of selecting for two months. Right.  So, you have to decide the frequency that you want to get together as well. And I just have a note about selection. I would never choose a book I never read. How do you feel about that? I know there's lots of good websites out there that are good for selecting, helping to select books. I mean, there's books that lead themselves more to book discussion and other books. Right. One of the complaints in one of my book groups is that the books are always too depressed. Can we read something not depressing? And so we did. And then we had nothing to talk about. And, you know, that's one of the, you know, I don't find the books depressing. I mean, I don't feel that way about them. Maybe I don't get it emotionally involved, but you have to have some meat to something in order to discuss it. And especially when you're building book groups for kids, this is a fine line that you have to walk because you don't want all to be doom and gloom. When you have kids, we always try to mix up the genres to get a lot of different kinds of literature in there.  But in order to have a discussion, you have to have something to discuss. And sometimes that means that there's a controversy or a big conflict or something in the story. And that's important. That's an excellent segue. We didn't cover the genre fiction. So to have something to talk about, can you do that with mystery, romance and fantasy? Do you think you can do it? Well, I know that we have a young adult group at Isley Branch that is a fantasy group and it's a big group. There were 22 kids in it last summer. And they are devoted fantasy readers. And I think they have everything in the world to talk about. They're into fantasy. They've read a lot of the classics in the genre and they have things to compare to their young adults so they're talkative, they're thoughtful and I think you could do that. And I think the same could be true for mysteries if you have people that truly that is their passion. And that is what they're interested in. We tried doing a mystery and it was a P.D. James mystery in my group and P.D. James is a wonderful writer. But once again, there was just a limit into what the things that we found to talk about in that book discussion. But I could see that it could work for people that were passionate about that particular topic. So I'm going to get you to answer this question. Would you ever pick a book that you hadn't read? I would. Okay. I would. Especially if I had read a review of it or heard from word of mouth from other people that it's a good book and it's a good discussion book or it was an author that I knew. But say you finished it and you went oh I'm so regretting that. I can't believe I made my book read that. I think it's okay. I would move on. I would be okay with it if that worked. That happens. All right. All right. Now this is a book group phenomenon that always comes up in the literature that I read in all the conversations. Do you eat or do you not eat at a book group? And I especially want to hear about kids in this area. We consider food mandatory for our young adults. Our young adults especially. Food is mandatory at almost any time we have teenagers. Together we have food even if it's just chips and pop. For some reason it's the social lubricant of teenagers. With our younger kids we do a lot of we sometimes do food tie-ins. And so that's really fun. What are some examples? Well like we did fudge the book. Super fudge. And then we had fudge. These were in the days when we could actually bring baked goods into the library. Now we have to have pre-packaged goods but we can still do that. We've had things where we do icebreaker games with M&M. We've had different, we've done prairie pioneer stories where the leader has brought in some kind of food item that is featured in the book. We did a book called Fig Pudding and we actually had a leader who made Fig Pudding which is way above and beyond the call of duty. But if you think hard enough there are food tie-ins to lots of things. I know we did a group called The Dog and Pony Show and one of the group leaders brought in Puppy Chow which is basically powdered sugar chicken. I mean it's so simple and yet so nice and enhancing. So I think that it's less, with the kid book groups we try to incorporate it into most of it but it's not like a big food event. It's more like, you know. And then I was in a group in one of these book groups with parent child book groups at Bethany Branch where we alternated bringing snacks so each pair, it was their turn on a different week and one brought the snack and one brought the drink. But certainly you're meeting for 45 minutes food is not essential. It depends on the time of day. We were meeting at 7 o'clock at night so everyone had eaten dinner. You get all sugared up at the end of the night. But I know in adult book groups that food is very central that there are ambitious book groups who also cook according to the book group. So if you're doing a book that took place in India you're having Indian cuisine and you know these people have way more time than I do. My book group used to be like that too. We read The Bean Trees by King Solver and somebody made bean soup and we read The Chamber by Grisham and there were Eskimo pies and we all had to eat Eskimo pies so if there's an obvious food theme in a book it can be very fun to play out. It can be very fun but you certainly don't want to make it obligatory because it can get to be too much. And I will mention that in that particular adult book group it put unnecessary pressure on some people they didn't want to host the group because they weren't themselves cooks and they felt real pressure because they didn't want to host it then and felt badly that when their turn came around they couldn't host. I guess I'd caution all of you who are having it in your home that you don't want to think about neutral locations for those folks who feel they can't host it. We rotated who hosted based upon who picked the book. We did too for a long time. Yeah, so that went together. But we had one member who really felt I don't really want to have you in my home and I don't cook. So that put undue pressure on that member. So be mindful of what that is for your book group. Well and people don't have to meet in homes either. Sometimes people meet in restaurants, but typically meeting at home like we do something usually around the holidays where we meet one time in a restaurant and just have a fun thing. I mean we've met at coffee houses before because we had a woman that had a small apartment and couldn't fit everybody in her house. So yeah, meeting outside of homes of course is a possibility and if you're at a restaurant then nobody has to worry about preparing anything. And one last food note. I discovered in my group that I have a social hour before and this was done to keep conversation on track really. So this kind of falls into another category. But the book group comes from 6 to 7 at my house and it is always at my house because most of the people live in my condominium building. So it's really easy to get to. So that we have wine and food from 6 to 7 and then from 7 boom, the book discussion starts. And that allows people who want to come catch up on the latest movie they've seen how your kid's doing how's the new job going along how they can get all that conversation out of the way and know that that's the time to do it. And then at 7, I really am pretty Millicent about staying on the topic and so far I think it's... I think that works brilliantly because in my other group we really vary. Sometimes we eat first and then talk and sometimes we talk and then eat and it always seems... things seem to break down at some point no matter how we do it and I think you've really got the key there of like here's our structured social time and here's our other time and you even physically move in your apartment so when you're in social time you're at a table and when you're in book group time you're on the couch and I just think it's a brilliant way to structure it and it works really well. People try to talk about the books sometimes during social time and I'll shut them down and I'll say not yet, not yet, keep it to yourself and they'll even try to talk to me before the book group and I'll say I want to hear it but I want to hear it when we meet. Because in my neighborhood we're all so close riding the elevators together It's easy to talk about now. I'm pretty militant about it but I think it's helped and so those are just my experiences and what I've learned from various Well, Lisa, that also kind of stags into the whole question and I'm not sure what order this is in but about having a leader versus not having a leader. Now with kids and young adult book groups they refer to the book group leader as a facilitator and that's really what they are. They are there to elicit discussion they're trained and they have very specific goals that they're trying to they're trying to have a discussion they're trying to have the discussion last a certain length of time they're focusing on certain themes and ideas in the book. With adults I've experienced a lot of things where people take turns facilitating the discussion and sometimes where the same person facilitates or where nobody facilitates and my experience once again has been that having a facilitator makes a big difference even if you move it around that person is just basically responsible for doing a little bit of research about the author a little bit of background about the book a little bit more about other books that author may have written and just, you know, I mean it's not like you have to spend a day doing research but just coming a little bit more prepared and also pulling yourself out of the discussion more so that you can keep the discussion flowing and one thing that I think is really lost kind of in the art of conversation and also becomes lost in book groups sometimes it's kind of following an idea to its conclusion people tend to change the subject a lot and I think that it's a good job of a facilitator to say hey are we done talking about this yet are we ready to switch gears do you have time to put their two cents worth in about certain topics or parts of the book and I think that's difficult and I think some people are better at it than others so if you have someone in your group who kind of rises to the top and that would be the person probably who's pretty serious, pretty devoted and enjoys that role then that's a great role now there would be people who may not want to be in that role all the time because they want to be more of a participant sometimes and that helps a lot and I think that it makes people take it a little bit more seriously you make lots of really wise points now in our book group there are people who say I will choose but I don't want to lead you will lead it and they're speaking to me and I have no problem with that I am controlling my natures and I really wanted to go a certain way but I really feel responsibility for the group you come because they read the book and maybe I'm an education major I have a curriculum mind towards that and in that tone people are also my friends and I care about them they've spent some time reading the book that's why they came so I feel a bit of a responsibility so ahead of time I will send out usually the author's website sometimes there's a website just for the book if there's a movie tie in sometimes that's interesting and sometimes there's NPR interviews or something with the author that you can listen to ahead of time and I will send those out and often those really do oh that's why the author lives there that makes perfect sense that they would make that setting there or that author is a nurse and they had practical advice about that kind of thing so in that kind of background information can add so much to your experience of reading a book and I've also found that sometimes coming out of a book discussion I have a really different perspective on the book than I had going in that's magic to hear other people's points of view but also people can bring bring something to the discussion that you didn't get out of that book and also all that extra material can too if you know something about the author's background and where the story came from I mean those things all add a lot to the book discussion I think okay here's something Vicki and I are facing tomorrow we have a book that we both read and neither of us liked it we have nothing but just ridiculously critical things to say about this book and celebrating my birthday Damana I thought well dang why do we have to talk about such a crappy book on my birthday so I think it bears witness to what do we do when we what do we do when the book just dang you know how do we prepare what kinds of comments do we bring I think this is practicing really good practical advice especially as the leader Vicki was asking me what are you gonna do Damana how are you gonna do prepare I think that when that happens in my group and I think Lisa agrees with this and I certainly train all my book group facilitators that work with kids to mix negative comments at the beginning I mean it's okay at the end but if you start out a book group on a negative tone like I really hated this book then the people who like the books aren't gonna say anything especially kids really is bad for kids this is actually a pointer that Leigh passed on to me from a McAlvacot discussion that she was in that you can give negative comments but you always have to wait until the end and we have found it to be very very important I also say absolutely this is my absolute rule about book groups is never start a book group by saying did you like the book yeah I would compare and then everybody goes around go yes no yes no yes no and then it's like okay well and to me there's a more deeper and more important question than liking a book and I think that if you are in a book group you're beyond that and I don't think it means you have to like every book and I don't think but I think that you really need to strategically kind of keep your comments to yourself you need to listen more you need to pay attention to what others have to say and then you know as the discussions winding down or you're halfway through if you say you know your problems with this book and here's what they are and you also to be really careful with the person who selected the book I mean they may have no emotional connection to it at all they just picked it because it sounded good but you know you don't want to insult somebody especially if it was like their favorite book ever it's just all diplomacy and I think the important thing is just kind of holding back and you know and then also being constructive and not just trashing and saying oh this is hideous and you know I think you have to be able to support your point of view just like you do in any other kind of discussion Conversationally I'll generally wrap up our book with who would recommend this book and who would you recommend it to and why and I'll never they've noticed that I never asked did you like it but I'll say would you recommend it and they'll say you know I wouldn't but or my father might really like that because of this theme and then it helps the application of who wasn't my cup but I know someone who really would have enjoyed it and I'm going to tell them about it and I think that's a fantastic question because I think that especially those of us that are in the book world where we're recommending books to people and we do readers advisory that we really have to think about that appeal what is the appeal of this book and I think when we book talk things we have to think of that and that's like a really central question that a lot of people miss out on it's all about I liked it I didn't like it and that's not the discussion and the appeal is and I think that's a fantastic question to ask because I think it's a great way to wrap up the discussion and one only once I didn't ask it because I so just like the book and one person said you didn't even ask about it but you're only human I gave myself away but another thing I would say and I've facilitated a group now for a while that I just really run through the characters I make lists of the characters and I talk about each character because it's such a simple way and I say this to those of you who look for those discussion questions and there aren't any and then people will often call our library and say do you have discussion questions on a book and there are some generic questions that I've sent out from book group blogs that I think are great but I often just find that if you start with the character and you just go down with the list of characters it really lends itself especially if you were drawn to a character or they made a poor decision with the deal breaker in the plot you can talk about that, why did they make the decision it it drives itself I think I think there's a lot of variety out there in terms of pre-made discussion I think it helps if you're getting your group off the ground that you don't know kind of the dynamic of the group yet and when we did the 13th tale I know I went online and got lots of discussion questions about pulling one from one and one from another and then there would be one that would be like all these questions are great and so you hit upon those sometimes where they really get at the heart of what you want to talk about during the book discussion do we have a question? yes Kathy just typed a question into the text chat there we're wondering if it would work to blog the book discussion for young adults and if you have suggestions for young adults well, I think that I'm kind of embarrassed I don't know more about this but it just started up at the gear branch we have a strong team group going and they're doing an online book club where they don't actually meet in person but they do their book club online and I don't know more about it and I wish that I did I can probably find out more about the person that you would want to talk about that is Sarah Dale Pearsall who is our team librarian at Gear Library and I will just give you her email in case you want to email her it's just s, period and then Dale Pearsall which is all one word d-a-l-e-p-i-e r-s-o-l at LincolnLibraries.org and I'm sure that Sarah would be happy to share with you more about how the online book group goes and our team book groups this summer we have a golden sewer group so we have teens who are choosing among the ten nominees or choosing four that they want to read we have last year we did a fun one which was books into movies and the kids all chose books that had been made into movies and then they watched the movies we have the fantasy group that I told you about we have one group that's very free form we have different books so with teens you know you're in that kind of nebulous area if you're a library system of course when you're choosing books you're giving a little bit of an endorsement to them teens can handle edgier material but you don't necessarily want to be throwing books out there that are going to cause a lot of parent concern or uncomfortableness among the group it also depends on your age range that 12 and 13 year olds in your group obviously there's a big difference between their sophistication and reading level and subject matter than you do if your group is predominantly 15, 16 and 17 year olds so I would look for award winners obviously and look at what's exciting and fun for kids and and go from there did that answer your question Kathy you feel like you got what you wanted from thank you you can just say yes or no do you have any other questions? thank you yes I'll just also mention that facebook has a book club application that I just learned about this morning so if your kids are on facebook that answers your question okay great thanks Kathy so if your kids are on facebook there's a book club application and so interestingly people can share that way and they do say in the press release that they don't think it takes a place a face to face but in social networking there's every kind of person who wants to meet however they want to meet I'm a face to face kind of person I would not be satisfied with an online book discussion but possibly kids would so you may want to ask your kids if they have facebook and if that's something they'd want to investigate as most kids do and it behooves you all to have facebook that's what they're doing speaking of online connections on the Lincoln City Library's web page if you want to connect into our summer information we do have a list of all of our book group selections there so if you go on to our main page and you click on the summer reading connection there will be something that says book groups and you can see what we've selected for the summer do you want to show them that we can actually see them now the Lincoln City Library we don't have this one bookmark but can you give her your website okay it's just linkinlibraries.org sorry Christa we're throwing a loop here anyway that has the list of books that we're going to be reading this summer and others are interested now to save time and energy with our kids book groups see what says be creative scroll down okay and then it says let's see keep going down oh it's still going okay sorry oh I want you to take a survey you can ignore the survey you can go back and follow that later Christa let's see there's teens read okay those are the teen book groups so if you click on that you're going to get the list of books there's the voting online for two of the groups that's for a new thing that we're doing this year is letting the kids vote online before they're doing the book group about which book they'd like to read that's kind of cool and then up at the top I think if you just click on the summer reading information go up a little bit more Christa okay so where yeah I don't see a direct connection to book groups but it should be in that summer reading information if you can click on it what we found with our kids' book groups is that we do a lot of series books we do a magic tree house American girl those kinds of things those are wildly popular I sort of fought against that for a few years because I was just curious and thought no kids need to read all these different things and they need to read this great literature and we just discovered that kids wanted to do that I mean the magic tree house books are full of history and information and they also have printed guides that go with them and so and the same with American girl I mean there's a lot of historical things and those are what the kids are familiar with and those are what they want to read so we've gone to much more sort of pre book groups and it saves our staff a lot of time and you've reconciled yourself yeah I got over it I got over it yeah right exactly check our online information so there is the list we have 20 some book groups going on this summer Lincoln about 300 families are involved it's a big deal it's a wonderful thing that's huge there's our read aloud please which is for second and third graders we have a Spanish language book group that meets during the summer downtown and then the other side is the reading together that's for fourth and fifth graders and their parents and then of course the teams doing their book groups without their parents imagine that I think that's fascinating we're getting to about the end of the hour and I'd like to just ask some reflection questions because I think we've gone over a lot about the particulars and I don't want to just keep hammering those because in the end you'll find what works for your folks you'll find what works for the people who've joined your group and I'm just passionate about book groups I think they'll survive every sort of social networking I think they'll survive everything I think that text is not dying I love the feel of a book there's nothing like cracking open a new book and I think that talking about books I just love it and I would never I think these are never going away and so that is why I want people to start or think about joining or leading a book group so I found some kind of interesting questions that I thought might be right one is how do you consider your book group a success how would you judge if things are really going well and if maybe things need to be adjusted what are the criteria that you would say that went great or that went poorly and I have found at the end of the night people have different judgments about that what would you think how do you know if it's going well well I know that the first time I went to your book group I was so excited and lunch the next day I was going on and on about it but my big my big thing was we talked about the books for an entire hour and a half like that was so awesome to me now other people might not think that's so awesome you know but to me that would that meant that book group was successful to me I think if everyone's respectful if everyone gets to say what they wanted to say and if you really run the book out I mean you got you got everything you could get out of your discussion I think it's successful and I think that you just have that feeling at the end that it's going to vary a lot for different people at different times but I think that's the pleasure and joy of it is that sometimes you're going to come out of the discussion and just think that was so great so good but you know there's always next time now what about the kids group how do you consider those successes well with the kids group sometimes it's really hard to tell because kids can tend sometimes we have really quiet groups and it's just like you know just trying to get anything out of them is really difficult what I find though is that kids will say things to me later a lot of times I think and I think that's a lot of the way that kids are an adult you start thinking you know about something you think about it and actually the beauty and the joy of it comes later it's not something that you feel immediately and I think with the book groups just getting the kids and parents together to talk about things that they may not want to talk about or they may have never talked about before to me that means the group is successful just that the parent child signed up to read together and the parent is making this say this is a legitimate thing and an important thing to do so it's not about the numbers yeah it's really more about I yeah and I don't I I we like to have good discussion but we don't have that expectation and it's always going to be the fantastic discussions we do you have a question but what can we answer for you do you want to chat something you can just type on that text chat button at the top more on the right side and let us know what your question is and while you're typing that I'm going to ask you another question but we won't stop reading before we answer your question so you can get that to us either on a microphone or in the chat I'm happy to answer that okay well while we're waiting for Rita's question oh okay talk about the dominator in the group one who won't let others talk oh Rita would have to bring that you know I've read things that I was a classroom teacher for a little bit and there's some obvious things that you can do and I was just reading some examples in my book blog when there's two people talking and something's going on or you're talking about a dominator something that I've done is to say Mary I haven't heard from you and Don I haven't heard from you and I will really call out people's names to say now we've heard a lot about Jan's opinions and I might just say stuff like that that would be my perspective I will call the names of people who literally haven't had a chance to say anything and sometimes I'll use a go around the room technique let's go around the room and everybody answer this question the dominator only gets their turn so sometimes you can employ that technique to make sure everybody says something and when it gets to their turn they might say well I don't know that I haven't answered we're going to come back to you then because I want you to answer it and you might really just force it if you have something to add for a dominator problem oh yeah because there are people who process much more slowly you know it's almost like when you speak a foreign language and everyone's talking so quickly that you don't have a chance to even form your response and so those people you really have to give a chance to but both of your suggestions are good ones and we use both of those in training to teach kids and I think it's one of the things that we do with our kid book groups is we do go around at the beginning and say tell me one thing that you found interesting or that you want to talk about and every child can come up with one thing usually and then I make little notes on the pad and always come back to that and I think calling out certain names and people really works well I guess those are our best suggestions Rita I hope that those are helpful to you and it helps to call if you can know all your book group members by name and probably a group of friends or community citizens call them out by name and then around the room technique you might just say tonight everyone's good suggestions maybe conversational get going yeah okay good that's an excellent question though and when you put a group of humans in a room you're going to get that and I think sometimes you do just interrupt and just say okay well you know what about that what do you think John and just cut the person off I mean I think that we have done that in our book groups before let's talk about some memorable book discussions what are successes or what books what are your maybe we'll just wrap up with this one what were your most memorable book club nights or days or afternoons with kids or either adults I have a few and you'll share some I remember one at the very beginning of my book group when we had this awesome chemistry and it was a book that was about kind of hidden things that happened in a small town and I had there's three sisters in my book group and it came out that they had all had this very similar experience with their high school principal who hadn't molested him or anything but he provided alcohol at parties for these kids and all three of them had experienced this but none of them had ever talked about it before and it came out in the book group and it was so interesting and so that to me really stands out because I just remember that being an evening where we were all just like wow that's a really big thing and the sisters felt like it was really a big thing too because they had somehow never talked about it one of my favorite book groups was The Night of Intimacy also not a lot of people showed up it was a Vietnam War theme book that one of a Vietnam vet had chosen for our group and everybody had very deeply seated in feelings that they never voiced and in fact when they voiced them to the group it became quite emotional and there was this level of confidence and trust in the group that just almost brought me to tears because I thought these people are really bearing their soul and they're bearing it to the book group because of the trust that we put into that group and I would never reveal anything about that even but just the generality of it was transforming and I liked that we found these things out about these people and they just made themselves raw to us sharing their thoughts and feelings and they really respected the people who shared what they did well when you think about it I mean people read for different reasons but one of the reasons people read is to see things through other people's eyes and to experience things that we can't really experience and the book group just takes that one step further so it's all about sharing and learning and if you're into that those are going to be really great moments for you because that's why you're in the book group is to share and so I think both of us had experiences where something deep was shared that made it so satisfying. Yeah, beyond anything I would have ever imagined. Okay, well Christus put some slides together that you will have as a part of this presentation that have websites and I would like to just go to the one where I just want to point out the last one, book club kits if we could. What I've included in these slides are some excellent resources and we've alluded to those throughout our discussion and this particular slide I'd like to pay attention to if you want to get a hold of multiple copies of books that are really geared towards book discussions and you're having trouble getting started and you want some ideas both from Vickie's and my library we offer book club kits and that just means they're all there self-contained, I need eight copies of this book you can hand them all out that night and the club is good to go so it's just the club in a box you can just get it right off the ground and get it going so pay attention to those websites if those would be helpful to you and contact either of us if you have additional questions we're almost at the top of the hour are there any last questions for either of us you've got our contact information if you think of something later don't hesitate to call us or email us we both obviously feel passionately about this so we would love to hear about your experiences and if anybody is trying to get book groups for kids off the ground you can email me or call me and I'll be happy to tell you we've been doing that at Lincoln City Libraries for 15 years, we started with three book groups and we've grown to the 20 that we currently offer Vickie's your person for that not that your person so you've got all of our contact information I appreciate your taking time to spend with us for 10.59 so I think we need to wrap up I just want to let you know also that all of these links that were in this PowerPoint that I just whipped through very quickly are in the commission's delicious account so you can go to our delicious account that'll be linked out of the recording when I put it up as well the NLC reference delicious account is live and book group but I'll give you a link for all that as well when we do the recording so I guess if there's no further questions right at the moment we can wrap it up thank you very much for attending I hope you join us next week when Lisa will be back again meet the librarians behind ready at nlc.state.ne.us if any of you use that email address you can see what we look like the other two folks, oh thanks Crawford we're getting some applause thank you so much thanks for joining us and if you think of questions later I sincerely mean it let us know because we would be most happy to respond to your questions and we'll let you know how our book group will perform tomorrow night you got a comment down here too thanks for a very informative session we love book discussions and you gave us some good ideas excellent thanks Laura thanks Laura thanks for joining us this morning we're giving groups or get them started we'd love to hear about how things are going thanks see you all next week bye bye


So, last week we talked about Democratic lawmaker from New York, Elliot Engel, who showed up for the very first time in his district in months, and he was caught on hot mic saying this. I mean, that pretty much tells you everything that you need to know about Elliot Engel. Now, he recently got himself in even more trouble because in a recent candidate forum, he was talking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's decision to endorse his primary opponent, Jamal Bowman, and the rhetoric that he used maybe was just a wee bit hyperbolic. This is what I'm talking about. This is not a dictatorship. This is the democracy. We shouldn't have one person from high, even though she's a colleague of mine, think that she can annoy whoever is elected to Congress. That's not what democracy is all about. So I'm tried and true. I've been there. I've worked hard. I've done things for people. As I said to people, two-year term, I ask for a renewal of my contract for another two years. I mean, what else is there to say? Has he not already shown his true colors to every single person in that district? He is equating a political endorsement with dictatorship. Now, I think it's good that AOC endorsed Jamal Bowman. I wish that you would endorse more primary challengers. But if, according to him, an endorsement is comparable to dictatorship, which doesn't even make sense. That's part of democracy, then I'm sure that he's going to denounce the endorsement that Nancy Pelosi gave to him, correct? He was also endorsed by the Congressional Black Caucus. So I'm sure that he's going to reject their endorsement wholeheartedly, right? And while we're at it, while we're talking about democracy and really strengthening our democracy, then I'm sure that last year when the DCCC was going to war with vendors who were working with candidates who were primary and corporate Democrats, that he was on the side of the people speaking out against the DCCC. I'm sure that earlier this year, when there were widespread reports about superdelegates wanting to subvert the will of the people, if Bernie Sanders did in fact end up with a plurality of delegates, you know, he aired on the side of democracy and wanted the people to make their decision and didn't want institutions and individuals influencing the democratic process.  So I mean what we're dealing with here is a whiny, entitled, elitist Democrat who thinks that that seat is owed to him. Never mind the fact that he didn't set foot in his district once during a global pandemic. But now he's angry that since he's not there, his opponent is getting endorsements of other lawmakers. Well maybe you should be there. Maybe rather than complaining about the fact that you have a primary opponent, you actually just try to do better, actually propose legislation that your constituents want. Try to actually perform, do your job. But no, he just wants to keep that seat warm. It doesn't matter that he's not making a difference. He just wants to be there because he's been there forever. I believe he's been there since 1988, which is basically the entire day of my life. What have you done, Elliot Angle? What have you done besides implement terrible policies and propose terrible policies? What have you done? Nothing. So the fact that he has the nerve to whine about AOC's endorsement and equate that to a dictatorship saying that an endorsement is not democracy or it flies in the faces of democracy, whatever he's trying to imply.  This guy is clearly not fit to be a lawmaker.  Support Jamal Bowman. Go to BowmanforCongress.com, donate to him and help him defeat this ghoul because Elliot Angle doesn't actually care about the people that he's supposed to represent. He's been in Congress for decades and he hasn't done anything.  He can't handle the fact that he's actually being challenged. He can't handle the fact that democracy actually is playing out because he has a competitive primary opponent.  He's insufferable. And the people in his district need to realize that this isn't someone who cares about them. He's not even doing the bare minimum. He's just warming the seat in Congress but doesn't actually want to fight for them, doesn't actually want to improve their lives. So, I mean, the people in this district will be making this decision shortly. They deserve better. So support Jamal Bowman and actually get yourself a representative because you currently don't have one. You don't have one. He's not a representative. This is the absence of leadership. This is a coward who is just looking out for his own career. He's made that incredibly clear during the course of this primary. And if you vote for him, then I'm sorry, you're part of the problem. He doesn't care about you. So stop supporting Democrats like this.


From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting FutureCloud, one event, a world of opportunities. Brought to you by Cisco. Okay, we're here with Kastu Das, who's the Senior Vice President General Manager of Cloud and Compute at Cisco, and Vijay Venagopal, who is the Senior Director for Product Management for Cloud Compute at Cisco. KD, Vijay, good to see you guys, welcome. Great to see you, Dave. Good to be here. KD, let's talk about cloud. You and I, last time we were face to face was in Barcelona, we loved talking about cloud. And I always say to people, look, Cisco's not a hyperscaler, but the big public cloud players, they're like giving you a gift. They spent almost, actually over $100 billion last year on CapEx, the big four. So you can build on that infrastructure. Cisco's all about hybrid cloud. So help us understand the strategy there, maybe how you can leverage that build out. And importantly, what are customers telling you they want out of hybrid cloud? Yeah, no, that's a perfect question to start with, Dave. So, yes, so the hyperscalers have invested heavily building out their assets. There's a great lot of innovation coming from that space. There's also a great innovation, a set of innovation coming from open source. And that's another source of a gift, in fact, to the IT community. But when I look at my customers, they're saying, well, how do I, in the context of my business, implement a strategy that takes into consideration everything that I have to manage in terms of my contemporary workloads, in terms of my legacy, in terms of everything my developer community wants to do on DevOps, and really harness that innovation that's built in the public cloud that built an open source that built internally to me. And that naturally leads them down the path of a hybrid cloud strategy. And Cisco's mission is to provide for that imperative the simplest, more powerful platform to deliver hybrid cloud. And that platform is InterSight. We've been investing in InterSight. It's a SaaS service. InterSight delivers to them that bridge between their states of today, their workloads of today, the need for them to be guardians of enterprise-grade resiliency with the agility that's needed for the future, the embracing of cloud native, of new paradigms of DevOps models, the embracing of innovation coming from public cloud and open source. And bridging those two is what InterSight has been doing. That's kind of the crux of our strategy. Of course, we have the entire portfolio behind it to support any version of that, whether that is on-prem in the cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and so forth. But if I understand it correctly from what I heard earlier today, InterSight is really a linchpin of that strategy. Is it not? It really is. Let me take a second to really familiarize those who don't know InterSight with what it is. We started building this platform quite a few years back and we built it ground up to be a immensely scalable, SaaS, super simple hybrid cloud platform. And it's a platform that provides a slew of services inherently. And then on top of that, there are suites of services. There are suites of services that are tied to infrastructure automation, Cisco as well as Cisco partners. There are suites of services that have nothing to do with Cisco products from a hardware perspective and it's got to do with more cloud orchestration and cloud natives. And InterSight and its suite of services continue to kind of increase in pace and velocity of delivery. Just over the last two quarters, we've announced a whole number of things. We'll go a little bit deeper into some of those, but they span everything from infrastructure automation to Kubernetes and delivering Kubernetes as a service to workload optimization and having visibility into your cloud estate, how much it's costing into your on-prem estate, into your workloads and how they're performing. It's got integrations with other tooling with both Cisco, AppD, as well as non-Sysco assets. And then it's got a whole slew of capabilities around orchestration because at the end of the day, the job of IT is to deliver something that works and works at scale that you can monitor and make sure is resilient. And that includes a workflow, an ability to say, do this then do this and do this or it includes other ways of automation like infrastructure code and so forth. So it includes a self-service that span that, but we're inside the world's simplest hybrid cloud platform, rapidly evolving, rapidly delivering new services and we'll talk about some more of those there. Great. Thank you, Katie. Vijay, let's bring you into the discussion. You guys recently made an announcement with HashiCorp, I was stoked because even though it seemed like a long time ago, pre-COVID, I in my predictions post, I said Hashi was a name to watch our data partners, ETR. You look at the survey data and they really have become mainstream. Particularly, we think very important in the whole multi-cloud discussion and as well, they're attractive to customers. They have open source offerings, you can very easily experiment, smaller organizations can take advantage, but if you want to upgrade to enterprise features like clustering or whatever, you could plug right in, not a big complicated migration. So a very, very compelling story there. Why is this important, why is this partnership important to Cisco's customers? Absolutely, Dave, and spot on every single thing that you said. Let me just start by paraphrasing what our mission statement is in the cloud and compute group. Our mission statement is to enable a cloud operating model for hybrid cloud. And what we mean by that is the ability to have extreme amounts of automation, orchestration and observability across your hybrid cloud IT operations. Now, so developers and applications team get a great amount of agility in public clouds and we are on a mission to bring that kind of agility and automation to the private cloud and to the data centers. And InterSight is a key platform and linchpin to enable that kind of operations, cloud-like operations in the private clouds. And a key, as you rightly said, HashiCorp is the, they were the inventors of a concept of infrastructure as code and in Terraform they have the world's number one infrastructure as code platform. So it became a natural partnership for Cisco to enter into a technology partnership with HashiCorp to integrate InterSight with HashiCorp's Terraform to bring the benefits of infrastructure as code to the, to hybrid cloud operations. And we enter into a very tight integration and partnership where we allow developers, DevOps teams and infrastructure administrators to allow the use of infrastructure as code in a SaaS-delivered manner for both public and private cloud. So it's a very unique partnership and a unique integration that allows the benefits of cloud-managed IAC to be delivered to hybrid cloud operations. And we've been very happy and proud to be partnering with HashiCorp on that issue. Yeah, Terraform gets very high marks from customers, a lot of value there. The InterSight integration adds to that value. Let's stay on cloud-native for a minute. We all talk about cloud-native. KD was sort of mentioning before, you got the core apps, you want to protect those, make sure they're enterprise-grade, but they got to be cool as well for developers. You're connecting to other apps in the cloud or wherever. How are you guys thinking about this cloud-native trend? What are the moves you're making in this regard? I mean, cloud-native is one of the paramount ID trends of today, and we're seeing massive amounts of adoption of cloud-native architectures in all modern applications. Now, cloud-native has become synonymous with Kubernetes these days, and Kubernetes has emerged as a de facto cloud-native platform for modern cloud-native app development. Now, what Cisco has done is we have created a brand new SaaS-delivered Kubernetes service that is integrated with InterSight. We call it the InterSight Kubernetes Service, or IKS, and this just geared a little over one month ago. Now, what InterSight Kubernetes Service does is it delivers a cloud-managed and cloud-delivered Kubernetes service that can be deployed on any supported target infrastructure. It could be a Cisco infrastructure, it could be a third-party infrastructure, or it could even be public cloud. But think of it as Kubernetes anywhere delivered as SaaS managed from InterSight. So very powerful capability that we've just released into InterSight to enable the power of Kubernetes and cloud-native to be used anywhere. But today, we made a very important announcement because we have today announced the brand new Cisco Service Mesh Manager, the Cisco Service Mesh Manager, which is available as an extension to IKS or to InterSight. Basically, we see service meshes as being the future of networking, right? In the past, we had layer two networking and layer three networking, and now with service meshes, application networking and layer seven networking is the next frontier of networking. But you need to think about networking for the application age very differently, how it is managed, how it is deployed. It needs to be very developer-friendly and developer-centric. And so what we have done is we've built out an application networking strategy and built out the service mesh manager as a very simple way to deliver application networking to the consumers like developers and application teams. This is built on an acquisition that Cisco made recently of Bonsai Cloud, and we've taken the assets of Bonsai Cloud and delivered the Cisco Service Mesh Manager as an extension to IKS that brings the promise of future networking and modern networking to application and developer teams. Got it. Thank you, Vijay. And so, Katie, let's wrap this up. I mean, there was a lot in this announcement today. A lot of themes around openness, heterogeneity, and a lot of functionality and value. Give us your final thoughts. Absolutely. So a couple of things to close on. First of all, InnerSight is the simplest, most powerful hybrid cloud platform out there. It enables that cloud operating model that Vijay talked about, but enables that across cloud. So it saps. It's relatively easy to get into it and give it a spin so that I would highly encourage anybody who's not familiar with it to try it out and anybody who is familiar with it to look at it again because there are probably services in there that you didn't notice or didn't know last time you looked at it because we're moving so fast. So that's the first thing. The second thing I close with is we've been talking about this bridge that's kind of bridging your on-prem, your open source, your cloud estates. And it's so important to make that mental leap because in past generation, we used to talk about integrating technologies together. And then with public cloud, we started talking about move to public cloud, but it's really how do we integrate, how do we integrate all of that innovation that's coming from the hyperscalers, everything they're doing to innovate super fast, all of that innovation that's coming from open source, all of that innovation that's coming from companies around the world, including Cisco, how do we integrate that to deliver an outcome? Because at the end of the day, if you're a cloud ops team, if you're an IT ops team, your job is to deliver an outcome and our mission is to make it super simple for you to do that. So that's the mission we're on and we're hoping that everybody that's excited as we are about how simple we made that. Great, thank you a lot. A lot in this announcement today. Appreciate you guys coming back on and help us unpack some of the details. Thanks so much. Great having you. Thank you, Dave. And thank you everyone for spending some time with us. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech event coverage.


Boys Thank you. That happened on 80. Seems like that dictionary, the new foreign keys handling the optimization of the logs on the applied logs. And just for using replication in 57 and eight without any code change on our side, we got these results. So if you guys are using 57, please analyze 80 and you'll have for free this improvement. Just because our core code change and you could take advantage of that. So it's, this is really, really quite important. And the main reason is that dictionary. It's simplified a lot of things for us for replication and since application is not a single block, we also have that type of optimizations like the JSON file. So on 57 when we replicate the JSON file, we send the full file on eight zero, we just send the changes data. So if you have one gigabyte file and you change one bite on 57, you send one gigabyte on eight, you send one bite only. So you can see what's the scale of this improvement. So if you use JSON files, please go to eight. This is one, another, another big reason. Just one more. And two weeks ago released what we call consistent reads on group application. You can read consistent data on every member. So you write on the primary and you can read anywhere without reasoning if they'll be still it or not. That is insured by the group itself. And we have some charts here. And this is the worst case scenario. We set the guarantee or the label on all transactions. And you can see that the eventual, the default one that we have is the blue one. If we set the guarantee level as before, we have a small decrease here. And if we set to after, then you go to half of the throughput. But again, this is the worst case scenario. Ideally, you should set only on the transactions that you really want to have this strong guarantee. But if you guys, okay, I don't want to sink on that, I will enable on all, then we'll have these results, which meaning that even for ensuring consistent reads with the before is really not bad. And it gives a really, really solution for your case. And thank you.


Hi, thank you for your talk. So I would like to ask you what to you is the most interesting thing happening right now around Bitcoin and maybe cryptocurrencies in general and maybe if you have time What is your opinion on proof of stake because there are like people saying it's fundamentally flawed because there is nothing at stake? Well, I'm currently on a diet that reduces my preference for carbohydrates, you know, I'm trying to Prevent diabetes at an age while I still can so I am a very big believer in steak As for proof of stake, I think it's rather interesting But we only have one proof of work and since saga them the works today a Few years ago my main Work was trying to understand just how Bitcoin works at a very fundamental level and keep Understanding it at a deeper and deeper level now my main job is still understanding Bitcoin at a deeper level But also reading about all of the other things that are happening and just when I think I understand Something new comes out and I'm like blown away Five months ago. I did not know anything about segregated witness And then Peter wool pulled something out at a conference and blew my mind away And now that's that I started reading about Lightning Network six months ago. I started understanding it's about 304 months ago to a level of depth And it's blowing my mind There are dozens and dozens of dozens of projects that I know of That excites me tremendously because I can see all of this raw Creativity and and sometimes I think this is really really funny because the banks are like and the government's like We're gonna regulate Bitcoin You have no idea What is going on in this space? You have this caricature version of Bitcoin in 2009 that you're trying to regulate meanwhile Peter wool and Greg Maxwell building confidential transactions and segregated witness and payment channels and Lightning Network and God knows what else and there's thousands of people building interesting things so Yeah, good luck with that. It's it's Overwhelming how many interesting things are happening overwhelming I started writing the second edition of my book and I was like I'll just make a list of the things that are new since I wrote it two years ago or a year and a half ago That I need to add to the book That's a four-page document and I'm needing to edit now Because it won't fit right And by the time I print it I'm gonna have to start working on the third edition list because it will already Be almost obsolete right. That's the nature of putting things on dead trees I Find a lot of the new features fascinating one of the things here's I'm gonna blow your mind by Probably the end of 2016 Bitcoin will have a hybrid proof-of-work proof-of-stake system. What I Didn't see that announcement By the end of 2016 Bitcoin will have a hybrid proof-of-stake system Why and because Lightning Network is a proof-of-stake system and and people haven't yet realized that Lightning Network is a proof-of-stake system in order to set up a functioning channel on Lightning Network you have to commit money to a multi-sig address and The more money you have committed to the multi-sig address the more transaction rates it can handle and the more fees it can generate Locally and the definition of I stake money and it generates a small amount of fees while I have that money staked is a proof-of-stake system only it's a completely Trustless proof-of-stake system based on Bitcoin transactions running on top and guaranteed by Bitcoin's proof-of-work and I only realized this about six months ago That that's what lightning was and I and I then had to go to one of the developers who's writing it and go Just to make sure Am I getting this right? Is this really a proof-of-stake system? Yeah, you could call it that I'm gonna go call it that in Berlin So the thing is Bitcoin is full of surprises and proof-of-stake Could be a really important part of the consensus algorithms in our future What it does allow us to do is scale much further than proof-of-work. So That's a benefit and I think we're gonna see a lot of development


Hi. In this video, we'll be observing the PDF to JSON conversion using Bitescout API server. These are the some of the useful links, which are API server documentation, API server base URL. This is our east hosted URL of the API server publish package. Link to input sample PDF file. Let's get started. First of all, let's visit documentation and get hold of the endpoint for PDF to JSON convert. Here it is. It's slash PDF slash convert slash to slash JSON. For this demo, we'll be using a get request. However, it's recommended we should use a post request for the production environment. If we review parameters, mainly it requires input document URL and URL parameter. Please make sure that input URL is accessible from API server. Now, let's review the input PDF file. Input PDF contains product information in tabular format. We have product name, units and price. In the bottom, we have total units and some of all prices. Okay. We'll be building a get request URL in the browser itself. Let's have a base URL and append an endpoint URL for PDF to JSON conversion. In the end, let's pass the input file URL as a query string. With a full request URL complete, let's execute it. And here's our response. Fast. Isn't it? Let's review the output URL, which points to generated JSON. In the output, we see that it contains table header, all rows of product data, as well as footer information. Everything is neatly formatted JSON. We've configured API server with demo keys. That's a reason some of the data has watermarks. Well, that's it. It's that easy to convert PDF to JSON using API server. Thank you for watching this video.


وأقول في القرآن ما جاءت به آياته فهو الكاريم المنزاله وأقول قال الله جل جلاله والمصطف الهادي ولا أتأوّاله الحمد لله رب العالمين والصلاة والسلام على عبد الله ورسوله نبينا محمد وعلى آله وصحبه أجمعين السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته ورحمة الله وبركاته وبركاته من قرآن لله ملك السماوات والأرض من قرآن لله ملك السماوات والأرض يخلق ما يشاء يهاب لما يشاء إناثا ويهاب لما يشاء الذكور أو يزوجهم ذكرانا وإناثا ويجعلوما يشاء عقيما إنه عليم قدير صورة الشورة بين آية number 49 و آية number 50 نمبر 50 كل شيء في الارض والأرض يجب على الله عز وجل الله عز وجل هو الملك الله عز وجل هو مالكي يوم الدين الله سبحانه وتعالى كل شيء في الارض والأرض يجب علىه لذلك ما نرى من الملعب are gifts from الله سبحانه وتعالى لذلك الله يجب على كل شيء في الارض الله يجب على الله الله يجب على الله whatever He wants He gives male children to whoever He wants and He gives female children to whoever He wants or He brings them together and gives male and female children and whoever He wants He makes them barren He gives them no children at all indeed He is عليم قدير He is knowing of everything and He is able to do everything this ayah is one of the most fundamental proofs that our children are a gift from Allah عز وجل because Allah سبحانه وتعالى said يهب يهب يهب الله يجب على كل شيء من الملعب to whoever He wants and He gives the gift of female children to whoever He wants and He gives the gift of putting together male and female children by a mix of boys and girls to whoever He wants and whoever He wants He leaves them without any children at all and that's the nature of a gift right so Allah سبحانه وتعالى He gives this gift of children and to some people He gives only boys to some He gives only girls to some He gives a mix of boys and girls and to some He makes them without or He makes it that they are without children at all and He gives them a mix of boys and girls and He gives them without children at all and that is from the علم of Allah سبحانه وتعالى from the knowledge of Allah and from His قدرة from His immense and perfect ability and perfect knowledge that He distributes children in this way and Subhan Allah in Islam there is no there is no kind of stigma attached to any of these situations when Allah سبحانه وتعالى recognizes that this situation came from Allah it came from Allah سبحانه وتعالى that you have only boys and don't have any girls and you see the family that has only boys and Subhan Allah they would wish for a girl and there are some families that have only girls and perhaps they would wish for a boy and there are some families that don't have any they don't have any children at all and we know how much that how much a person wishes to have so all of this is a gift from Allah سبحانه وتعالى and also this why I brought this ayah here is to emphasize to you and to make you think about the situation of the one that doesn't have any children and He makes whoever He wishes barren without children Subhan Allah perhaps there would be a rich person from the richest of the people on this earth and they would give everything on the earth جميع and all of it to be able to have a child but Allah سبحانه وتعالى He made them the situation that they don't have any children that's from the knowledge of Allah and His ability and the fact that Allah سبحانه وتعالى distributes the risk to whoever He wants some people He gives money some people He doesn't give money some people He gives children and Allah سبحانه وتعالى gives and distributes His risk however He wants so I brought this ayah for two reasons number one to establish that children are a gift from Allah and when you have a gift you should always be grateful it's a gift Allah سبحانه وتعالى He spoke about it using the word يهابو to give a gift Allah سبحانه وتعالى then whenever you're given a gift you should be grateful and when the gift is something that people crave for and people would spend all the money that they have to achieve and people try and they go for medical treatments and they go for all kinds of things which are both draining upon health and upon financial resources only so that they can get this gift from Allah سبحانه وتعالى so what is the situation like how grateful should we be for the gift of children for the gift of children and just remember those who don't have any children and how hard it is for them to be appreciative of this gift that Allah سبحانه وتعالى has given you and every gift you are given deserves gratitude and that shows us that we have to be grateful to Allah سبحانه وتعالى for everything that He has given us and it also shows you that if you are from those people who are not able to have any children until now you haven't been able to have any children but it also shows you that you need to seek this blessing from the one who has it you can't ask a gift from the person that doesn't have that gift to give it to you so like the people run around maybe perhaps you see some of the people that even go to the grave and they pray and they ask the person in the grave to give them children or they go to the magician or they go to the healer and perhaps some of them put complete faith in the doctor and they ask the doctor to give them children not in the sense of just going for medical treatment and believing that the blessing comes from Allah but actually believing and having complete trust and hope that the doctor can give them children and ultimately you need to realize that none of those people this gift is not in their hands they don't own it they're not from the people or they're not the one that Allah said اللك السماوات والأرض to Allah belongs everything in the heavens and the earth Allah creates what he wants Allah gives this gift to whoever he wants so if you're from those people who haven't been able to have children until now and I say until now because there is no reason why Allah سبحانه وتعالى will not decree for you to have children at a time that he knows سبحانه وتعالى we're going to talk about the story of Zakaria and likewise إبراهيم إبراهيم والسلام إبراهيم their children and having children late in life this is in the hands of Allah سبحانه وتعالى but you need to seek this gift from the one who controls it and the one who possesses it and that is Allah سبحانه وتعالى he's the one that controls this he's the one that possesses it so if you haven't been able to have children and you are one of those people who want to have children are trying to have children but you couldn't then make sure it is Allah that you are asking and that doesn't mean that you can't seek a medical course or a medical treatment or you can't seek a means that is from the means that Allah has placed in this earth in order to be able to have children but ultimately it is from Allah سبحانه وتعالى so attach your heart to Allah and make your dua towards Allah and put your worship and your effort towards Allah سبحانه وتعالى and then take the causes and the means that Allah سبحانه وتعالى has placed and that's a principle in everything that we have in this world and everything that we want in this world whatever it is, whether it is of wealth or children or anything from the زينة الحياة الدنيا from the adornment of this world is that we ask it from Allah سبحانه وتعالى and we put our heart and attach our heart to Allah سبحانه وتعالى and then we take whatever means Allah سبحانه وتعالى has made permissible for us to take on that topic Allah سبحانه وتعالى و البنون زينة الحياة الدنيا و الباقيات الصالحات خير عند ربك ثواب و خير أملا سورة الكهف آية number 46 الله عز وجل said wealth and children are the adornment of the life of this world and the باقيات الصالحات باقيا it means something that remains and obviously صالحة is something which is righteous the righteous remains or the remaining righteous things are better in the sight of your Lord in reward and better in hope سبحانه وتعالى think about this آية what a beautiful آية and we can definitely take a benefit from this in terms of our children are in نعمة that Allah عز وجل he described wealth and children as the adornment of this world the adornment of this worldly life it's like they are an adornment something that makes this worldly life beautiful decorates it and makes it beautiful and makes it pleasing is that you have wealth and children and we said this is an evidence that wealth and children are both from the provision of Allah سبحانه وتعالى and the things that Allah عز وجل gives to people as a gift he gives it to some people and to some he gives very few and to some he doesn't give any at all سبحانه وتعالى but Allah عز وجل said والباقيات والصالحات the righteous remaining the things that are righteous that remain so this is an interesting question what are the باقيات والصالحات what are these righteous things which remain that are better in reward and better in better in hope what are these things like hoping for money how many live their life hoping for children seeking the rewards the worldly rewards of having children like someone continuing your lineage like someone who is going to serve you when you are older like someone who is going to provide income for you when your income has ceased and so on these are things that people seek from the rewards of the worldly life from the matters of the worldly life from the day they wish for for children so what are the باقيات والصالحات the scholars of Tafsir they have a lot of different opinions but here all of their different opinions they come back to one thing and that are the باقيات والصالحات refer to the righteous good deeds the righteous good deeds and that could be the Salawat the five daily prayers the things that the scholars mentioned but ultimately all of their opinions generally speaking can be summarized in the sentence that are the righteous good deeds the righteous good deeds those are more important than what Allah has given you from wealth and children and this gives us a principle and that is that Allah gives the dunya to those whom He loves and those whom He doesn't but He only gives the آخرة to those whom He loves Allah عز وجل gives the dunya to those who He loves there are people who Allah loves in this dunya who have children many children there are people whom Allah loves in this dunya that have lots of money there are people whom Allah عز وجل hates in this dunya that have many children and there are people whom Allah hates in this dunya that have lots of money ultimately you having children or having money and wealth doesn't make you beloved to Allah it doesn't make you from the people who will have a high standing in the آخرة what matters are the good deeds that you put forward by here there's an interesting subtle point a little subtlety or a little subtle point here and that is you can use your wealth and your children to be from the باقيات الصالحة you can make it from the deeds that remain by putting that effort in and by thanking Allah for that blessing and using that blessing to please Allah the مال and the بانون the wealth and the children that are the زينة the decoration of this worldly life can become from the باقيات الصالحة from the righteous good deeds that really matter by using the blessings you have been given by Allah if Allah has given you that blessing if Allah has given you the blessing whether it be wealth whether it be children or anything else from the blessings health or free time or knowledge either knowledge of the worldly life or knowledge of the religion which is even more important whatever Allah has given you use it and make it from the باقيات الصالحة don't make it from something which is nothing more than باقيات الصالحة nothing more than the decoration of this world because that doesn't distinguish the righteous from the people who are not righteous because Allah gives this dunya to those who he loves or those whom he loves and those whom he doesn't love but Allah only gives the آخر to those whom he loves so use and this is again another emphasis upon the blessing of your children use the blessing of children to get near to Allah don't make it something that just decorates your worldly life for you that just makes your life look beautiful but make it something that really remains يوم القيامة and is something which is worth it and you have really shown gratitude to Allah عز وجل for that particular blessing Allah عز وجل said that that people are people زينا للناس people have it's been made beautiful to people the love of الشهوات the love of their desires people's desires love that they have for those desires have been made beautiful for them whether it be women children piles of gold and silver branded horses cattle or land these are all from the things that have been made beautiful to people and I brought this because it is a نعمة of Allah عز وجل all of these things are from the نعم of Allah سبحانه و تعالى all of these things are from the blessings of Allah عز وجل and نساء to have a righteous wife البنين to have children القاناء طير المقنطرتي من الذهبي والفضة gold and silver in piles upon piles horses cattle land all of these are from the نعمة of Allah عز وجل but ultimately they are from the things that can be used for good or for evil and can be used to please Allah or can be used to anger Allah or can become from the things which are just neutral which don't benefit you anything deny the benefit you know they harmed you so again it's about seeing the blessing of children look at how Allah عز وجل mentioned this the children he mentioned it second in the list of these things that people love to have so if you've been given something people love to have you have to use it in a way that is pleasing to Allah عز وجل this is the مطاعر الحياة الدنيا it is the provision and the temporary enjoyment of this life but Allah عز وجل the final destination and the beauty and the amazing nature of the آخرة this is what is with Allah سبحانه وتعالى and we said the hadith in which the prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم said الدنيا مطاع this world is nothing but a temporary enjoyment and the best temporary enjoyment is المرأة والصالحة a righteous wife and Allah عز وجل mentioned after the righteous wife Allah عز وجل mentioned from the مطاعر الدنيا from the adornment and the temporary enjoyment of the dunya is children and so children are a blessing and a gift from Allah عز وجل who controls everything in the heavens and everything in the earth that's all we have time for in this episode إن شاء الله تعالى we're going to be continuing with the theme that our children are a gift in the next episode but we're also going to look at the fact that our children are a test and a trial and so it's not just that our children are a gift and a blessing but they're also a test and a trial and we're going to look at that also in the next episode إن شاء الله تعالى that's what Allah made easy for me to mention in the time that I have and Allah عز وجل knows best والصالحة والسلام على نبينا محمد وعلى آله وصحبه أجمعين السلام عليكم if you're enjoying these videos and you'd like to keep up to date with all of the courses we're going to be running make sure you head over to amauathome.com