Finals are about two weeks away at Bemidji State University and the Mental Health Advisory Board is helping students relieve some stress with a week of calming events. The board is calling it Keep Calm Week. Each day there will be an activity students can participate in that's known to relieve stress. Today students made goody bags filled with things like tea, gum and candy. Tomorrow there'll be a guided meditation event and Wednesday there'll be a free yoga class. On Thursday, well that's Beaver Treats Day. Ultimately when it comes to mental health a lot of it is being able to keep it in check and be able to keep that at bay. I would definitely say that it's something that it requires maintenance it's not something that there's going to be a quick and easy fix for and so with us being able to host this event it's trying to keep students remembering that hey don't forget to check in on yourself because you need to take care of yourself before you can take care of anyone else because you as yourself are most important. And on Friday students will be offered the chance to make another free treat bag.


Hi, we're in the neighborhood sharing the good news of Jehovah. Do you have a moment? Without question, the Jehovah's Witness faith should be regarded as a cult. They are not a Christian organization. However, there is one point that should be noted and that is this, that you can be a person could possibly be a Jehovah's Witness or part of the Jehovah's Witness and still be a Christian. Here's how. Being a Jehovah's Witness does not necessarily mean that you know everything about what the whole organization entails. Just like being a Christian doesn't necessarily mean that all Christians understand what the tenets of Christianity are. No faith can, can make that claim that all of their adherents understand what's going on in that particular group. The same as the same holds true with Jehovah's Witnesses. So there are some as possible, that there are some who have come to a trusting faith in Christ, yet don't fully understand what's going on in the Jehovah's Witness group. This is an organization that is ran by the White Tower Bible Track Society, a group that calls itself the mouthpiece of God. However, a closer look will find out that they are anything but a mouthpiece of God. In order to kind of see what they're about to get a good understanding of Jehovah's Witnesses, you have to first start with the founding of the group. That was by a man by the name of Charles Tays Russell, who by any account would be categorized as a snake oil salesman. This guy was not a good man whatsoever. He was a person who, who believed or at least spoke about how there are no good churches. There are no Christian organizations left. All of the world has gone into apostasy. And so it was up to him to kind of usher in God's true word. Well, the reason why you would call this person a snake oil salesman is because he literally was that he was going around the countryside selling what, what he claimed to farmers to be this seed for miracle wheat. Well, anytime you have someone out there making these ridiculous claims, you're going to have someone, at least in those days, you're going to have some journalists who are going to challenge him. And so he had in his side a thorn by the name of the Brooklyn daily eagle. This was a newspaper that called him on his claims about this miracle wheat, but also made it a point to mention how inerrant his doctrine was biblically. Well, Charles Russell did not take to that kindly. And so he would, he filed a suit against them claiming that the newspaper was defaming him. And because of his lawsuit, then naturally a court proceeding would take place. The good part about a court proceeding though, is that there are transcripts to kind of help us to see what happened. One of the things that came out in the court process was Charles Russell's lack of understanding of the Bible. Now we need to back up for a second. This is an organization that believes that God's true name is Jehovah. And we ought to call him that out of respect that it's sinful not to call him Jehovah. Well, a couple of things. One, we're not sure if the V sound is an accurate sound at the beginning of Hebrew. Now there are some, some scholars who debate that point. So I won't really get into that. But what we do know for a fact is that the J sound is absent in Hebrew as well as Greek. The J sound is a sound that comes around a little later in the next several centuries, introduced primarily we think by German scholars who try to compensate by adding the J to what they think is the correct pronunciation of his name Yahweh. Now we don't even know if that's the correct sound of his name, because Jews did not, or Hebrew did not have, it doesn't have any vowels and nor did the Maserites give it any vowels when they maintain the Jewish texts. So where they get this term Jehovah and to state that that's the name that we ought to call him. We just don't know. It's okay to call him Jehovah. That's not the problem. But to state that it is a sin to not call him that. Well, there's no basis for that more than that. This is an organization that states that they understand and they have the true translation of the Bible. You have heard it talked about many times no doubt about how they handle the character and the deity of Jesus. They deny that he is the true God. They would put him in the category of a God. Now we're going to look and see if that makes biblical sense and we're going to do so using their scriptures. Here is an organization. Here is a man that claims to have the right interpretation of scriptures. However, we're going to find out that he didn't even understand the languages that were used that our English versions were derived from. He didn't understand Hebrew or Greek though he had bragged and boast as though he was a Hebrew and Greek scholar. Well, on the stand during his lawsuit against this newspaper, the question was asked, do you understand? Can you read Greek? Well, to maintain his facade, he answered the question as to whether he understood and could read Greek. He answered, stating that he could read and understand Greek. Well, so what would any lawyer do as a follow up question? They would give him a Greek text to read. And so they gave him the Greek text and it may have been the book of John. I'm not sure, but I believe that's what it was. They gave him the book of John to read. And of course he was found to be a fraud. He could not read it. Well, thinking that maybe this might be too difficult of a task, maybe at least because he's got all this pressure on the stand, they offered him something easier to read. They gave him the Greek alphabet. He still could not read that. And so he was forced to admit on the stand in court that he had lied about being able to read and understand Greek or Hebrew. Well, why is that important? Well, when you tell everyone that our interpretation, our translation of the Greek and Hebrew scriptures are incorrect and yours are correct, well, now we see that. No, we can't trust your word. You can't even read the text yourself. And so you're in no position to tell anyone else how they are in error when it comes to their translations. This is a man who had multiple affairs with his wife. And so after a divorce and the court had ruled that he owed, I think it was about 20 something thousand in alimony, he got around that by taking all his assets and pushing it into the coffers of the Watchtower Society. I'm not sure how that actually ended, but that's the kind of man that we were that that that we're dealing with here. This is the kind of person who is the founder. This is the founder of this organization. So if the foundation is rotten, if the foundation is shaky, what does that say about everything else that's built on top of it? Now, because we're not doing a real exhaustive study on the Jehovah's Witnesses, we're not going to be able to cover all of the things that they believe. They believe some wild things such as Jesus being Michael the Archangel. Well, that didn't even make sense, even according to their own scripture. If you just simply look at Hebrews one five, we find this. To which one of the angels did God ever say you are my son? Today I have become your father. So even in their own translations, God is saying that I've never called any angel, let alone Michael, my son. And so that holds no water. But one of the biggest things that the Jehovah's Witnesses has against the rest of Christianity, or I should say the other way around. And the reason why we treat it as a cult is because of how they handle Jesus and his deity. They deny that Jesus is God. And so when you encounter a Jehovah's Witness, there's a couple of things you need to be prepared to deal with. One, many of them are indoctrinated to the point to where they may not be willing to hear you or wanting to hear you. So you've got to first determine if they are willing to do so. I'm going to give you a couple of questions to ask to kind of proceed for these are some things that I used to use, but you'll also see why I don't really spend a lot of time dealing with them unless I come across one who I can tell or at least seems that they might be open to hearing the text. What's the old saying? A man convinced against his will is really not convinced. And that's what you're going to find a lot of times when dealing with people like Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, should we do so? Sure, we should always, as Peter says, always be ready to give a defense of the hope that's in us. And so we also want to be guilty of sharing the gospel to people who just don't know the gospel, and that would include Jehovah's Witnesses. But as I said before, there are there there may be someone into the Jehovah's Witness faith who. Believe in Jesus like we do, but may not quite understand all the tenants. And so I've got a couple of questions that I that I kind of use that may be helpful to you. The first question is this, one, since I'm willing to be wrong, if you can show me something that proves that I'm wrong, I'm willing to listen to it. I'm willing to address it. So my question to them is this, if I can show you something using your own scriptures that demonstrate that you might be wrong, would you be willing to listen? If their answer is no, then there is no further reason to talk, because again, we're going nowhere. We'll just go back and forth for no good reason, unless maybe there's someone in the audience, someone around who is genuinely interested and may be struggling and you want to defend the faith. That's fine, also. But if it's just the two of you or maybe in their case, they have two against one. It may be a fruitless exercise, but if they answer yes and they're likely to answer yes, then you can go ahead and proceed for it, because if they're willing to listen, or at least they say they're willing to listen or to address whatever they think might be wrong, now you've got a starting point. Now you've got some common ground that I mean that they're really going to listen. And so here's what the second question comes in. The second question is this, do you believe that lying is wrong? Is lying a sin? What Joe was witness is not going to say that, yes, lying is wrong and lying is a sin. Even atheists, even people who don't believe in God, believe that lying is wrong and lying is a sin. And so if lying is wrong and lying is a sin, when we show them something that they can't refute and they don't want to address it, then the next question has got to be, is I thought you told me that you'd be willing to address it and you said that lying is a sin. And so, and so when we come to a passage that refutes their understanding and they're not willing to hear it, then we're going to remind them that you said initially that you would be willing to at least address or listen to what seems to be an apparent error.  So you need to at least be honorable to your word. I will be honorable to mine if you can show me where I'm wrong. So we want to deal with like many others, we want to deal with the easiest thing to show their error. And that is the deity of Christ. Jehovah's Witnesses believe that Jesus is not God. Now, according to our scriptures, we believe that he is. As a matter of fact, we don't believe it. We know so. They have decided to mangle the translations and to cause their new world translations to read the way that justifies their doctrine. So we're familiar with John one, one word says in the beginning was the word the word was with God, the word was God, but they were translated as the word was a God. In Greek, there is no indefinite article. You would just simply have the word by itself.  If you want to say a brother, you would say a Delphos. And that would be it. But they take that to an extreme. And so when we look in John one, one, when it says the third portion of it, it says Caipeas and Helagos, they take that the Caipeas, because there is no definite article in front of Faos, the word God, because there is the word does not there. They would take it as that it is to be rendered as a God. Well, that's just bad Greek grammar. And I hope I don't lose you. But let me try to explain this real briefly and then we'll move on. There are two nouns in this passage, the word, the word for God, and the word for word. Both of those are nouns. The question is, which one of those nouns is the subject? Any Greek scholar, any Greek student would be able to tell you that Helagos is identifiable as the subject. So the word is the subject. The other noun for God is what's called the predicate nounative. What that simply means is that the word belongs to a category of Faos, meaning that the word belongs to the category of God. The word is God, which is why it says Caipeas and Helagos, which is and God was the word or we translated better in English and the word was God. The problem that Jehovah's Witness have is that when we go further down, we see their inconsistencies in verse six. Read this with me. In English, it says, there was a man sent from God whose name was John. In Greek, it says, a pestilmanus, paratheu. A pestilmanus is being sent from, paratheu is from, then it says, stayu, that's God. What's missing here is the definite article. There is no word, the, there. So their line of consistency would say that it should be rendered being sent from a God. Now, the reason why they don't have this same consistent line of thinking here is because this text, verse six, doesn't affect their doctrine that Jesus is not God. Verse one doesn't. So they deal with that, but if they're going to be consistent, they would have to do the same thing in verse six. They're not interested in being consistent. They're interested in improving their point and indoctrinating people and then having more to add to their cult. And I say cult and I'm not, I'm, I'm, I'm hesitant to use that word. Oftentimes, but this categorizes them. This class of this classification of them being a cult is earned. We're going to see that in just a second. So the first line of questioning would be this, who raised Jesus from the dead? Well, according to the Jehovah's Witnesses, and I won't give you all the scriptures, I won't read the scriptures for you. I'll just put the scriptures up so that you can go and read them. But in the New World Translation, God is the one who raised Jesus, according to Acts 232, but then according to John two, Jesus is the one who raises himself from the dead. But then what about the Holy Spirit? Well, according to the New World Translation, as well as our translations, Romans eight tells us the Holy Spirit raises Jesus from the dead. So Houston, Watchtower, we have a problem because you can't say that God is the one that raised him from the dead. When your own scriptures tell you that Jesus raised himself from the dead, as well as the Holy Spirit, how can that be? Now we know, we know what the truth is. The way it's recognized that that God, the Father, God, the Son, God, the Holy Spirit, they exist eternally as one, though they are distinct. But the Jehovah's Witnesses will tell you that Jesus is not God. Well, so the next question would be, is Jehovah the Almighty God? Well, they would say yes. And in Isaiah 455, their scriptures in the New World Translations will tell you that God declares that he is God. Apart from him, there is no other God. He's the only God. So there is no other God. However, John one, you've just told us in your passages that Jesus is a God. Well, if Jesus is a God and God or Jehovah is Almighty God, what do we do with Isaiah when he tells us that about this child that's going to be born and what his name will be called? Wonderful counselor, Mighty God. Well, wait a second, even more of a problem, because your own scriptures are bearing this out that Jesus in fact is God or at least Almighty God in the New World Translations at the name of Jesus every knee, shell, bow, tongue, confessor. The same can be said about God in the Old Testament. In the New World Translations, God is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. But in the New World Translations in Revelations, Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega. Well, what is it? So when you're asking this question, and granted there are far more passages that we can go to. But so when you ask them these questions, ask them, does that seem to be a problem? And if they're going to be honest and true to their word, they're going to say, well, that needs to be addressed. They're likely not to turn from the Jehovah's Witness faith at that point, because they have been so indoctrinated that they are reliant upon the Watchtower Society to give them their marching orders, which is why I tell you that they are a cult. This is a group, this is an organization that has throughout the centuries given numerous false prophecies regarding the end of the world. The latest being 1975, they've also done so I believe in 1925, 1914, 1874, and a few other times in between there, times where they said that the Jesus's millennial reign has already begun. I believe 1925, they spoke that through the Watchtower that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob will come and physically rule and reign on the earth. The problem with giving these predictions is that while when you're giving them, you're going to get a boost in attendance, you're going to get a boost in people joining, but when the date comes and goes, you're going to have a huge falling away. You're going to have a lot of people leaving because wait, we found out that you were wrong. And what does Deuteronomy say about a prophet that's whose words don't come true? So when it comes to dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses, remember the people themselves aren't necessarily representative of the organization. The organization is built upon lies, deceit, deception. There are some though who may legitimately be seeking the truth.  Sanctify Christ in your heart and always be ready to ask them or answer them. That doesn't mean that you're going to know everything. And so when you come across someone in the Jehovah's Witness faith and they ask you questions and you may not have the answer to, it's okay to say, I don't know. Would you be willing to come back when I find the answer? And that doesn't mean that you can also bring somebody there with you. If they have somebody with them, then so be it. But it's okay for you to also have somebody with there's no rules that say that you can't have one or two more people with you to give you a better answer or understanding. So be careful when you deal with them, because it's not likely, not impossible, but it's not likely that you're going to turn them, but make sure that they don't put you in a position to where you look ungodly, where you get frustrated. There are plenty of people out there who need to hear the gospel, who are not being pulled in by a cult. But we all still have this one issue to deal with, whether we are born again believers, whether we are not, whether a person is in the Jehovah's Witness faith, whether someone is a Mormon or Muslim. We all are dealing with Satan's attacks. And so we want to be mindful when we go out and share the gospel and love that we're going to deal with this from time to time. Now this question came from one of the subscribers who asked a question about Jehovah's Witnesses. And so if any of you have any questions, simply leave them in the comment section, send an email. And then what I will do is I will respond either through the comments through an email or in this case with a video. So I want to thank you all until we meet again, be smart and be a smart Christian.


Welcome, this is the 27th of April. It's the Jenkins user experience special interest group reminder that we abide by the Jenkins vote of conduct. Be nice to each other. Topics that I've got on today's agenda, preparing for the June long-term support release, possibly other UI improvements. And if Jan, Evian or Tim join us, UI improvements topic. Alex, to you, I guess a question would be, should we put localization as a possible topic here? Is that something that actually fit into UI UX meetings? I don't know, it's a good question. I mean, at some level, it certainly fits as part of the user experience because presenting to a user in native language is a much better experience than presenting in a language that's non-native. So maybe we optionally have it at the end if you're okay with it. And we talk about it here just to briefly highlight it. Would you be okay with that? Yeah, for sure. Okay, great. Any other topics that need to be on the list? Okay, then let's address the topics we've got. So LTS baseline selection, our usual schedule would have been, the schedule would have selected last Wednesday, the 20th, that would be the 20th. And hasn't been selected. Tim started an email thread, proposing a selection to choose 2.344 or 2.345. And I would, so Mark's question was, can we wait one more week? That would be then a two-week delay because there are a few things that were of concern for me in terms of open bugs. This is a good place where I'm open to others. I believe Alex, you asked a similar question that led that conversation. Any insights you want to give Alex in terms of your experience with most recent weeklies? I think the recommendation was 2.344, that actually contains quite a few regression releases from past weeklies and actually from past LTS lines. We see back to 2.3 and at least I think 2.89 or something, at least very, very old in terms of LTS. And 2.345 contains at least two or three regressions, but these were minor ones under your X regression dashboard. Actually, that's a good one. Maybe I should bring up the regression dashboard here because that's a place where this group should probably look to see are there things that worry you as you look at this list. So here's the, this is an opportunity for us all to take a moment, look at these descriptions and see if there were a few in the mail message that I highlighted. For instance, this one right here worried me, broken sidebar icons just because it was a little surprised. This one is ongoing effort in multiple places, right? Alex, that's a, there are several plugins that still need work to be ready to adapt to the SVG icon removal or SVG icon removal and replacement with better icons. Yeah, I have started Google spreadsheet and drop the link in the SU. Oh, good, okay, so this one has a link to the sheet right there, excellent. Okay, excellent. Oh, very good. Okay, so list of plugins with unreleased changes and unmerged changes and some of them highlighting, okay, there hasn't been a release of this thing since there was no real activity since 2012, yeah, okay. Dead plugins or abandoned, good, okay. Yeah, there are quite a lot of plugins which are, I would say abandoned because they had no SCM activity for at least five years on the D4 branch. That's why they are listed on a separate sheet. And everyone else is pretty much working in the progress already to be released. Okay, and so these look very promising then, okay, so merged and released, this says 47 of them or 46 of them have already been updated. And then we've got another set of eight that it's been merged just waiting for a plugin release and another 28 that it's not yet been merged but the PR has been proposed, good. Now this tab, the one with marked for deprecation, my assumption here is just as we did for the tables to divs, if something's deprecated, we're not going to attempt to bring it back because for example, we would have to fix a security vulnerability before it would be distributed again. It just doesn't make sense for us to say, oh, we must have a fix for something that's already vulnerable. Yeah, okay, excellent. Alex, thanks for doing this. This looks any questions from others or concerns on the icon improvement project. Okay, any others in this list that others may be concerned about? Let's see the one that I was concerned about was in Google groups. Let me go find the message. I have to see the list next LTS baseline. Yeah, so broken sidebar icons. Oh, right, this one that I've had multiple requests for and I've seen no activity here. So I think this one may be one that it's this topmost one. The, when a build is queued but not yet started, the new icons give no indication of that whereas the old ones did. And I've had at least two different cases where people said, hey, I like this. I need that. Can we have it back? Now, Alex, in your experience, is that feasible with the current technology, with the current stack or is that something we're gonna have to have a different icon or something else? If I remember, if I understood the issue correctly, I think it's about the computer icon no longer blinking if a computer's launching or something. Sort of close. It's that the arrow that shows that to start a job or not used to blink when it was in queued but not yet started. So it was the job itself would blink. Not the computer icon but rather the here. It's easiest if I show it in Jenkins. Is everybody okay if I just bring up a Jenkins to show it? This icon, right? Let's look at this one here. So the icon over here used to blink. Oh, yeah. I think that used to be clock and clock to underscore animator tip or something. Right. Yeah. So to me, a technical question is, is there a way to allow us to have this highlight that something has queued but not started? I guess likely. I mean, the logic existed before and we didn't get rid of it. We just got a rid of the icon so we could likely spin up another icon for it. Oh, good. Okay. All right. So I don't need to be concerned that there's a technical limitation. It's now a coding thing. Excellent. Thank you. Okay, good. Back to the team. Are there other things on this list that are of a concern for you? I mean, I like that this is sorted by create date because anything prior to about March, about this row that I'm highlighting is old enough for me to not consider it really a risk to the June release, right? Okay, they are regressions. They are things that people have noted but not a concern given how old they are. We've lived with them for a nice long time. All right. Then I think, so to this group, are you okay with the idea that we continue asking and trying to persuade Tim that let's wait for either we take three, four, five or one more and we may still have some backports or we wait another week and take three, four, six, the one that will be next Tuesday and then proceed from there. Any concerns or objections to that idea, Vadek? You okay with that? No problem for my part. There is nothing related to security with the next year. All right, great. Okay. Anything else on the preparing for June LTS topic? Okay. Next topic then was other UI improvements and I think we had discussed this in depth the last time, Vadek. Anything, I assume nothing's really changed there since then? It's okay, nothing changed. Okay, so no real topic since last session. All right, and since we don't have Yan and Tim here today, I'm not gonna, oh well, I guess we've got the new login screen that we could show. Yeah, let's do at least a demonstration of something that has arrived. We have this place where we've got it. Let's see if it's up to date. Weekly.ci, I know you're not using it nearly enough so you should be reminded that weekly.ci.jankins.io is here. Oh, except it's got an, okay, login to Jenkins. Am I running the wrong version? Oh yes, it's one, it hasn't updated yet, sorry. So I'll have to, after our conversation, if you want to see the new login page, I can bring it up. This one is still not updated to 2.345. So we just got a new login page with a slightly different layout. Next topic then, localization and crowd-in enterprise.  Yeah, for sure. Okay, so thanks to the infra team. We have this site now and I've got to make it big enough to read. Is that readable? How about that size? There we go. Okay, Alex, your topic. Yeah, crowd-in enterprise, that is basically, I think one of the major topics we spent the last five hours on. And it's basically, I mean, crowd-in is basically a more streamlined solution to work with translations, especially with and by people for not necessarily familiar with Git-based environments. Yeah, and this is our Jenkins instance, crowd-in.jankins.io is sponsored by the crowd-in team and hosted by them. And we just have a senior record for it to have it under our domain. So for me, the brilliance of this solution, so Alex, are you okay if I highlight some of the things that I think are really, really exciting about this? And so I was just discussing with a French native speaker a few minutes ago and his first experience in trying to contribute to Jenkins had been attempting to do some Jenkins translation into French and using Java property files and various edits and how to find those things. It was really complicated and a complete failure. Whereas here, when I want to contribute a translation, so okay, this is what we envision is that each plug-in and Jenkins core will eventually be in this list of open projects and someone who wants to contribute clicks one. And then they click things like, I want to work on Italian and here are some messages that have been translated. Here are some that still need to be translated and I can very easily navigate through these. Let's do one. And they let me, they offer suggestions for translations. They offer, and I don't know which of these actually to take, I think I want this one to stay in English. So, but this lets me do translations. And now that translation is now ready. It's been submitted, now I can switch and other people would take this role then of proofreading my proposed change. And after they've proofread it and said, yes, this was accepted, then a pull request is submitted to the plug-in. And that pull request comes through my usual development process. So all I did as a native speaker was interact with this webpage that gives me great suggestions. And I get to submit proposed improvements to the Jenkins translations. Alex, back to you now. I'm so delighted by this experience. I just can't express how much I've enjoyed this thanks to Alex's work. Yeah, at some point on background information, like Marc said, proofreading actually equals the role of a PR reviewer on GitHub. So basically nothing specific about this role here. Basically like any other maintainer or translator who is familiar with the language can approve these strings. And once they are approved, they end up as PR on a separate branch on your project on GitHub. Which you can actually just merge right away because you have approved these strings on crowd in beforehand. And for me, the concept of a proofreader lets us also admit that there are times when the person who's finally merging would benefit by having a native language speaker who does the proofreading instead of me doing the proofreading as the maintainer. So Vadek, with your comfort, let's see Vadek, I forget, is your native language French or German or? It's French. Sorry, sorry. Switzerland is a complicated country, right? There are only four native languages in that country, right? Yeah, exactly. So the French translation process then becomes much better because it's a UI focused on doing translations. I'm so pleased with this. And Alex, thank you so much for launching it. We will do a, Alex and I will do an online meetup within the next week or two to highlight how this works. But for me, it's been delightful going through it. It's especially interesting in some of your way when you don't have to care about all the encoding of the accent, especially in French, this kind of thing. It's just a pain to do the thing. And I don't even imagine the situation for people with Cyrillic alphabet. I have a Belarus people in my team. They try to do some translation and it was just naturally nice. Right, or here the Chinese simplifies or Chinese traditional, right? Where you've got a multi-byte character and this webpage is going to present in multi-byte, multi-byte suggestions, right? And it's just going to do it. So, oops, this one didn't offer me any. Oh, maybe not. I've never done Chinese before. So we'll have to see what they've got. But- I don't think you have to say that any Chinese plugin before hence our translation memories are pretty empty here. Right, that was what I wanted. Anything else you'd like to highlight, Alex, on the crowd-in integration? I don't think so. Probably doing that on the online media then. All right. That covered all the topics I had for today. Any new topics that have come up since we started? Just one point, Konstantin Krodin. What is the flow after the thinker approved? You are creating a pull request directly from the flow from the application. What is the process in a sense? And you mean like what happened after you have approved these trends on crowd-in? Yeah. The plugin mark just showed is currently set up with a GitHub integration through GitHub Actions and runs Chrome-based every 12 hours. So if you approve these strings, you get a PR on every 12 hours based on this schedule. Obviously, you can change this just in the crowd-in in the GitHub file to be something different. But yeah, this is the example you have experimented with in the past docs of the sessions. So perfect. That's exactly what I wanted to hear in a sense because if it was a direct commit to master, it could be a huge mess in terms of security. For the example, the permission that you are setting in that application are not necessarily the same as in the repository in GitHub. So we can have some desync at that point but it's also because the translation are very dangerous in Jenkins. They are considered as trusted code most of the time and we got some huge issue in the past in terms of XSS because if you are able to include any payload inside the translation, it will impact everyone in a sense. So that's pretty interesting to see that it's based on pull request and nothing else. Right. And so let's highlight just, here's a specific example. So schedule build six days ago received a pull request from, let's see, from GitHub Actions. The bot submitted a pull request that had these changes in it and I had to review them and then decide to merge them. So it felt to me very similar to what I do with dependabot where I say I look at the change and I have to decide if I want it or not and if I don't want it, I can close the pull request. Yeah, so I like the pull request workflow very much because it insulates the develop, it requires me as the maintainer to think about these translations but has the benefit that the submitter hasn't had to work through the formatting and the character encoding and et cetera all in order to get their pull request submitted. And yes, notice non e un tempo di generazione valido A has an accented character and my Italian is still embarrassingly poor. Yeah, just a note on authentication. The workflows are currently using a personal access token generated by Crowden to use as secret in your workflow. Similarly, how do you use other secrets in workflows? It's basically nothing you expose anywhere. And that's similar, if I remember correctly to the technique used by continuous delivery, used by CD, is that correct? Now, there was another question which was how do we authenticate users to Crowden as an application? And I think there the recommendation from Tim was let's just use GitHub, use GitHub and what's the other, he cited an example. I think it was a GitHub auth like we do somewhere else. Oh, dear, where else? What's the other place? I forget. So in other words, let's avoid using avoid Jenkins LDAP because we'd rather not manage a connection between Jenkins LDAP and the Crowden server. Yeah, based on the example Tim and I think it was Damian from the info team gave me it would be compatible out of the box anyway because Crowden doesn't support LDAP but more SSO here, which our account start service isn't much compatible with anyway. But I think using OAuth2 from Google or GitHub that's what we have enabled at the moment would work out fine enough for the ordinary user. Obviously, you can still sign in with an email and password if you want. But me, for example, I'm just using OAuth2 to sign in because that is fine enough for me. Excellent. And Vada, since we've got you here is there anything we need to do to engage the security team in assessing how this is being done, et cetera? If we just use GitHub OAuth2, I assume no issue for the security team or do we need to do a review with you? As long as it's creating some pull requests I will say I do not care at all. If you want to manage a username and things like this directly in the application I don't care because the impact at the end will be through the pull request. So if a maintainer approves a change you don't care where the change is coming from in essence. Great. Excellent, thank you. All right, any other anything else on localization and crowd-in enterprise? Thanks for the presentation. All right. Well, and Alex seriously, thank you very much. I'll keep saying it how delighted I am with how that feels. All right, I think we're set for today then. Anything else that if not, oh, go ahead Vada. Just perhaps a question concerning the pull request 300 from me in script security. What do you expect in term of action at this point? Because that was a topic that was created or I think it was discussed for the first time one month ago in the previous week's meeting in two weeks ago. Why it was coming there just to understand a bit the context? I just brought it up because it had been on the agenda for an extended period and that was the only reason I raised it. I don't see that we can just leave it as is because I don't think we've brought it to resolution yet. How we want to do it right. Jesse's view is he just as soon we make no enhancements to that page. Others view is hey, that's a good page to improve and there's a lot that could be improved. Yeah, just to be sure if there was any real need or things like that to move it forward right now in a sense. So thanks for the clarification. Great, thank you. Perhaps to set expectation, I do not plan to work on that aspect at all at the moment. So do not expect me to have a status next time with positive news, I will say so. Well, and I think I think we can we can just drop it from the agenda because it's we've we've brought it to resolution to the point where it's it's it's paused and it won't proceed forward until the concerns are addressed. It's OK. Great. All right, thanks everybody. Thank you, Mark. Thank you. OK.


Instrumental variables are useful because they can be used for correcting for endogeneity. But they are also useful because they can be used for testing endogeneity as well. Why would one want to test for the presence of endogeneity data? The reason for that is that when you use instrumental variable estimation, you typically lose lots of efficiency. So the estimates become more less precise than they would be without the instrumental variables. Also some instrumental variable techniques, such as two-test least squares, is biased in small samples and in the presence of weak instruments. For these reasons it is useful to test for endogeneity and then make your decision on whether to apply instrumental variables or not based on that test. Of course endogeneity should also be treated theoretically so you should think through what are the plausible reasons for endogeneity in your data. Articles that present guidelines on endogeneity analysis or instrumental variables typically list quite a few different techniques. These different techniques are based on a few simple ideas. How they then differ beyond those ideas is that some of them make different assumptions based on whether you can assume homoscedasticity or whether you cannot assume it, whether you have independent observations or not. Let's take a look at what the basic idea of these tests are. This is the simple instrumental variable model. The endogeneity, no endogeneity, is that X is uncorrelated with UY. If Z is a valid instrument, then the only reason why X might correlate with UY is the correlation with UX, the error term of the first stage regression, and UY, the error term of the main regression from the second stage. The testing for endogeneity basically boils down to testing if this correlation is non-zero. If the correlation between those two error terms is non-zero, then we have an endogeneity problem, assuming that the instrument here is valid. So how do we go about testing that assumption? Well, the simplest thing is if you use SCM, you'll get an estimate for this correlation after you've freed and you just take a look at the Z-test for that correlation. If that is significant, then you conclude that we have evidence that there is actually an endogeneity problem in the data, and then using instrument of variables is warranted. If it's non-significant, then we conclude that the instrument of variables are probably not problem, or endogeneity is probably not a problem for our data, we can probably forgo the instrument of variables. Then we have three other a bit more complicated tests. The first one is an estimable comparison. So we compare two models. One is the instrument of variable model. Another one is a model where we assume that there is no endogeneity by considering this to be zero, and then we compare the models. The second is an augmented regression model where we take the residuals from the first stage regression analysis, we use them as a predictor of Y, and then if those predict Y, then we conclude that there is an endogeneity problem. And the third one is the general Hausmann specification test, which compares an efficient estimator. In this case, our normal regression analysis against consistent estimator, in this case instrument of variable estimator, and checks if those are sufficiently different that we can conclude that one of the estimators must be inconsistent. Let's take a look at what these tests do in a bit more detail. So this is the next model comparison. We need an unconstrained model. Then we take something out from that unconstrained model to come to the constraint model. So this is a zero decrease of freedom unconstrained model, and we take the error correlation here out, and that gives us the constraint model, which is one degree of freedom, and then we compare the models. Of course, this has one degree of freedom, so we could just as well test it directly instead of having the saturated model here as a baseline. But if we have more than one instrument, then this nested model comparison is required simply testing this model. It's not as good as us doing this because this is a more focused test. Then we have the augmented regression analysis. The augmented regression analysis is the idea is that we do the first stage regression of the two stage least squares. So we regress the endogenous variable X on the instrument, and then we take, normally in two stage least squares, we take the fitted values and we regress Y on the fitted values. So that's the second stage regression analysis. In the augmented regression test, we include also the residual, the difference between the observed X and the predicted X to the second stage regression analysis. This is going to be uncorrelated with the fitted X, so it doesn't really affect our estimate beta here at all, but the beta residual here, whether the residual explains Y, is our test of endogeneity. If the residual explains Y more than at all, then we conclude that we have an endogeneity problem. And then we need to use instrumental variables. If the coefficient beta residual is not significant, then we would conclude that there is not enough evidence to conclude that we have an endogeneity problem and therefore we don't need to use instrumental variables. Then the final test is the Hausmann specification test. This is a general specification test and I'll explain it in more detail in another video, but the idea here with the test is that we have an efficient estimator and we have a consistent estimator. So we know that all regression here is efficient, so it's the most precise way of calculating the relationship between X and Y, assuming there is no endogeneity. If there is endogeneity, then all regression is going to be inconsistent. Instrumental variable estimator on the other hand is consistent under endogeneity, but it is inefficient. So if there is no endogeneity, then instrumental variable and all regression are both consistent, but instrumental variable estimator is a lot less precise. The idea of the Hausmann test is that we compare these two estimators, how much they differ from a sample, and then we compare that against the estimated difference of their variances. The intuition behind the test is that if the difference between two estimators is large, then we cannot attribute that difference to the differences in efficiency, but it must be because one of these estimators is inconsistent. In this case, we will conclude that the OLS is inconsistent because the instrumental variable estimator is consistent under more general assumptions. I'll explain this test in more detail in another video, but this is a very general test. It sometimes requires large samples to work, but it's something that's highly useful in different contexts. So that was the basic ideas of these tests, and these four different basic ideas underlie all these tests listed, for example, here, and which test you pick, then depends on what test your statistical software offers and what estimation technique you apply for estimating the model. If you apply, for example, two-stage least scores, then you can't do likelihood ratio test because that requires maximum likelihood estimation and so on. But basically, then it becomes just a matter of preference after you have checked which of these are applicable and then you pick the one that you like the most.


Now the governor of Bayosa State, Duye Deere, has imposed a dark student curfew on Opunembe following amid a crisis rocking the community. The governor in a closed door meeting with members of the security council in the state also dissolved all the youth and chief tenancy councils in Opunembe. Addressing newsmen before the commencement of the closed door security meeting, the special advisor to the governor on security Agboebi Agboebi noted that the security council has called on the inspected general of police Kaya de Igletokun to withdraw the special weapons and tactics team sent to the community and allow the joint security agents in the state to quell the crisis. We have had council meetings over and over. We have talked about moping up of arms, knights and medium weapons that are all over the state. There is nothing that we have not talked about in this security council meeting to keep the security and the peace of Bayosa. We are going close to November elections. The same number in 2019 was a flashpoint. People were killed just as we have seen people killed. And my people say the snake cannot bite you twice. So we have to nip it in the board. Number of 2023 cannot be number of 2019. We are a government. As chief security officer of Bayosa state, I will work with you commanders to do everything that we need to do to bring a lasting solution to this Nambe crisis. So that people can go freely to Nambe without fear, without being intimidated, without being terrorized. So that all parties can go to Nambe and campaign according to the constitution and the electoral law of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Good morning. I'm delighted to be able to have this opportunity to talk to you. I'm sorry I couldn't be there in person, but at least I have this been given this opportunity through the wonders of modern technology. I'm Marina Whitman professor of business administration and public policy at the University of Michigan but probably more relevant from your point of view is that I am the daughter of and the only child of John von Neumann after whom you have named your society and I thought I'd spend a few minutes telling you why I think the name you've chosen for your society and also the name you've chosen for this first gathering the Hunnavators are so particularly relevant. First the innovation part. As I'm sure you know my father spent his whole life innovating and in fact he innovated in so many different fields that I'm always afraid that I'll forget and leave one out. He innovated in mathematics, in physics, in economics, in computer science, which didn't even exist until he invented it, and in security strategy. And his mantra to me as I say he's only child was he didn't care what field I chose to go into but he impressed on me that it was a moral obligation to make use to the fullest of whatever intellect or talents I'd been given. So that was something he believed extremely strongly. So that's the innovator part. Now for the Hun, the Hungarian part and maybe the best way to talk about that is to tell a story, which may be apocryphal, but it certainly went viral. And that is as follows. That in the middle of the Manhattan Project when a bunch of people were sitting around in the evening drinking beer and talking because of course they weren't allowed to leave the hill, one of them said, how come it is that so many of the geniuses on this project come from a little country that nobody can even find on a map called Hungary. And one of the other guys said, well let me let you in on a secret. They are actually not Hungarians or not even human beings at all. They are Martians. But in order to conceal the fact that they are not humans, they all speak Hungarian, which of course nobody can understand. And as I say that went viral, books have been written about the Martians who are five specific Hungarians who worked in the US war effort during World War II. And therefore when I was looking for a title for my memoirs, which were published a few years ago and which by the way talked quite a bit about my relationship with my father, I titled the book The Martians' Daughter. So that as I say explains why you've chosen so well in your naming. But my father, although he was very much a Hungarian, chose to spend the bulk of his adult life in the United States and a great deal of his innovative thinking was done here. So I think I'm particularly pleased that I've had a chance to wish the very best of luck for this first Honevator gathering and all future gatherings of a new generation of Hungarians in the United States.


Howdy, Fort Worth. My name is William Rimley. I'm the Fort Worth Municipal Court Director, and today we're going to spend a few minutes to learn about the Clerk of the Court Division and in particular as well, the Clerk of the Court, Juan Paredes. So, just want to start off first, Juan, will you introduce yourself? Hello, my name is Juan Paredes. I'm the Clerk of the Court. I've been with the City of Fort Worth for 15 years now and serving as Clerk of the Court for almost two years. Excellent. So, let's start off, first of all, with what is the Clerk of the Court Division and what function does that take related to municipal court? So, the Clerk of the Court is really the administrative arm of the judiciary here in the City of Fort Worth Municipal Court, and that covers a wide range of responsibilities. So, that includes accepting case filings from our issuing departments like police, fire code. That includes receding payments for anybody that is assessed, fines, and fees as part of a judgment. We schedule cases. We take questions from the public and respond to those. We do a lot of follow-up based on courtroom activity. We summon jurors to come and take part of that very important civil service. A lot of the case management that goes on behind the scenes, usually you don't see that in the courtroom. That's what our clerks do. Excellent. Well, thank you for that information. So, what does it take to be a municipal court clerk? So, to be a municipal court clerk, I mean, we're under a really cool program right now, which is the automatic reclass program, and there's three levels to our municipal court clerk job designation. And at the level one, you really don't have to have a whole lot of experience. We provide all of that in-house. So, if you have some level of customer service is always helpful, you know, you'd have to have a high school diploma or GED, and that's really all it takes, right? And there are structured trainings that we provide. There are promotional opportunities once you become a certified court clerk. That's something that we provide all our clerks. And that's a program that was established through the Texas Municipal Court Education Center and Texas State University. So, it's a very structured program. It's highly professional. You know, what we do is very important, and it can impact people's lives. So, we want to make sure that the staff that is brought on board is properly trained and really understands what it is that they're doing. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that information. So, what are maybe some unique things that the municipal court clerks do that maybe everybody would not be aware of? Okay. Well, municipal court clerks, like I mentioned before, they provide a wide range of services. We have clerks that serve, you know, as our call center. They take general public calls. They also web chat with you. If you have any questions and you're on a mobile device and need some quick information, you can, you know, connect with them there. We're in the public often. So, there's community engagement events that we do.  Not everybody's very familiar with that profession, right? It's kind of a hidden gem. If you don't know about it, you know, it's not publicly talked about often. You know, you hear about attorneys and prosecutors and what they do in the courtroom, but the clerk position really helps all of those functions take place during the court proceeding. So, you know, we also provide interpreting services. We'll go into the courtroom, you know, on very specific occasions to help, you know, our non-English speaking defendants in the courtrooms will, you know, give you information if you have questions. Obviously, we can't provide legal advice. We're not certified attorneys or licensed attorneys, so we can't do that. But we try to provide the public with as much information in order for them to make an informed decision. And obviously, our judges and prosecutors are available or somebody can hire a licensed attorney if they have any questions as well. Thank you for that information. I think that's helpful for the community to understand kind of what's happening. And, you know, I know that part of the court clerk's function is to help guide folks in understanding the process. Again, not giving legal advice, but information. And so, as well as supporting judiciary and the other services within the department. So, let's turn for a moment and just talk about you for a moment related to the as the clerk of the court. What is your function and responsibilities and maybe go into a little bit of just day to day what's it like to be the clerk of court? Okay. So, some of my major responsibilities overarching general are one of the things I mentioned is making sure that we have the proper staff and train, right? So, whenever somebody is requesting services, you want to have somebody that is knowledgeable and able to guide you on the other end. So, that's a major component of it. The other thing is making sure since we're the administrative side of the judiciary that we're following all of the, you know, state, local mandates legislation that is out there. There are reporting requirements that we have to abide by for the Office of Court Administration and I'm responsible for making sure that that's done on a regular basis. I'm really service analysis, right? How well are we providing service to the public? Not just to the general public, but also to all of the players in the judiciary, which includes our judges or prosecutors, officers that are issuing citations, you know, we want to make sure that that process is as smooth as possible. And that takes a lot of collaboration. We have several different divisions here in the Municipal Court and I make sure that we're working well together. Everybody has different needs. Same thing, you know, as our clerks do, we want to make sure that in my responsibility is that that communication is open and there's dialogue and that we're removing barriers. I'm removing barriers for anything that may come up. And, you know, a lot of that includes future planning, you know, something that we do as a finally misdemeanor court is making sure that the public has a forum for justice and access to justice. Being a fine only court, a punishment is the fine, right? Somebody has to pay if they're not ordered to anything else. And we are responsible for projecting, you know, what those collections could be. And our city really plans on how that can be best used. But, you know, we provide that information working with our budget office, Treasury and, you know, our legal department just kind of project how criminal justice and public safety is really going for the city, right? We're a branch of that. You know, we don't do the enforcement like our police officers do, but we do play a role. So I know that there's hundreds of municipal courts across the state. And I believe you are a member of one of the associations. So what is your current role and how does that help support what you do in your old clerk of court and this court? Right. So I'm currently serving as the North Texas chapter, Texas Court Clerk Association President. And what really the association does is provide a lot of education to our members and bring awareness to the profession, try to promote, you know, what it is that the clerk does. It's very specialized. Like I mentioned before, there is a certification process, right? It's not just anybody can go and do it. There is some education that has to be there in order to provide the service and know what you're doing and do it well. So the association is a major component of that, you know, it's a professional organization. I'm ensuring that as the role evolves that we're staying current and knowledgeable and able to perform those duties, you know, throughout history, the judiciary has changed and the clerk profession has changed as well. And we're trying to make sure that we're keeping up with those changes. The association meets regularly, you know, we're keeping informed on changes with legislation and how that would impact not just the clerks, but the judiciary. And you know, referencing one of the questions you had earlier about my responsibility, if there are any legislative changes, I need to make sure that we're prepared to follow those regulations and reporting if there's anything that's tied to it and making the analysis related to how that's going to impact not just our court, but the city in general. So kind of, I guess in closing, going back to employees and stuff. I know right now we have an active recruitment. So would you say somebody if about, hey, if they'd be interested in this, how do they how do they go about applying become a clerk, a court clerk? We are currently looking for, you know, talent. And if you're interested in finding out what the municipal court does, you can go to the city of Fort Worth recruitment page and submit your application. Like I mentioned, at our level one clerk, you don't have to have a whole lot of background in municipal court, or criminal justice, you know, we provide a lot of that training. So if you have any interest in it, I encourage you to apply and possibly interview with us. We'll let you know what, you know, the position is about and the expectations. And if you find that this is something for you, you know, there's growth opportunity within the municipal court clerk job description. Those job descriptions are also available through our human resources city page portal. So it'll give you a brief description. You know, some of the responsibilities, you would be responsible for carrying out and going back to what I covered initially about, you know, things that we do to help support the judiciary. We have a lot of people from a wide background, right? Some some people had criminal justice going to school for criminal justice. Others, you know, were working in customer service in a completely unrelated field, and they've come to municipal court and and had a loved and, you know, have been here for a very long time. Well, and thank you for spending a few minutes to help kind of describe what you do on a daily basis, your role in the clerk of the court division, staff and appreciate your time today. All right, thank you.