Good morning, everyone. My name is Penny Zeta and I'm so excited to be back at ProductCon and to talk to you all today about polymathism in product management. Don't worry, I will be defining what polymathism is throughout the talk, but before I do, so let's just dig in with a little bit about myself right away. I actually began my career in management consulting, which started off really broad. It was really there that I learned how to ramp up on things quickly and draw connections across areas. I had the opportunity to sample lots of different industries working with Fortune 500 companies in tech, retail, and pharma, and all the well-building skills in business strategy. Then I became really curious about the startup space and just the dynamism of the industry. I spent a lot of time with early and growth stage companies and it was there that I worked a lot with founding CEOs who had these really great moonshot visions and it really helped me fall in love with product development overall. Didn't have my first quote unquote proper product management role until I went to American Express and there is where I really honed in and learned about the traditional core product skillset. I worked across a bunch of different areas there as well included mobile, loyalty, mark tech, and digital platforms. Currently I serve as the head of product development at Amazon for Prime Gaming. So I oversee product tech design and the TPM org and it's Prime Gaming basically is this awesome free benefit program that gives away access to games and game content and a monthly Twitch sub for anyone that's actually a prime member. So if we were to look at all of my road titles here, my career path probably feels pretty linear but within and across each of these areas I took a lot of risk, whether it was changing industries, changing functional areas, taking on new leadership responsibilities and not highlighted across all these are some of my endeavors in yoga and art in nonprofits and in psychology because that stuff never really makes it to the core bio slide. And honestly, at one point I was calling it career bingo because it felt like every new role was so different from my last and I was worried I was taking steps back or starting over and there were certain points where I questioned whether or not I wanted to do something that was so different versus kind of progressing in my career. But the issue that I had was I was someone who's very, very curious and I'm a lifelong learner. I didn't have the vocabulary for it historically but what I've actually been doing over the years is cultivating polymathic traits like curiosity and resilience. And I was really integrating learnings from each of these different roles so that new and more doors kept opening up that wouldn't have otherwise been accessible for me. And I honestly wouldn't be as fulfilled and in the position that I've been today. So which leads me to the focus of today's talk. I'm gonna chat through three different things. First, I'm gonna finally define what polymaths are. I'm gonna talk about why PMs should strive to be them. And finally, I'm gonna share a learning model on how to cultivate polymathic traits. So what are polymaths? For those of you who are hearing the word for the first time, you might be thinking it sounds like some terrible school course or a lofty title, but put simply polymaths are individuals who know a lot about multiple things. To better understand them, it's actually helpful to first recognize that there's an idea of generalists versus specialists. So specialists have deep functional, technical and domain mastery in usually one or two areas. They spend years living and breathing that subject matter and are experts in a neural field. Examples of specialists include neurosurgeons, environmental chemists or data scientists where it makes sense for them to hone in and have that more narrow brain focus and very deep skillset. On the other side of the spectrum, we have generalists. They're characterized by broad but shallow knowledge across many areas. And while they're versatile, they've also been criticized as jacks of all trades and masters of none. Examples of generalists might include folks who are project managers, management consultants or human resource managers. And over the years, there's been a lot of debate and fun back and forth in terms of whether it makes more sense to be a specialist or a generalist. For example, in the mid 1800s, we had the Industrial Revolution and with that came a division of labor and factory lines and rise of specialization. Then we had, in the late 20th century, we had generalists seeing a rise because of things like complexity theory that really emphasized how things are interconnected and why it's important to have a more holistic understanding. Just in the last two decades alone, literature has also bounced back and forth between these where we had Malcolm Gladwell talking about in his book, Outliers, how there's this idea of a 10,000 hours of practice goal that's needed to cultivate expertise or specialism. And then on the other side, we have David Epstein's book who came out and basically it was called Range and it talks about why generalists actually triumph in a specialist world. And today my talk isn't really about why one is better than the other, it's actually to focus on an alternate path. And the alternate path is polymaths. So polymaths fall in the middle and they kind of straddle both sides of the spectrum. There's a date around the precise definition but I would define them as individuals who have at least three areas of deep knowledge. So again, they have the deep knowledge but they also have the broadness that's more than what you see in specialists. And polymathism again, leans into both sides because it leans into the innate multifaceted curiosity we as human beings have that child like wonder. And it also balances it with meaningful depth of expertise. And examples of careers here for polymaths can range quite a bit, but they usually excel in things like leadership, innovation, entrepreneurship and you guessed it, product management. So let's break down some of the key traits that make polymaths so unique and so different. The first one I wanna call out is their worldview. Polymaths tend to have an open and a growth mindset. They also excel in first principles thinking. And first principle thinking is where you kind of see things as deconstructed foundational elements for foundational truths that serves as building blocks for things. So when you can kind of deconstruct something you can also recreate things from those smaller pieces. They have this insatiable curiosity and it's not just in terms of one thing it's actually really, really broad interests and those interests are often they go beyond just adjacent fields. They have the propensity to become experts in the areas that they're interested in. So they can actually dive deep, they can scrutinize things, see if they actually make sense or not and they can reflect on it to actually gain mastery. Or they have this associative and integrative mindset. So they're able to connect the dots across lots of different areas. They recognize that things are relative and they were able to see interdisciplinary patterns. And five, they have this amazing voracious drive. It pushes them to embrace things like self-learning and to continue at things or adapt despite seeing setbacks or challenges. So it's really like, it's arguable in terms of all the skillsets but these are the core things that, usually when we look at polymaths that we see that they actually have. So let's talk a little bit about some well-known polymaths and just get some examples of those. As far as really well-known ones, one of the OGs that come to mind when we think of Renaissance polymaths is Leonardo da Vinci. We know a lot about him from his artwork with the Mona Lisa, but it's also good to recognize that he leveraged his expertise in fields like science, engineering and architecture as well. Second, we have Ben Franklin, again, another well-known polymath. He specialized across multiple areas in politics, philosophy and science. And without him, we wouldn't have things like bifocals or lightning rods or our modern day understanding of electricity overall. Natalie Portman, very well-known actress, but in addition to that, she's a dancer, she's a director, she's a multilingualist and she's also made a lot of contributions to social activism. And finally, we have Elon Musk. Elon is probably arguably one of the most well-known modern day polymaths today. He studied physics and economics. He programmed from the age of 10 and he also helped found a lot of companies across payments, energy, space and more.  It's to illustrate how mastery across areas can actually cultivate holistic excellence and how each of these individuals had more than a singular purpose or mission in life or at least they had different ways of manifesting their calling in life, which leads us nicely into why PM should strive to be polymathic. So let's start off with, just understanding the evolution of product management. As a discipline, it's evolved greatly over the years, but it would kind of first emerge in response to this need for a holistic market-driven and cross-functional approach to product development. We're all probably too familiar with this next graphic with how product managers really need to have deep business and financial acumen. They need to have deep technical knowledge and they need to have user empathy. And on top of that, they need to be able to integrate all of these to actually do their role. So this graphic here clearly illustrates how PM product management as a role is expected to be polymathic by nature. Great. Does this mean that we all get to say we're polymaths added to our LinkedIn profiles and business cards? Not quite. I believe that PMs are well-positioned to become high-value polymaths, but it doesn't mean that every PM is won by default or without working on or exhibiting the traits that I kind of mentioned earlier. In fact, I've actually seen a little bit of erosion in polymathism in product managers over time due to a number of reasons. The first is that there's been a dilution of the practice. A lot of this has come from academicization, which is a word, and generalization. In the past, there wasn't really a playbook on what a PM is. So individuals would have to gain deep expertise across areas and make the connections themselves. With the rise of things like product training, certifications, boot camps and frameworks, we've made the discipline a lot more accessible and standardized, but some folks have taken this at face value and only focused on that like narrow middle piece. So they only focused on understanding agile or user story writing skills, and they've actually lost sight and lost some of the deep expertise across those three core domains. A second trend I've noticed is hyper-specialization within the PM skill set. So PMs are narrowing their expertise to a specific product area, which has been giving rise to multiple quote unquote types of PMs. So you might have a PM that focuses on new ventures and a PM that focuses on growth or a platform PM, and having this degree of hyper-specialization has actually come at the cost of versatility and just like a lack of understanding of the entire value chain. If you look at Amazon itself, it actually has four different role titles for PMs. There is product manager, there is product manager MBA, there is product manager tech, and there's product manager tech external services. And these all have different skills, expectations, pay bans, but they all fall within the PM umbrella. And because we've hyper-specialized or forced people to hyper-specialized so soon, we find that people are losing a little bit of that curiosity and only focusing on the area that they think is most important. Lastly, I spent a lot of my time mentoring PMs. And one of the things they often come to me about is, I'm thinking about my next role, trying to figure out what I should take next. And oftentimes it comes between, one, a role that's a promotion, but it's probably within the same domain. It might not be as interesting, may not be as novel, it might not be as challenging, or two, something that's completely different, but would expose them to so many new skill sets, maybe it's a different field, and it has a lot of new challenges that they would have to tackle. I mentioned this earlier, I've been at this crossroads many times in my career. Anecdotally, I have to say that I have found an outsized number of PMs that end up choosing to go for the first option. So they choose to go for the promotion, staying within the same domain, and maybe what might feel like a little bit of a safer bet. I'm not really sure what's causes. Maybe it's because product management itself has become more well-defined as a career with linear progression, a clear trajectory of different titles that we feel we need to pursue, or maybe it's because the industry is just pushing us to specialize sooner, or just a trade-off between curiosity and perceived progress that happens over time. But I find this to be really unfortunate. So I wanna talk a little bit about the benefits of polymathism and some of the advantages, and hopefully convince you all on why embracing it will help us combat this erosion and realize our full potential as PMs. So benefits of being a polymath, one of the biggest things that polymathism helps with is this ability to solve wicked problems. Wicked problems is a concept popularized by Horace Riddle and Melvin Weber, and these were two social scientists from the 1960s. Basically, they argued that traditional problem-solving approaches are great for something called quote-unquote tamed problems. And tamed problems, excuse me, are typically well-defined. They have limited variables. They're within a domain, and solutions for them are easily evaluated for effectiveness. So examples of this might be solving a back problem, fixing a flat tire, or resolving a bug in software. Wicked problems, on the other hand, are a lot more gnarly. They're often, as you can see here, they're often highly complex. They're uncertain and they're changing. They have ethical and social dimensions, and they also have multiple interdependencies. And there's also no definitive one-size-fits-all solution. So examples of this might include designing an effective healthcare system. Another wicked problem could be how do we promote peace in regions of conflict or solve the obesity epidemic? Or how do we combat income inequality? So you can see that in all of these examples, it's not enough to be a deep expert in one field. You actually usually have to be open to ideas from different fields and be able to adapt to changing conditions. And you also have to be really a debt at collaboration across disciplines. And many of these are usually solved with an atypical combination of skills. So thinking about this, it kind of makes sense why polymathic PMs are well-equipped to solve wicked problems. So I wanna talk through next a couple of real-world examples and the polymaths as well as polymathic products that were developed to tackle them. Our first wicked problem that I'm gonna talk a little bit about is the global water crisis. So worldwide, there are 771 million people that lack access to clean water. That's one in 10 people on the planet can take this opportunity to drink a glass. That's super, really quick. But I am super grateful to be able to do that. Also over 800 children under the age of five die every day from diseases linked to unsafe drinking water or poor sanitation. Mikhail Bestregard-Fronston, he's a Swiss entrepreneur and philanthropist. And he has a really diverse background that includes running a textile business. He started an aerospace company and he's also advised the Prime Minister of Denmark and acted as an elder for the Lehiya tribe in Kenya. So he drew from his really, really diverse expertise across engineering, material science and public health to work against this wicked problem with clean water. And he helped develop something called Lifesraw. Lifesraw is a product. It's basically a portable water filtration device that's been designed to filter out contaminants, bacteria, parasites so that people can actually drink directly from things like streams, rivers or lakes. And last year alone, over 3.3 million people were able to receive access to clean drinking water because of Lifesraw and its programs. Our second wicked problem is around payment acceptance for small businesses. So small businesses have a close place in my heart after having worked in the credit card industry that's been really, really focused on them. But every business we know of today really started out as a dream that then turned into a small business and then maybe grew from there. Small businesses have really been the backbone of the country and they basically continually allow individuals who are inspired to bring innovative ideas to life. However, historically, small businesses have been at a disadvantage, especially when it came to accepting payments, specifically credit card payments due to things like high cost, complex infrastructure, limited access to payment processing services. Also, payments having worked in the industry, it's really, really complex. It's highly regulated. The industry constantly has new technologies that are coming out. There's really, really diverse customer preferences and there's also a lot of complex legal considerations. So all this kind of contributed to the fact that small businesses were struggling to scale and to actually compete. Jack Dorsey, who we're probably all well familiar with is a well-known innovator. His interest in endeavors has spanned across tech, art, sociology, politics and more. Years after he founded Twitter, Dorsey founded Square and Square is an app-based POS that allows individuals and small businesses to reliably and affordably accept card payments anywhere where they basically are using their phone. And it's really revolutionized commerce and it's used by over 2 million merchants today. The interesting thing about Jack Dorsey's story, however, is that when he first sought out funding for Square, he actually distributed a list called 140 Reasons Why Square Will Fail. And he gave this to investors, obviously with some counterpoints. But one of the reasons that he cited was the doubt that he, someone who was a guy who invented a microblogging service for a social media company could take on the financial services industry without any experience in it. And here I wanna demonstrate how, yes, he didn't have that background, but he had interest in the area. He believed that he had the skills and he had the tenacity. So he didn't have the payments expertise, but he had the perseverance and he knew he could learn it and contribute it quickly because he had that diverse foundational background that was interdisciplinary across programming, design, communications and entrepreneurship that made it easier for him. Our last bucket problem has to do with language learning barriers. So historically things like accessibility costs and the way language was traditionally taught in classrooms have been deterrents to education and communication and this has led to downstream impacts in terms of economic inequality. Louis Van Aan is a polymath that grew up in Guatemala. And that's where he saw firsthand how opportunities were really limited to those with English proficiency. He was lucky enough to be able to go to school and learn English and he wanted to be able to do the same for others. His actual first claim to fame was as the inventor of CAPTCHA and re-CAPTCHA. And he drew it from his experience there and prior interests in computer science, in games and in crowdsourcing to create Duolingo. So I speak about Duolingo a lot because it's an app that I love. It basically offers free lessons for over 40 languages. It uses kind of this gamified teaching approach to make learning more engaging and more fun. And it's now the most frequently downloaded education app in the world. And it's really helped with a lot of problems across immigration assistance, travel prep, language preservation and career advancement for millions. So in addition to helping us solve wicked problems, polymathism also helps with future proofing. And by future proofing, I mean future proofing ourselves as PMs. So I know that we've all been inundated with recent advances in AI. So just for fun, I decided to ask chat GBT if AI will likely replace polymaths. I'll just get started here, but spoiler alert, there's no surprise that essentially chat GBT says no, it's not likely because of the very traits that make polymaths so unique. So again, that multidisciplinary nuanced contextual understanding that polymaths had, while AI is able to go really, really deep in terms of its learning, but it doesn't do as good of a job in terms of integrating and cross referencing across areas. And again, if we think about the future more and more industries are becoming less siloed, they're starting to intersect. And at the intersection point is where we're gonna see a lot of growth opportunities in a lot of ways where we can add value as polymaths. So that's one area. The other thing that I wanna also call out though is that polymathism, a big part of it is that resilience despite things like economic downturns with the layoffs that have happening as the PMs that I know that exhibit polymathic traits, they were the ones that were, during the downtime, they were learning new skills. They were figuring out how to pivot and they were the ones that were emerging with roles in completely different industries but also had some tie into what they did historically. So again, just an example of why exhibiting these traits can help us in the future. So the last thing that I wanna mention is that polymathism really can help serve as a contributor to success. So researchers have found that persistent intellectually challenging hobbies like music, art, chess, programming, these are stronger predictors of career success than grades and IQ exams. Other studies have found that Nobel Prize winners which as compared to regular scientists and Nobel Prize winners are again, these esteemed folks who have the highest honors in their domains, they're 25 times more likely to sing, dance, or act, 17 times more likely to create visual art, 12 times more likely to write poetry and four times more likely to be musicians. And if you think about it, you might be like, okay, is this just because talented people are just talented or great at a lot of things? And it might be really easy just to chalk it up to talent but in truth, learning these other areas takes a lot of a lot of dedication, a lot of knowing how to learn. So it isn't just raw talent itself, which leads us to how do we cultivate polymathism? Say we don't necessarily have some of this today is are there certain tactics that we can employ to make us better at it? Hopefully at this point I've convinced you all on the advantages of being polymathic and I'll focus a little bit more on a practical learning model that you can use to apply. So let's first ground ourselves with this idea with the intention of our learning. Most of you are familiar with the Peruto principle or the 80-20 rule. As a reminder, it's an efficiency theory that believes most things in life are not distributed evenly and that about 80% of the outputs are the result of 20% of the inputs. So 80% of a company's profits comes from about 20% of its customers, 20% of players score 80% of the points in a game and so on. Jake Chapman is an investor who took this principle further and he posits that if we believe that the 80-20 rule is divisible, we're actually gonna start seeing and get even more lopsided as it progresses. So let's say 20% of the inputs is 4% and that generates 80% of 80% of the outputs are 64%. So put simply, 20% generates 80%, 4% generates 64%. And as you kind of continue doing this math down, it actually leads to some pretty astonishing force multiplication. He takes this further and applies it to kind of five stages of learning. And in these stages, there's varying degrees of proficiency from layman to master. And he kind of assumes that it takes about 20 years to achieve mastery. So just to bring this to life in terms of how we should think about this, let's imagine that we have 100 points worth of learning that we can spend. We can decide to spend all of 100 points in one area to get to about 99% output or mastery in one domain. Alternatively, we can say we'll spend 20% of our points or 20 points in one area and get 80% out. So as a journeyman, and we could do this five times. So we can do, we can be a journeyman for five different domains versus just a master for just one domain. Intuitively, this sounds probably about right as you think about it. Just for example, two months coding class, those boot camps, they probably teach beginners the basics before they move on to roles as entry level apprentices. So now this is obviously isn't 100% accurate representation of the world, but the point here is that the distribution shows the efficiency value of diversifying our learning. And it's also helpful to go into your learning with somewhat of an idea of what your objectives are upfront in regards to the degree of mastery you're trying to achieve, as well as how much time you're willing to invest. So we can actually dig into the learning model now. So polymorphic learning is often self-guided. It stems from this innate curiosity or motivation to obtain knowledge. And it's helpful to structure these into three stages as, again, as a guide with different types of learning questions and learning activities within each. I've seen a lot of different learning agendas that will break things down into more granular pieces. But at the end of the day, it's really around what you're trying to figure out, what you wanna know and what you're gonna do to be able to actually learn it and apply it. And I really think that learning questions are really important because that's really what's gonna help guide your studies across each of these different areas. So this looks a little bit like an hour class. And the first phase goes pretty wide. So it's called going broad. And this is a phase where when you're starting out, you're asking broader questions. You're gonna be trying to understand things that are more foundational in nature, or you're gonna try to clarify some concepts or basics of your subject. And you're also probably gonna be, from an action perspective, you're gonna be seeking more guidance and input from professionals. And a lot of the content that you're gonna consume is probably gonna be more expert generated, more authoritative. So it can include things like textbooks or intro classes. And as you move from this, you go a little bit narrower.  And this is where you, after you have more of a baseline area of knowledge, you might break things down into modules and within your topic and kind of go deeper into those different areas.  And the types of questions and hypotheses that you have here are gonna be a little bit more complex. You're also gonna start drawing from a broader set of resources. So it's not just gonna be expert generated. You might look at user generated content as well. And you're also gonna be starting to apply more of what you're learning through engaging with peers or intellectual debate. The final phase is kind of where you go back wide again. And this is the integration phase. And here it's where you're kind of integrating what you've learned with other areas of domain of expertise that you already have. So here your questions are gonna be more associative in nature as you try to find relationships between what you've learned and what you know. And you'll also know enough to start generating some original thoughts and perspectives and be able to teach others. So there's two things that I wanna call out here. The first is that as you move from just like novice to master year go from top to bottom, your learning actually will become a lot more self-directed.  You're gonna go from like more expert generated stuff again to stuff that really suits your specific needs. You're gonna become a lot more discerning in terms of the credibility and relevance of what you're using to learn. The second thing that I wanna call out is that these phases might feel distinct as you move through them from kind of the top where you're more consuming knowledge to the bottom where you're contributing back, but you should be implementing your learning throughout each of these phases. And I really think it's important to mention that you do not want to let your knowledge outpace application. So I'm gonna repeat that again. Do not let knowledge outpace application. And that's really important because, yes, it's great to learn things, but in order to really synthesize it, you actually have to apply it. So now that we've routed ourselves with this learning model, I'm gonna take you through just a quick example about just to bring it to life using examples from my own life. A lot of folks sometimes will ask me, how did you go from pharma to retail or from retail to financial services and from financial services to gaming? So let's kind of double click on that last one. So aside from playing games and interning in media and entertainment, I was otherwise like pretty much a nuke when it came to the games industry.  So in terms of how I got started, I started really broad and a lot of the questions I had were basic. It was things like, how big is the games industry? What's the difference between a developer and a publisher? What are the player personas and the key trends that are impacting the space today? And from an actions perspective, I knew that I wanted something that was a little bit more guided, that had an outline and a holistic view of where I should be digging in. So I took an IEP training course and it covered things like the history, genres, principles. It basically gave me this awesome bird's-eye view of every single thing. And I also purchased textbooks that I used as reference guides. I didn't read them from the front to the back, but I used them as reference guides as I was learning new concepts. And I also used expert games resources like Game Pass and New Zoo to really better understand the market. As I dove deeper, I started getting into topics that resonated more with me, which included things like gamification and monetization models. And as I was defining these sub modules, my learning felt like it was oscillating a little bit. I was going deep and coming back out and going deep again on a lot of different topics within the game and space. And the questions I asked became a lot more complex. And from an actions perspective, this is really where I completely inundated myself and embraced a variety of different ways to learn. So again, I spent a lot of time playing games. It's hard to get into the games industry if you don't actually play games. So there are games that I already played, so I tried different genres. And if I couldn't get past a certain level, I just watched people who were way better than me play games. I read a lot of books. I'm a big reader, so I love reading books about gamification in different ways, again, different ways to monetize or interactive storytelling. I went in intended eSports events. So eSports events are an awesome way to see gameplay live. I also watched a ton of YouTube videos. Again, some more of that user-generated content. And I got a chance to understand some more unique perspectives. I also attended games conferences like GDC. And there I sat in undeveloper meetings with my business development team. And I really, I interacted a lot with folks on Twitch as well as at Meetups. And I was able to find a lot of awesome communities that were not only willing to teach, but they also wanted to debate certain things. And above all this, I was fortunate enough to actually work in games starting this time. So I was applying what I was learning every single day to my role. And I worked with a lot of folks who had more tenure and expertise in this space. And it was great because I was doing a lot of learning through us, Moses. So a lot of this might sound like a lot and extremely time-consuming. And it was, I was living and breathing games and I still am. But that's kind of what building proficiency entails. It's the ongoing curiosity that makes you ping-pong from being like, ah, I get it all. I'm a genius. Like I know everything to like, I know nothing.  This is so confusing. And it's really that perseverance to kind of continue past that. So the last phase is the integration phase. And this is where I really doubled down on applying what I was learning. So questions here were around what patterns or trends do I see in games that are related to other fields that I've worked in. I knew enough at this point to form opinions and assess what I believe was going great in the games industry versus what I felt like needed a little bit more innovation or change. And a couple of examples of actions that I actually took. The first was product con last year. I combined a few things. I combined my passion for mentorship with the games experience that I was able to have at that point with my deep product knowledge to create a talk on how to gamify your product career. The next one is from a women impact tech panel. And there's where I combined my background passion in tech, passion for gender equality. And I spoke with peers from different games companies about biases in the games industry and how we can actually work to combat them. And each of these were super, super rewarding because it was a way for me to actually contribute back to this field that I had spent so much time consuming information about. And it really allowed me to synthesize my learnings with the new knowledge with my existing areas of expertise and it really just solidified so much of my learning. So again, I'm going to zoom out a little bit and share more about how this all can fit together. Again, using samples from my own experience. So here are six domains that I feel I have some degree of expertise in, either through work or just recreationally. So I want to walk through kind of my knowledge, how my knowledge in one of these areas actually helped me accelerate my learning or create atypical perspectives in another. So let's start with visual art. I've always loved making art ever since I was a kid, whether it was sketching, painting or digital. I spent a lot of time creating it myself and I learned about things like composition, color theory and design patterns. And one of my consulting roles was for a clothing retailer that was looking to explain globally and at the time, global expansions were my jam. So I was working with them and one of the early meetings that we had, there was just a side debate that they were having about this ad image and looking at it, I called out a few things that I noticed. I was like, well, there's oversaturation, the visual hierarchy is off and the colors that you guys chose were not evoking the right mood for the campaign. I added a few other tidbits that sounded smart and they really impressed them and it worked. And basically they were like, okay, you actually know what you're talking about when it comes to the art space. Do you want to be included in more meetings? So they did, they started folding me more into like some fashion designing graded meetings and it allowed me to earn trust with that team. And one of the things that's really cool was it actually surfaced up a new opportunity. After this project finished, they were starting another project about how to launch their e-commerce experience. And that's when they taught me and said, we trust your strategy charts but we also trust your design and aesthetic understanding and I think you can combine both of them to do this role. So that was pretty awesome. The next comes from my example working in the tech space. And that's where I learned I spent a lot of time helping companies move from waterfall to agile and getting deeper in terms of agile methodology. Around this time is also where I developed a really strong interest in yoga. I will say though, the first class I went to was with a friend. I had a number of variables working against me. It was after a night out. So I was extremely dehydrated. It was big room yoga. So the room was like 105 degrees and it was an advanced class. So folks were doing things like headstands and king pigeon pose and eight angle pose, I think. And at first I was like, this is not for me, you know, a bit much, it's okay. I don't have to be a yogi. Maybe I'll do soul cycle or something like that instead. So that felt a little bit less complex. But afterwards I met up with one of the instructors and he basically explained to me how yoga is really a series of poses that builds off each other. And that's how you kind of can learn to do the more complex ones. And I realized that I actually could apply a lot of what I knew about agile methodology to learning yoga. A lot of it was embracing an iterative approach breaking down these advanced poses into more basic ones that I can master in increments and can build off each other so that I could still feel like I was progressing. And I also experimented with different poses, whether it was more standing poses, more poses that were on the floor. And I recognized that, you know, some of them didn't serve me as well. So if that was the case, I could easily pivot and use some of that learning to be applied somewhere else. I also spent a lot of my time on a weekly basis doing like mini rituals and reflection moments with myself and help having me, you know, figure out what went well, what did it well and kind of adjusting my practice based off of that. My last example brings me to today's world. So I mentioned this earlier, but I spent a chunk of my time working in Fintech for American Express. AmEx has one of the best world-class membership rewards programs. So basically the more that you spend on your credit card, you earn membership rewards points that can be redeemed for other things. And really at AmEx, it's where I learned how to do things like how do you balance rewards diversity based off of different target audiences? What's the value of exclusive benefits? How do you evaluate things like earning potential? And I was able to use a lot of this in my current role because currently I manage a games benefit program. And this program has historically been a little bit more transactional focused, but I took a lot of my learnings from American Express and by looking at the credit cards industry and a payments industry where they have some of the most well-known and most used rewards programs and said, how can we apply it to the game space? How can we start thinking of our customers again, just not just transactional, but also as members so that we can actually retain them? So another area where, since that has helped me a lot with games. And I know I walked through a few of these examples, but realistically each of these kind of feeds, it's not just a one-to-one feed, each of them actually feeds into each other and this actually continually expands as you add more and more domains and you make more connections across them. So I wanna leave you with some closing dots and key takeaways. The first is that again, polymaths new world at a minimum you guys have learned a new word and polymaths are again, individuals that have deep knowledge across multiple areas. They sit between generalists and specialists. Some of their key core traits are that they have this open and growth mindset, they have this insatiable curiosity, they have the ability to achieve mastery, they are interested in broader areas and they also have this resilience and perseverance and finally they have this ability to integrate across areas and connect dots to create new ways of value. PMs really strive to cultivate polymathic traits because we're well positioned to, it's an expectation of our role pretty much and things that polymathism can help with, it can help us solve these wicked problems that are really, really gnarly. It also positions us well for success and to future proof ourselves. And in order to cultivate polymathism, it's really great to just remember that you're gonna do it across areas and start off broad, figure out what the right actions are, what the right questions you have at each step and then go a little bit more narrow and then go broad again as you integrate and connect. I'll leave you guys with this quote from again, the original or the OG polymath Leo, but whether you're debating if you should take a job or not because it feels like it's off the beaten path or if you feel like an imposter in a new domain or if you're looking for a new purpose in life or different ways to achieve that purpose. I hope this presentation has helped you and thank you again so much everyone for all the time today. Bye.


Today, we're going to talk about the low carb alcohol trend. What's happening? NJRoot22.com here with another low carb keto carnivore chat slash booze review. Low carb overall has been around for a pretty long time. More people know about it today than let's say 30 years ago, but there's still not enough people that understand it completely. Like the only way it works is to go either super low carb or even zero carb, like maybe like a carnivore diet. And you can tell low carb is not considered mainstream today because there are no dedicated sections for it at the supermarket and they rarely even classify things as low carb anymore. It's like they don't want it to become a thing or maybe the math indicates that there's not enough demand to warrant having a separate low carb section. But that oddly enough seems to be taking a different path in the alcohol industry. Many products are now prominently displayed or display the numbers of carbs on their packaging. This was unheard of just like five years ago. Now you have dozens of different low carb spike seltzers on the market now and even several low carb beers as well. I happen to like the Corona Premier which is truly not half bad at all. These are all being marketed as low carb specifically. Perhaps the booze industry will pave the way for the rest of the food sellers to follow. Maybe this is the tipping point for more widespread low carb acceptance or how evil sugar really is. I really hope so for the rest of humanity. We already figured it out so we're not worried about it for us. But hopefully one day it'll catch on better.


Cheap seafood, the social cost of production. Many workers employed on board offshore fishing vessels have been subjected to unsafe working conditions, unfair wages, subpar living conditions, and both physical and psychological abuse. While this issue exists around the world, it is particularly rampant in Southeast Asia, a region that owes much of its recent prosperity to its ability to provide cheap seafood through its fisheries. Here is the cost of cheap seafood that you don't see. An important cultural and traditional occupation in many parts of the world, marine captive fisheries are the primary source of livelihood for close to 40 million people. Of these, around 85% live in Asia, where growing fisheries exports have brought about significant economic growth over the past years. But while the growth in global seafood consumption over recent decades has been good for the growth of the industry and local economies, the pressure on fishing communities and suppliers to meet this demand has only compounded. The result is a surge in demand for cheap seafood, especially from wealthy importing countries that have pushed several Asian fisheries to sell at rock bottom prices and rely on illegal practices to remain competitive within international markets. But meeting these low prices is increasingly coming with a hefty human cost. What makes workers vulnerable to exploitation? Depleting fish stocks. A large number of commercially valuable wild fish stocks are currently depleted or in poor health following years of inefficient fisheries management combined with climate change impacts on our oceans. With greater demand for seafood and depleted supply, fishing vessels are often forced to undertake longer trips and travel further into the sea for catch that once came easy in order to make a profit. These trips require more fuel, labour and increased vessel capacity to handle offshore conditions. Since fuel and infrastructure expenses are generally non-negotiable, many fishing companies try to keep their costs low by underpaying workers or exploiting desperate workers who are willing to work for unfairly low wages. Migration. Asian countries with successful fisheries operations like South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand often attract migrant workers from poorer neighbouring countries in large numbers. Migrant workers are recruited to work aboard fishing vessels through brokers or middlemen who are known to mislead them about wages and working conditions. Desperately in need of a job, workers often end up signing contracts that are in languages they do not understand without enquiring about issues like rest hours or deductions. Laws in the employing countries often extend fewer rights and social protection to these workers. For instance, Thailand does not allow migrant workers to form or hold leadership positions in labour unions. Such restrictions leave migrant workers without a platform to voice their grievances or gain compensation for their mistreatment. Lack of visibility. Fishers have often been described as a hidden workforce operating remotely at sea and constantly moving. Fishing vessels often go unnoticed by law enforcement and fisheries management authorities for extended periods of time before returning to port. With some government subsidies also allowing fishers to buy vessels at a reduced price, there are now more boats than ever to keep track of. With over 4.6 million vessels currently operating in our oceans, a twofold increase in the number of fishing vessels in our seas since 1950. Once away from the mainland, workers' ability to freely communicate with the outside world can be removed by ship captains and they cannot request authorities to intervene in case of exploitation or even escape. Instances of workers being forced to work for reduced wages as well as being subjected to abuse have been recorded by several human rights groups and media outlets. In 2015, the plight of such workers made headlines when the Indonesian government rescued more than 2,000 fishermen, mostly migrant workers, being held captive against their will. The fishermen were reported to have endured severe torture including being whipped with stingray tails and given electric shocks. While these incidents are perhaps more common in Asia, they aren't restricted to the region. Recent studies from 2015 have also reported cases of labour abuse aboard fishing boats from the UK and Ireland. Transshipment of fish. Ideally, fishing vessels return to the port after storage space on board has been used up and the fish needs to be landed. However, to keep workers at sea for longer and avoid inspections, some fishing companies resort to the transshipment of their catch. This involves transferring the catch from the fishing vessel to refrigerated cargo ships at sea that bring the fish back while workers must remain at sea for extended periods. Transshipment vessels also supply fishing vessels with fuel to enable them to stay at sea and keep fishing for longer. Such vessels are also known to employ trafficked workers who are forced to work in conditions that can be described as modern slavery. Why is it difficult to put an end to the abuse? Lack of investment and resources. Despite the existence of relevant domestic and international legal mechanisms to regulate poor practice in seafood supply chains, several governments have failed to address human rights issues in the fishery sector. Ending human rights abuse at sea is complex and requires systemic change which in turn demands considerable investment in research, training, surveillance and enforcement. In most developing countries where these issues are rampant, government and local authorities simply cannot afford to allocate the required resources. And given that close to half of the world's marine capital produce comes from developing countries, costs are a major limiting factor in addressing these systemic issues. Consumer demand for cheap seafood. To meet the rising demand from consumers in wealthier regions, retailers seek to import seafood at the lowest possible prices. With their sourcing policies often excluding primary producers importers and international retailers seem to either be unaware of or choose to willfully ignore the social cost of these low prices. Public legislation in importing countries often fails to enforce stricter laws regarding procurement policies as well. Leaving legal loopholes for producers, importers and retailers to exploit cheaper products that employ questionable ethical practices. Corruption. Corruption perpetuates human rights abuse in many ways. Port officials, law enforcement officers and civil servants have been known to accept bribes in exchange for overlooking irregularities, facilitating human trafficking, helping avoid inspections and circumventing prosecution or penalties. Corruption and resultant illegal and unregulated fishing have also been found to be more rampant in countries with political instability and inadequate governance structures. Lack of safety at sea. Acting to support human rights at sea is known to be a very risky task. This is especially true in the case of observers who are trained specialists employed either by government agencies or independent third parties to remain on a selected vessel and examine the catch and working conditions on board during their journey to sea. Instances of observers being forcibly confined to their quarters, intimidated into falsifying reports, pribed and even murdered in order to avoid the public sharing of mispractice at sea have all been documented. What is the European Union doing about it? The European Union is the largest seafood importer in the world and accounts for 20 to 25% of the global seafood market. Because of this commanding position within the industry, the EU has the power to act as a key driver for better industry practices. In 2008, this market muscle was flexed as the European Commission issued a carding system, wherein countries that were determined to be performing poorly with regard to controlling illegal and unregulated fishing in their waters would receive a warning or a yellow card. If a yellow carded country fails to make any changes, it has issued a red card and consequently banned from exporting fish to the EU. The same system also mandates catch certificates for all seafood that is imported into the region. These certificates provide information about how the fish was harvested and need to be approved by a competent authority from the exporting country. Although these measures have resulted in some improvement, such as improved traceability in international fish trade and close monitoring of fishing activities, it relies solely on financial sanctions and therefore cannot eradicate labour issues in marine capture fisheries alone. More needs to be done. If tangible changes are to happen in a globalised seafood market, businesses must actively implement a zero-tolerance policy towards human rights abuses within seafood supply chains. This would mean, among other things, improving transparency with regard to procurement, employing third-party organisations for carrying out social audits, and training employees to identify and report abuse and corruption. Consumers can also play a role by exercising their collective buying power and demanding that retailers guarantee that the fish they sell is traceable and fairly procured. How do you think fisheries regulations could be adapted to improve human rights? Let us know on social media linked in the description box. This article was written and read by me, Madhura Rao, who was originally posted on foodunfolded.com.


Luck is an absolute key, an essential part. I won't say essential is probably the wrong word. It's a very important part in anybody's life. Whether it's career, whether it's family relationship, whether it's marriage, whether it's raising children, whether it's doing well in your job, you know, the element of luck some people don't believe in it, but I'm a firm believer that luck or good luck or being at the right place, at the right moment, in the right venue or whatever is an essential part of life. And without that, if you don't have hard work and perseverance and all of that, it's fine. But I do think that if you don't have that little 25% of luck, you might not go as high as you wanted to go in life. I have been lucky. I mean, all my life I've been pretty well. So I never take rational decisions. It's always, it builds up, it builds up, it builds up. And then on the spur of the moment, I just decide to do something. So I bought my first car, I bought my second car, I bought my first house, I bought my second house. I met my wife and decided the day I met her that I would get married to her. So I think a lot is impulse and you go with your gut. You trust yourself. Is there a little bit of luck involved in it? I'm sure there is. But I think if you have a very strong sense of belief in yourself and your gut and instinct tells you that you're probably going to do the right thing and you believe that, then luck happens to you.


And we're live at the AMAs! I am hosting for the next four hours on Reddit, the first ever AMA Ask Me Anything. Just click the link down there in the description below, sign in to Reddit and ask your questions about YouTube, about freedom, about Twitch, about TGN, about anything you like and I will answer them every single one to the best of my ability, I promise. This is our first ever AMA and if it goes well, we'll do more! This is our first ever effort on Reddit and if it goes well, we will document it so you can learn and do the same. We want everyone to grow together and it starts with getting answers to your questions at the first ever AMAs. Ask me anything. Click the link below and let's get some answers. Take care. My name is George, founder of Freedom and you've been watching... Click the first video for a fireside chat with George where he shares our future and how we grew from $20,000 to $120,000 in just one month. And click the second video to see how to monetize all of your videos with just a few clicks to enable all ad formats and monetize in all countries. And we will grow together as a family because this is the Freedom family. You are part of it. We are all part of it and we're all growing together. So grow with us and partner with Freedom. That play now button right there on the video bar is all you need to click to get started.


This study found that teas grown in Europe are comparable to teas grown in other parts of the world in terms of their health-promoting properties. The results suggest that European teas can provide the same level of antioxidants and flavonoids as teas grown elsewhere, while maintaining the same antioxidant capacity. Additionally, the study showed that European teas have similar levels of total polyphenol and metalculation activity as teas grown in other areas. These findings indicate that European teas are just as beneficial as teas grown in other locations and may even offer additional advantages such as being more accessible to European consumers. This article was authored by Patricia Carloni, Alfonso Albisade, Purification Amartina's Malgarejo, and others.


Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. Initially I thought I'll be talking to ten people and five of them are gonna be wearing blue shirts so it's good to see that we got more and more in the audience. So my name is Oded. I work for Plumgrid as a system engineer and I've got about 20 minutes to give you about an hour worth of content so we're gonna kind of rush through some of the slides. We are going to do a demo so this is a live demo. I know this is a demo theory and we promise you that so let's cover that but before we get to the demo just a couple of slides about what it is that we do. So at Plumgrid we developed virtualized network infrastructure to power up you know the next generation the modern data center and when we started looking at some of these capabilities of what SDN is some of the things that we wanted to achieve is to be able for example to create a software stack that can run on any network and can be scalable and can provide security and can be used things like a policy-driven type of an attribute. Okay so this is a what we kind of set our sights to build. We are a software only solution running as an overlay in the SDN kind of a space. So for those of us who've been in the cloud space for quite some time we all understand that networking in the cloud has been kind of a lagging behind some of the advancements and innovation that we saw coming from the compute and the storage world and we're we had to play a little bit of catch up to kind of close this gap of what networking needs to be done and to allow this next generation data center that really comes down to how do we automate things in the data center. Okay how I can give an application or some kind of a higher layer obstruction the ability to go into orchestrate things not only from a compute perspective and from a storage perspective but also from the network and the way for us to do that is really look at software defined networks. We all realize that the physical network is a bit of a challenge and if I got to orchestrate something in the physical world it's pretty much sending somebody to the data center to move cables around and that just didn't work for us anymore. So that was what we were trying to solve when we started Plumgate about three years ago. So we're in an OpenStack conference and I'm sure some of you guys are asking so hold on we already have a solution for networking in OpenStack right and we call this neutron. Why do we need other solutions right what's wrong with with neutron so let me start by saying that first of all nothing is wrong with neutron okay and neutron the way that we kind of see it neutron is this overall umbrella of network services that can live within the OpenStack kind of a framework and when we look at neutron from an API perspective this is kind of the unified language that we have. We got a set of APIs and if I want to build something from a network I call the API. Hey go and create a network create a subnet create a router connect those together so a user or an application can go then connect and consume these services. The challenge for us began when you look what's underneath neutron and some of these components that happens kind of underneath the API layer and this is where we started seeing some of the challenges about things like the network node things like agents things like OVS and if you just look at the typical deployment of a neutron using the OVS and some of the agents that presented a challenge for a lot of companies and you know our booth is right over there and I think half of the people that woke up and talked to us are saying the same thing it says we're trying to build this network we've got a challenge with neutron it doesn't scale we need HA we need something that looks a little bit better so given that as the context of what we were trying to solve keep that picture in mind I'm going to go back to a similar picture in a little while that shows you how this looks with with plum grid components underneath before we get to look at how we do that I want to take a step backward and talk about virtual domains and I think this is maybe one of the most unique things about the technology that we've built that really helps understand why this is so unique okay and when we talk about network virtualization some of the things that we want to understand is really the operational elements of how do we operate a virtual network or an SDN so we started thinking about this say okay we've got API's and we've got programmable data planes and we got software switches but we kind of looked at how virtual machines are being created in the network and some of the advance that virtual machine gives the IT world and how it really revolutionized the way we do things and we saw some similarities between these two approaches look at a virtual machine it's a software container okay it's completely decoupled from the hardware that it runs on it has an identity I can assign it to a user I can copy it I can move it I can clone it and I can put an application and an operating system in it right we wanted to take the same thing but build it for a network okay can we take this software container this blank canvas okay instead of an operating system and application we would put a network function okay and this is where we came up with a concept of a virtual domain and if you look at it this solves a lot of the operational problems that if you're an application developer and you want to just call some kind of an API or do some kind of an automation so this is the perfect model for you this is something that you can understand okay scalability that's another thing that we were able to achieve using this domain the footprint of a virtual domain is is very very small on your infrastructure so we're looking at thousands of virtual domains okay think of a virtual domain as a tenant or an application or any other isolation container that you want in your cloud obviously multi-tenancy is a given some of the things that we can do also in the virtual domain is actually encrypt those if you're running a bank this is extremely important for you traffic from your virtual domain might passes through multiple servers you want to encrypt that data in between fault isolation sometimes an overlooked feature of what we do but I know the networking guys they are gonna love it if you mess up this virtual network you only messed up the virtual domain your physical network is gonna stay intact and this is something very very important we could also do things like visibility and scalability and everything that you can get from a software type of a solution that runs in your data center so why do we believe this is the right architecture for the cloud and again I think there's a certain disconnect between how server guys or application guys see a cloud to how networking guys see a cloud okay and anybody here that's trying to build clouds will know that there's a certain kind of disconnect between these two people what this virtual domain notion gives us is a language that some of these guys can actually understand if I'm an application developer what I have in mind is the top picture it's the automation it's the API it's software defined I don't need to understand how a physical network is built if I'm a network guy or a data center architect the bottom part of this is what I understand so in a way we kind of give people the ability to do both things design your data center in the proper way using all of the best practice of how data centers should be designed but still give the agility of a cloud into your developers into your server guys into the people that I want to leverage those resources coming from your data center and if we look at kind of an example of how this is then being projected into your network think for example a tenant number two that's his virtual domain that's a virtual topology right and once this is actually being rendered or pushed into the topology it becomes the virtual network that lives and runs in the data plane of the solution okay some of the components that we have in our solution again there's there's there's a lot of innovation that went into this technology I mean we started working we actually started by developing the data plane component you know in SDN we always have the data plane this is where packets are running control plane with this is where the logic is we started building the data plane component that we called the iOvisor or the iOvisor edge this is a programmable data plane component that lives inside a Linux kernel okay it replaces kind of the OVS okay so if you guys know of OVS we sit right next to it so we take it out that we put that one of the unique things about this component that it's a fully distributed programmable data plane that means that you can write new functions into it in a very easy and automated way so once we solve that we have to put some control plane in place and the control plane again to solve some of the resiliency problems that we saw with neutron we developed a highly available director clusters the reason we call these guys directors and not controllers because in many situations they don't actually control the traffic they orchestrate virtual domains into the data plane so once a virtual domain is actually being rendered into the topology we support the headless operation that means I can take out the directors everything that's being pushed in the topology into the data plane will continue to work without any problems so going back to this picture that we had earlier on here is open stack here is neutron we do support all of the neutron API's okay so but anything underneath the API going down is all plumb grid we take out the OBS we take out ML to we take out open flow everything is then being changed so the reason we maintain the neutron API is the because this gives us this compatibility with everything else that rides on top of open star so to make kind of the analogy you know you get to drive the car in the exact same way but the engine is completely different now okay so for you as a user it becomes transparent okay you get the capabilities of the Iovizer the performance scalability resiliency the API's stay the same once the API is pushed into our director cluster these virtual domains or virtual topologies are being created and then they're being pushed into the data plane component and you kind of see the illustrated version of it okay right on time I promised you guys a demo because we are a little bit adventurous we're gonna do a live demo and we've been praying all morning for the demo gods so hopefully everything is gonna work so what we've got here is an open stack deployment this is a red hat flavor we do support all of the other distributions by the way we're standard neutron plug-in but this one is running on on red hat and what I've got here just to quickly switch into the to the project side on the network I've kind of created some of these components in advance to save us some time this is a standard type of a network I got the external connectivity of a router I have another network which is kind of the tenant network and I've got a VM connected to it so everything that was done here from the Neutron API from Horizon I didn't mess with anything else let's see how this thing looks like in the plum grid user interface so as I go and create these components in open stack these kind of icons suddenly appear into my canvas okay remember the canvas that you get to draw your topology so this is now my topology now the cool thing about these things is that these are all live component of a network okay I can click on the router and get some information about it I can look at a static route list okay and this can be populated you can add entries to that I can look at my not for example is there any outbound or any configurations that I've got writing on my not by the way everything you see on the topology here is fully distributed into the data plane nothing runs as a VM nothing run in a control plane okay so I also have a virtual machine that is running to see the virtual machine we actually can see it here with its UUID but let's look at it from from Horizon so just a small virtual machine we call it seros what I want to show you today is a new feature we just released in this version which is open stack networking suite version 2 and it's an internal DNS feature so some of you know this is a project that actually happening in neutron that's called designate it's not released yet we've kind of a little bit ahead of the curve we do support all of these APIs that coming from but we're able to implement that DNS as a again a distributed function into our data plane which allows you to basically do name resolution inside your virtual network inside your virtual domain so to show you that let's first of all see if this VM is up okay we don't have the external connectivity here because of the network but let's go and create another VM and see if we can get the name resolution to work at least internally so this is going to be an Ubuntu VM let's call it Ubuntu 7 yep we also need to tie it to a network by the way once this VM is booting up let's look at the seros VM and how it shows up in our DNS so if I'm looking at my DNS component here and eventually it will come up no okay one of those right-click options actually does give me to see the host when it was registered to the DNS when the host comes up it goes there registers itself in the DNS so I can see the host name here I can just see some of the static routes if I've decided to use any static routes anything that has to do with the zone attributes okay so this is my domain so this is a fully functional internal DNS to my environment now obviously in a multi-tenancy environment you'll be running namespaces so you have the same kind of an IP addressing across multiple cloud or multiple tenants each with the same IP address scheme different domain and your name resolution is going to stay contained to your virtual domain so so we got 40 seconds for questions and if not like I said we're both e18 right over there please come talk to us if you want to and thank you very much


Brand new recruits get a chance to work with developers.  That's usually six to nine months. You can't just hop right in, you know, come in on a Friday to the recruiter and then leave Monday morning. You're not shipping out. That's not the way it works. So you're going to be six to nine months with the developer on average. It could be a little less. And then you're going to go to an AFSW, Air Force Special Warfare, basic training flight, like they have their own flight that usually allows a little bit more time to eat, sleep, a little bit more physical training time, PT time.


This paper reports on the synthesis of silver nanoparticles using an aqueous extract of seaweed enteromorphic compressa as a reducing and stabilizing agent. The resulting particles were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, x-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy, and transmission electron microscopy. The particles exhibited spherical shapes with sizes ranging from 4 to 24 nanometers and were found to be highly crystalline. The particles were tested for antibacterial and anti-cancer activities, and it was found that they had strong antimicrobial and anti-cancer properties. Additionally, the particles were shown to reduce the viability of cancer cells, suggesting potential use in cancer therapy. This article was authored by Vijayan Sri Ramkumar, Aravalgam Pagazendi, Kumar Gopalakrishnan, and others.