This is the extent of what I can talk about. These are the jerseys of every stadium he's gone to. His bucket list is to go to every stadium in the United States. Take it down. Good afternoon. Evening. Afternoon. We're going to go ahead and get started. Jessica, I hope you can hear that feedback. Okay. Everybody, welcome to our first plenary. We are still missing a panelist. Hopefully he'll be joining us shortly. I wanted to take just a quick moment, one to point out one logistical thing and then also to talk a little bit about why we're all here today. So I've been getting a lot of questions. Where is my room number? What's next? What's happening? With the exception of Georgina Escobar's session which already happened where there was a room change and like we get it, I'm so sorry. Everything is in the program. Yeah? I, one hand, it's in the syllabus. 100% promise. It's all first, you know, look here and if you're still confused then come find one of us. Actually then go find somebody else and then come find one of us. I'm the fourth step, okay? Just because it's going to make everybody's lives a lot easier. It's all here. No drama, okay? Great. So I wanted to get for just a moment to sort of go why are we here? You know, what is this thing? So back in 2016, the Latinx... Well, were we Latinx theater commons? Yes we were. We had just become Latinx theater commons. Maybe. We had just finished a cycle of our first programming. We had done an event in Boston, in Los Angeles, in Chicago. We had done two regional events in Dallas and in Seattle and we were like, what's next? And so we started taking proposals for new projects, okay? One of those proposals came from Roxanne Schroder-Arce. Now, Roxanne was not a steering committee member of the LTC at that time. She was a friend of the LTC, as many of you are. She came to convenings. She was on social media. She was writing for Cafe Onda, which was our journal at the time on HowlRound. But she wasn't on the steering committee, but she had this idea and this passion and this space and these resources and all this stuff, right? So, yes. Okay, I can speed it up now. My vamping's over. And she put forth this project as an option for the steering committee. People put in proposals. We met in Seattle over three arduous days and decided what we were going to do and this project clearly rose to the top, okay? From there, the steering committee sort of mobilized. We started thinking about dates. We started thinking about planning, sort of going backwards in the day of forming a host committee. Emily came on as a co-champion and we brought in Teatro Vivo and things started rolling from there. But I just want to tell that story because sometimes when you go to these events it's very easy to be like, oh, it was just this big power that decided they wanted to do this thing. No. It was Roxanne who was like, this thing should happen. That Latinx theater comments should be the ones that helped do it. And I'm just going to tell you that and I'm going to give you a budget. And then she joined the steering committee because obviously in order to make the thing happen she has to be in the room, right? That's how our events happen. Sometimes it's a little bit more formula. Sometimes it's more organic. That's why we're all here today because a pitch came in in April 2016 for a cool project like this. And here we are. Speaking of Roxanne, I'm going to hand it over to her to start us off and introduce our amazing panelists for our first plenary. Thank you. Amazing indeed. Wow. Just look at it.  And I cannot wait to hear what you have to say. I have been following all of your work for such a long time and it's so great to have you here. So, just want to introduce the panelists to tell you a little bit about them. We are focusing this panel on the roots of Latinx and Latin American TYA, Theatre for Young Audiences. We're going to do some discussion about what is that and more importantly why do you all do this work and what has been your experience and how do we do it better? How do we do more? How do we make it happen? And these folks are the folks who know. So, first of all we have next to me the amazing Jose Casas who is a playwright. We know his work. We love his work. Assistant professor and he leads the minor in playwriting in the Department of Theatre and Drama at the University of Michigan and also Cici or Jose will be talking about his new anthology, Palavres de Cielo here at the festival. So, we are so, so excited about that. Oscar Franco is a play through 12 teacher here in Austin and he has focused on the arts as a tool to support culturally responsive teaching and community centered learning with right here in Austin and he just got back from New York and we're like, come back! And he did. Oscar's also on the board of Teatro Vivo and then of course we have our amazing, I don't know if you've all met him but Marco Novello is my dear friend is an artisan of words and a chronicler of possible words and he teaches at that's pretty good. I didn't write it. And he teaches at Andaluc University in Mexico and flew in last night so thank you for being here. Miriam Gonzalez if you don't know Miriam's work you should Miriam's a playwright from Washington DC and Miriam is a tahana at heart so welcome back to Texas. Miriam is from Corpus Christi and we are just so happy to have you here and I am in love with your play as you know the smartest girl in the world and others so thank you and we're going to hear Miriam's play Oyame the Beautiful Tomorrow, yes. And next to Miriam Jose Cruz Gonzalez, the legend a playwright from the U.S. teaches theater at Cal State University Los Angeles, yes. Next to our Jose is the awesome Diana Guisado. Diana is a Mexican artist who studies here in the department of theater and dance with an emphasis on performance and we are just so happy and you're seeing Diana she's in both of the readings of new plays so thank you Diana. How's the sound? Awesome. Okay so here we go. So we wanted to start with a question and there's going to be some opportunity for you all to ask these amazing artist, teachers, scholars questions as well but first a little bit about why you do the work that you do so we're starting there like what inspires you what experiences have you had that have said do this work do work for young people in the U.S., in Latin America what inspires you to do that what makes you do the work that you do and Diana we're going to start with you please so what experiences have you had what has made you stay in this work and you know that if you want to speak in Spanish it's fine and it's not perfect. First of all it's just an honor to be here with these amazing people I feel like I don't belong here but you do belong here. I'm originally from Mexico and I have always loved to create theater and then I moved four years ago because my parents decided to and I realized that it was possible for me to study theater to keep doing this work but of course as years went by I realized the lack of representation the lack of stories that showed other experiences other bodies other people that I was living with and I do this because I believe that art can change people art can connect us and bring empathy and just hopefully create a better world and I notice that TYA is so important because if you inspire that in the children then you can raise human beings that can create a world that has more humanity and that's what I want to keep doing this work to represent to unite to find something else in this world that is just so crazy how do we bring more love and I think art is a way to do so so we can go down the line or if one of you wants to answer that question we don't all have to answer the question so Jose? I think about the first time I ever saw I think a piece of theater I think I was maybe a kindergartener and we were sitting down in the grass out here in our elementary school my brother ends up walking out and he's green and he was performing and I knew nothing about that my brother was in a play and that he was green and I was just so fascinated by him being green so that's my only memory of theater as a child that it wouldn't be actually until I was in college I was introduced to the Chicano Theater by Jorge Huerta Dr. Huerta at UC San Diego and so I was a student of him and learned about the theater movement and once I discovered that I was like okay I want to work with Teatro Campesino I want to work with Teatro Esperanza and that was my goal but it wouldn't be that route that I would end up going to I'd actually go to regional theater company South Coast Repertory and then we started a program called the Hispanic Playwrights Project and that program was dedicated to developing plays by Latino writers here in the United States and it lasted for 19 years I was really proud that program lasted 19 years but while there one of the things I started to do was to work in the communities teaching theater to young people and I remember when we first started a colleague of mine, Lori Woolery was there, a young artist at that time learning her craft and we ended up having 200 children show up and I said okay we've got two hours to do this I said so this is how we're going to do it we broke it down, she reminded me about this about a week ago and she says I've never taught before I said you know more than they do so get in there and you know it opened up a door for me seeing what I was doing with the adults in theater trying to open that door for our Latinx artists but realizing that there was nothing there for young people and so that then took me on that journey of going wow this would be, we've got to do something about that and that's how I sort of entered the field and began to understand the field of TYA Who's eager to talk? That's just your story of how you first experience reminded me of growing up in corpus in the 70's there was no theater for young audiences for us and so really my first experience was on my grandmother's knee watching novellas and just being so excited by the drama the slamming doors and all the kissing you know it was just like it was it was a fraud and then my grandmother's house was right across the street from this huge driving so there was a huge the huge screen was right there and we would sit on the driveway I remember we'd eat these pomegranates from the tree that would fall into the driveway and we'd just crack them open and eat and we couldn't hear anything we could see a cantin flash it was all Spanish because it was in the barrio and it was all Spanish movies and we would put words in my brother and my neighbor because we couldn't hear the movies so I was naturally loved theater my whole life and was always very dramatic and full of imagination that's what I loved but when I went into college and in graduate school and through high school and I started reflecting back on my childhood I realized there was never any sort of education for us on who we were as a people in corpus Christi even though we're a majority minority city we weren't in the curriculum on television I didn't see myself anywhere and so I come from a very political family my dad was a state rep here in Texas for a while and so we were always thinking about inequalities and what we had to do to fight for representation and as I got older I realized that where it all can kind of hit home is an education where we can democratize and equalize and so I went into education and I really I focused my dissertation on the dearth of material and curriculum for latinos and literature I just didn't see anything and I wanted to understand how could we fill that gap and I wanted to see where teachers what teachers were doing to address and celebrate diversity and how were they embracing diversity in the classroom and how were they making it higher order thinking and how were you bringing in complexities and I was really I was just very interested in that so from there I went through a lot of my life and I went to Washington I was an educator but then I got I crossed my worlds crossed with Karen Zacarias in DC and she gave me the same thing where I was in the theater, I was a teacher and I was in between things and I said God I love your theater young playwrights theater she started in DC and I said you're a teacher right and I said I love theater and I've only written plays with kids in the classroom she was like baptism by fire get in there all they need is someone that's going to listen to them they want someone that makes them feel they belong these kids they just need someone to listen to them and so I taught with them as a teaching artist for six years and I started writing myself and I was asked to write some plays and it just started went from there and I was just actually very lucky to run into incredible mentors like Karen Zacarias Jose Cruz Gonzalez Jenny Mullinger and David Tsar Child's Play and Dwayne Hartford and I just got into this world and I was just very, very lucky and also Kennedy Center just really been so supportive and just I realized the importance of mentors and gracious people who give their time and that we all have to lift each other up and connect each other and I think that's why this is so exciting here because this is important work that we do and it's time that we're heard and that we're seeing so it's exciting okay well I guess everything started when I was a little kid my parents took us to a theater show for kids in Mexico and it was the first time I went to the theater and I sat on the chair lights went off the curtain went up and suddenly something magical happened because there was a forest behind that curtain magical creatures started popping all over the place and I went just like that and it was just so emotional I don't know if the company was any good at all really but the impression that makes that little kid was so strong that carry on until today I guess so when I started acting at the university I had the chance to go to hospitals to perform for kids that were with cancer and terminal disease and seeing their faces and how they light up with this magic that's theater just hooked me into theater for children so I've been doing this for the last 30 years almost so I think is the opportunity to get in touch with another soul and change his life or her life even though it can last just days before they die it's a very strong opportunity to make a very strong impression in somebody that's clear of predigest and stuff like that so I guess is the best theater in the world I think that sticks out to me the most is really like as a teacher education in school has been what moves me and it has been schedules and all that stuff it's exciting for some reason and I realize that as I was going through public education as I then started going into when I went here to UT I started to see a separation between myself and my family a separation between my parents who did not go beyond high school and they had an education in Mexico and from their perspective it wasn't what they had hoped for so they were always hoping for more and I was able to live out that dream of graduating from high school and then coming in to the university and now working as a teacher but there was always a separation from what became my academic self and the roots that I came from and the roots that were in my own home and in high school when I started to do I started to be involved in the arts and music and theater and that was the key and that was the door that opened they couldn't help me academically they couldn't help me then a permission slip that was in English something as simple as that and the arts and theater and music were the things that they could understand whether they knew the language or not they could see on stage what was going on and understand the story and understand without that barrier of Spanish or English and they were able to see that and to be able to have my family be a part of that be a part of my life in that way and then when I came to UT I took a one of my first classes my first semester was Latino TYA that was taught by Raf San and that completely changed my life and it changed I think the trajectory of what I even had for myself and through that my parents I've been able to see that I've done and I've been able to have those conversations with them more about what goes on in my life and now that's what I hope to do also as a teacher to not have my students wait until they're in high school or college to be able to share with their families a part of their life but be able to have that at the elementary school level and be able to have their families go to events and be proud of the culture and the experience of just being in that space with an open heart and open mind and to be able to have that from the very beginning so my sort of going into it started from then and hopefully continues into that and that kind of work I didn't grow up exactly I didn't grow up knowing theater didn't care about theater got to college didn't care about theater but somehow magically and accidentally I discovered theater in college and the second I did that I said to myself oh shit what did I just do and I actually reached out to a bunch of Latino directors and writers just to like for consejos I didn't know what I was doing and I reached out to a lot of people and only three responded and one of them the one who took me under their wing the most is Jose Cruz Gonzalez so now he's stuck with me forever and so I discovered theater and I'm like okay now I'm a writer and I went to Arizona State for my graduate degree in playwriting and so if you all know Arizona State has one of the best programs in theater for young audiences and so a lot of the students were my friends and they said you need to write for youth and I'm like fuck you honestly I'm being honest I'm not gonna write for kids I'm a real writer that wasn't my thought and they nagged me to the point where I'll try it and so my thesis play was a hip-hop spoken word play which literally was my first one and I see one of the actors who was in that play right here Ricky Orisa and so it was cool and then I'm like okay I did it I'm gonna go be a real writer again but I kept getting commission and people kept asking me to write for youth and then I slowly started to drink the Kool-Aid and realized that you know when I love writing for this group and every time I wrote for this group I thought of my nephews my nieces or my friends kids and then I realized that there was an extra added sense of responsibility for writing for this group that I embraced and to me not only is TOA an important theater I think it's the most important theater and has so many strings attached to it whether it's you know putting up stories of building audiences whatever and I really embraced that and then getting into Latino theater for young audiences a lot of my work everything I do is based on diversity whether it's me teaching or writing or advocating and because I hate having that feeling of being the only one in my room and I know when my students come to me in tears that's exactly what they're feeling so it was my just not just being an educated writer but being an advocate for the stories that are underrepresented you know and I have way too many degrees in a lot of student loans and never once have I ever taken a class about a different cultures theater in theater in the theater departments I've been in that's a lot of there's like a lot of years and that's not acceptable at all so it was my goal and has been my goal to continue to just do this work just because it's so important and everyone's stories deserve a space and I also though with that kind of work it's also not only celebrating but also calling people out calling the system out because you know when we talk about TYA diversity we're worse than adult theaters that should tell you something right there and that has to change so one of the things you know when I talk about diversity I'm like I'm tired of allies I don't acknowledge allies anymore that's cool that you're with us but we need accomplices that's what we need because we need to change this because if we're going to advocate for kids the people who create the art and facilitate the art should look like that as well so okay shake it shake it okay thank you and we have plenty of Kool-Aid so drink and drink and drink so think about that I want to talk a little bit about some of the process we came across we went through to come here and to think about what is the purpose because there are so many different definitions and ideas and what is TYA and does that include youth and what does that mean and what is Latinx TYA and then okay we're doing this festival of the Americas and what does that mean okay so it's Latin American TYA but what does that mean too right and how does that how do we think of Latinx and Latin American coming together and how are those both two things that are totally different and also similar in some ways so so Emily and Abigail and I had lots of discussions and then the steering committee and then of course we had a committee that was the selection committee of the five pieces and then also a programming committee so a lot of thinking went into this and a lot of thinking my brain was going a lot so one of those pieces is thinking about what is the intervention what are we trying to do here and for a while and Cece and Jose we've been working on in some of the TYA world thinking about how do we diversify what is happening there how do we think about having more theater of color for young people and specifically Latinx theater for young people and we very consciously thought about this space as being a space where we want to think about our teatros our Latino theater companies thinking about doing more work for young people because what we see happening throughout the US and I'm eager to hear more about what's happening in Mexico and then of course we have little representation of other Latin American on this panel we have certainly at the festival we do they're in rehearsal right now but we the idea is also that a lot of our TYA our Latinx TYA is being done in historically white theater companies and so while okay that's those companies need to be thinking about diversity and representation sometimes those companies are checking boxes to be really honest we know that and some of those companies are doing something because they really believe in it and they really want to change and they want to move forward and great that's awesome too so we want all of that to happen and we feel like our intervention here though is really thinking about our teatros and how are we putting theater forward for young people and that's happening that our teatros throughout the country are doing more theater for young people but some are saying we don't know how or is it even viable are people going to come how do we sell this work how do we make it happen how do we even engage with schools and young people we don't know how to do that so some of what we want to do is discuss how are we going to do that and Emily is going to lead a panel that's going to talk a little more about that but just along those lines you define the work where are you seeing it where do you wish you you see more and what are some of the obstacles that you're coming up against and some of the spaces where you're just being you're just on fire and it's like this is happening let's make more of this and these are the avenues where we we've been able to and these are the avenues where you have to really push who would like to talk about that I'll jump in oh thank you for that that's really great to help frame it for us I think for me the thing is I've had the great fortune of being involved in festivals and I think that's really important for our writers having those opportunities to be at the Kennedy Center at right now at NYU any of these programs they're really important for our artists to get further developed and then of course people come to those festivals to see the work and then those opportunities happen for those artists to perhaps go on and work with those institutions and I have to say that what happened to me with Child's Play and David Tsar many years ago and so we've had that ongoing relationship since 1997 but I want to focus on Teatro del Pueblo which is a small Latino theater company Latinx company in Minneapolis, Minnesota and it's run by Alberto Justiano and Alberto reached out to me many many years ago and said I want to do a play here for young audiences and we want to commission you and Alberto is a small little company and he has to raise those resources to pay a commission playwright and every time I've gone back that's what Al does and he brings that theater to his community and I think that he is a really wonderful model to look at in terms of I'm going to bring you work here to my community and he said to me I want women in science can you write something about that and that's what Curious is about and I'm still waiting for Al to raise that money he said you know you can go and get it done someplace else and I said no I'd like to do it with you because you committed to me and I'm going to commit to you and so that I would say is a wonderful example of a company that sees the big picture but also understands the field and I think that's important thank you I didn't mention we're going to see Jose's work on Saturday of course which is was commissioned by Child's Play no? when was that? we did that in 2006 it premiered there and so it's had a life over those years and it actually is a wonderful example of an outsider telling Child's Play a librarian Tim was his name but he came knowing this book The Masa in the Library that had been written by Pat Mora and it was an illustrated book David asked me would you take a look at it and I sort of flipped through it really quickly bought the book and I was like okay I know that story but I said to David let me take a look at it a little bit more so thank God we went to the archive here today at this university the Latinx 100 year please go take a look at it if you have it I went to the Comunicida Archive at UC Riverside as he was the first Chicano to be a chancellor of a major university of California and so his materials were there what a resource to go in there and to see this man's life his materials there and to then suddenly realize there's a bigger story here and so I went back to David and said yes I think we can tell the story it's here and so you know it was a wonderful emerging I'll be interested to see what you think after you know I haven't seen it in years see does it still hold up my question to you show and I'll just stay on that for just a second because when we say it's not a life right the playwrights here are all going you know that that means what does that what does that mean from us in the library ladies since 2006 do you have any how many like I want to know I'll research this sometime but or someone else because we need to document this work but how many young people any idea I guess Jenny might know but I've sort of approximated maybe a couple hundred thousand maybe more of two hundred three shake your maraca shake your maraca Jenny Millinger said half a million young people have seen Tomas in the library ladies since 2006 the question and somehow you know took something from that so what about more the definitions where's the work being done how is it being done where are the spaces where the doors open where are the spaces where there's friction how do we how do what's how's it happening how's it happening for you how's it happening I struggle with it personally because you know I keep getting published and stuff but no one keeps doing the place and so and the work I've done where I really have found communities are community based theaters not TYA theaters Rising Youth Theater which is here I'm a resident artist with Spinny Dot which takes an international model of TYA as their mission statement so for me that's a little bitter I don't know I don't want to sound bitter but that's where my work and that's where the experiences I'm having as a playwright are more satisfied or satisfied because they go into communities and ask what's wrong and then you build off of that rather than looking for a title or something like that and they really don't think of those conventions or how is this going to sell you know it's just that's that's working this community so that's where I feel the strongest tie right now in terms of overall I think it's still we still need to get there all right thank you well I would like to talk a little bit about my experience and I'm talking about my experience because it's very hard to talk about the theater of our country for just one point of view and I used to be president of Mexico from 2000 to till 2011 and I faced a country without the knowledge of a movement a world movement that is theater for children and young people and in that 11 years I fought all day long every year to organize something but companies in Mexico I guess and theater is just a reflection of the reality of a whole country everybody is very individualist they don't see theater for children and young people as a movement and they don't believe I guess we don't have the culture of getting together of fighting as a group so it was very hard just trying to get information about how many groups in the country were doing theater for children and young people it was hard at the end of the time I was president we couldn't find out we were a few years around 400, 500 groups around the whole country developed one day and finished the other so it was hard and also I think it's policy the cultural institutions are doing now that's fighting against this kind of theater independent theater diverse theater because they try to put everybody in a box they make you do a project putting all you need to do a staging a play and for every 100 people that apply just maybe 10 people that sponsored so what you learn as independent group is that you can't do theater if they don't fund you so it's kind of weird I think they're missing the point instead of fomentar promote the creation and diverse creation they just funding very specific kind of work it's just one line of creation and making these groups think they're not able to create to be diverse so it's to be an independent theater for children and new people here now in Mexico are very aggressive I guess for example I did a show on October and they pay me that show until December and you never know when they're gonna pay it's weird how can you do a show when you don't know if they're gonna pay you and when they're gonna pay so it's hard so I think something's got to change there when I left Ascitesch somebody else got to be president but now I think there's no more president in Ascitesch Mexico so there's no because nobody wants to work for free Roxanne was there a couple of times and many people went for a colloquium organized because I tried to work in the universities to make people understand people that are studying theater that TYA it's a big issue all over the world nobody believes that so it was a big struggle that I fought in the universities and until today there's only out of 27 universities in the country that teach theater acting or something like that that have a course in theater for children that's amazing any courses any courses or a full program no just one course so it's it's a we have a lot of work to do there I guess so Marco just to dig in a little further so when you talk about diversity are you talking about diversity in form or are you talking about diversity of representation of culture language race, ethnicity within all of the people of Mexico because people don't believe that but Mexico is a very racist country very classist country and like let's say before theater is just a reflection of the reality of a country in Mexico we have a big issue with inequality there's a very small group of people with a lot of money and there's a very large amount of people with nothing and that happens also in theater you have some groups that have all the funds and you see the same names having the awards and stuff and a large amount of actors and groups that can't even stage a play so it's a big issue the diversity of all of the countries and I know I have the benefit of seeing some of your work and I know you have what you're going to see also you have indigenous themes in much of your work what about in other plays in Diana having seen a lot of Mexican work as well perhaps you want to speak about some of the work that you experienced or participated in as well and different themes different interpretations on these stages for young people and what that means in Mexico well first time I teach my my first work based on Aztec mythology it's called Mixtlan it's about the travel of a god Quetzalcoatl the feathered serpent to the underworld and people told me you're talking about death for TYA are you crazy? so they didn't want to surprise me I mainly wanted to be a playwright when I start at the university but I had to direct and produce an act because nobody wanted to stitch the place so but now they're a little more common but back in the 80s 90s when I started that it was weird for everybody they said why you look to the past we have to look forward to the future but I think as I wrote in the article that mythology goes very deep in your social unconsciousness and talks about us very deeply and asks and answers questions that have been there for centuries or more so you just have to context that virtual breath use the distanciamiento alienation alienation put some distance so you can look at the reality from a different point of view and find different things if you're so close you can't look at it so trying to write things from the past gives you that ability to have a distance and think a little bit more I guess from your perspective anything too it's just very interesting and also it's just not fair to see when you live in Mexico you just go through all of it and don't stop to think about it because you don't have the resources or the knowledge or all this literature that can teach you that there are other things out there and that some things are just not fair and when I was there all the things that my school produced or the things that I used to watch with my parents in Mexico City and American stories white stories I remember the first play I saw was this play of Tom Sawyer for example and that was in Mexico, yes and that's like theater for youth and then in my school we always produced like Judy and the Beast and then I remember doing like they did the play and the yep and the main character she was a very talented actress and but her hair was brown and people got angry at the producers for having a girl who was not blonde in the main role so and these things are so complex we try to explain to people but since we don't have that culture and that exposure to other type of work people don't understand and so you have to go out come here, see meet all of these artists to realize there's something wrong and I do want to go back to Mexico and change something and show there are different ways and also of course men are in charge of many things there's a lot of racism and it's just it is very very complex thank you okay so we're going to shift gears a little bit just to this idea of what what if you're doing the work is it viable so CC mentioned who's doing the work it's not being produced but I'm going to turn to you Oscar and ask about like as a teacher I know we didn't have a lot of time to bring these young people but the schools jumped at it so what is it, is it viable who's responding to the work as a teacher what is the need out there and then also can you get funds, can you get your children, your youth to get them to the theater or how does that work yeah and I think this is something that every year that I have always and I always have to think about every year including this one where I'll be bringing in some of my students for tomorrow and have to think about okay bus how are we going to get funds for this bus you know and finding what are the resources and how can I show that bringing students to this event, to this experience does relate to everything else that these other funds or that this thing is for there's a particular moment that comes to mind that I worked in elementary school here in Austin and obviously a lot of the work that I wanted to bring to them was Latin that's based and for a lot of families that had never happened and I remember that there was a student that I had who had a lot of different needs, a lot of different things and constantly struggled in school he was the first one out of the blue to me at first like to jump in and to say I want to be a part of that play I want to be a part of this thing and I saw a huge shift in that when the production actually happened he along with his parents who had never really shown up to his school for anything including like mandatory things showed up they showed up, they showed up with the the cousins that came from out of town they showed up with the abuelitos they showed up, they filled our tiny space that was not a theater but they showed up and they filled the space that had brought in the most people but not just the most people but the most people for students who parents didn't really show up for things and that told me a lot there that when the opportunities when we put the opportunities there people will show up when the opportunities there people will say oh great and the things that they told me anything for the school and that was their first again sort of like back to my own what brought me to theater like the entryway into it there was a show that I was also trying to do at my school and I with being blessed with working with that revival and being at the Mexican American Culture Center I had thought okay well maybe this could be an opportunity to have my students perform at the MAC maybe there's something that we can do there and I reached out to John and Rupert and kind of threw a little thing there and ended up not happening because I realized that that was also going to be a struggle for our families to get downtown where parking is a struggle where really trying to figure out and trying to manage a place that they've never been to was going to be a struggle and I think those are places to explore to be able to produce theater and bring families to places they've never been but I first realized I have to focus on the places that they are and when it doesn't exist in the places that they have access to that's where I have to start I have to start there, I have to start in a place that I feel comfortable with in a place that they already know how to get to our school and so we did it in this small space that wasn't a theater because our parents knew where that was and they had access to that and again they showed up and I had we had kids and families that had to sit up at the front super close to the actors and these were young actors who was their first time doing theater and they were like, they're in my spot like how do I go around them and I said just very carefully and they did it and they managed to get through the people and get through the small little brothers and sisters that they had so I feel like from that I learned that when you think about accessibility for families families show up and if families show up there's really no excuse why you wouldn't do the work because like it's happening I constantly think of every year I think it's like the dramatic publication every year they release the most produced plays and every year I'm heartbroken that it's the same place that have been done since 1950 something or another it's constantly the same ones when, to C.C.'s point earlier the work is out there the work is being published everything is out there and it's just how do we bring that into the spaces right from the very beginning right from the elementary school level to really start where our schools can be with our families and the families will show up they have and they will and the young people who spoke this morning were talking about how they're doing theater and they're speaking in Spanish in the theater and in school they're speaking in English and those two youth and most of the program for theater youth I know are not participating in theater they speak their own reasons why and perhaps ask them and along those same lines Abigail sometimes you need to tell us the story of the young person who walked in to see Sene Sienta today and said but that's Cinderella you might even love this because Cinderella well you tell the story sometimes you tell it at the end okay we're all on the edge of our seats Abigail to tell us so thank you okay so Miriam along the same lines so where have you found and you mentioned some spaces where people are supporting the work and encouraging you and of course we all are grateful to Jose I know he's a mentor to many people in this room where are those spaces where have you felt the love and where are you like dar dar dar to be very articulate yeah I'm living in Washington D.C. right now and from this personally where I've worked and who I've been in touch with I've been very supported again through Karen Zacharias sort of introduced me to all of this and got me connected to the Kennedy Center the computer doing a wonderful program they had there for new playwrights boot camp that really was incredible it was two weeks and so that was a wonderful place and right now in Child's Play have been incredibly supportive and connected me with really wonderful artists, Ricky and everyone there associated at Child's Play in D.C. they came to right now and I was connected with Janet Stanford and they became very interested in working with me and then with the Central American Refugee a lot of unaccompanied minors were arriving in the D.C. area it was about three or four years ago and the response was pretty ugly all over the country and D.C. as well there were some ugly things happening and she came to me and wanted to commission me to write this play but also to create a program where we would bring in unaccompanied minors to Imagination Stage and we developed OMA which is still going strong at Imagination Stage but also I would say that's where I've found support and I think I really do believe it's been personal connections and networking with people in places and spaces like this that's where I've really been able to just today at the Rising New Theater Workshop and listening to the different stories I was just really moved and reminded again about how many stories there out there that need to be heard and how valid and important those stories are and that is the American story and for some reason they've always been here, we're here and it's not been it's just not been allowed to be elevated to the stage and we know why we know why but anyway so that's where I found my support, I also Young Playwrights Theater in Washington DC I taught there I was on the board there but again I think organizations like Rising New Theater, Young Playwrights Theater Albany Park Theater the Detroit Mosaic Theater these are the places where I really feel the seeds are being planted to bring youth into theater but also to make them our future leaders in theater to get them onto boards to get them into the theater administrative staffs I think that's where the landscape will finally change once we start getting these folks and that to me is the very exciting part about YPT and Rising News and all of the other places it's just critical and the more we cultivate that the more we make connections with these folks, the more we have convenings like this we'll start to see more work, we'll start to see more connections and hopefully start building more bridges and unleashing all of these great stories out there and great talent so I think it's about this I think this is why it's so great I think the how around Latinx is so critical I would like to say though that I know we're focusing on theatres but I do feel like the larger theaters out there like the Imagination Stage and Child's Play and Seattle and that they I would love to see them coming to things like this just to hear what we have to say, what's needed how to open doors, how to get us to the table and rising youth I love the latter where you talked about are we there to check a box, are we there to be a part of the decision making and to start sort of changing the narrative of Latinx theater, American theater and changing that narrative, shifting the way we think about T-Way so I think yeah, digging a little bit in there changing the narrative changing the narrative right, what's the narrative what do you want to do? I think the new narrative is that what is Latino, what is American to me what American is is a blending and combination and intersections of everything I mean there's so many, right now I mean we're 18% of the population by 2036 would be the largest ethnic population and we're also mixing so much, there's so much inter-ethnic racial mixing it's everything and that's what's so cool that the new narrative, the new story of who we are as Americans is that we own it now we know some people want to make America great again and what that means but we know the America is what we've always been defining and I think the new narrative of what Latin T-Way, Latinx theater is that, it's part and parcel of who we are and it's not marginalizing us, it's not separate, it's everything I think that's the shift that needs to happen and I think there's some really cool work being done, I'm on CTFA with CC and Jenny at Children's Theater Foundation of America, we're really trying to dig deep and Robin's here, she's on some and we're really trying to dig deep and look at institutional racism in these organizations and really understand it and do the hard work and change the narrative and try to see how can we support theaters that are really doing good EDI equity diversity initiatives and doing the work and asking the hard questions and reflecting and figuring out how do we change so that we can do some fundamental institutional systemic work and that's what we're trying to do wow, thank you okay, well we got a phone in call so tuning in to us and Karen Zacarias in DC, we'd like to know and it's a great question so I cannot ignore it but really important right, we have, and speaking of some of our TYA companies throughout the country and and please speak about this in Mexico but we have such a need for adaptation, the book, right, will it sell and I know, right, Esperanza rising I remember people were like, well it's not a title that people know, but then we learned, oh it is right, well we fought to, you know, to fight that was a fight, but anyhow so what do we do about the idea of adaptation how do we get companies to do original work and also I mean, right, we have folks here who've done adaptations and what do you think about that what has that been like, is that a great joy, is it painful, what is that for you for our playwrights but also in your own work and why is that such a thing for our young people, it's continued, it's been a long time where the title, right, the book title and the adaptation and I think I got the question right, yeah, how do we get TYA to embrace original Latinx stories when there is no book behind it I don't know I mean, you know I think adaptations are good, I mean I think what they, one purpose they serve is to build bridges and so I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with adaptations, I think it's for the artistic directors to I think it sometimes boils down to just economics and then, you know, and it's hard to raise a fee, I mean to survive in theater, so I understand why there's that hesitancy to not go with original titles but I think it's, you know, when like Miriam talks about, you know, when you create that community that is empowered and can say something we'll see that change but I think it's going to be a while just because we play such an important role, you know, and it's like well, if we can't, you know, do this play then we won't do any plays or we'll go under and so, like I said, I don't know, you know, I'm not in that space to say this is what we need to do, I just think it's taking artistic directors tasking to be brave in all honesty, you know Anyone else want to stab in that and then we're going to open it up and then we'll have questions out there some and I've been really selfish about asking all my questions Okay, anyone else want to talk on that? No CeCe's I Don't Know was the final answer Okay, we have a question over here and then over there as well You have an answer We are all wanting to know that Let's get away from the book adaptation and the original Latinx stories in our companies in our theaters So the answer over there is Why not? Just do it Just do it Just do it Yes We have to be subversive and people, producers need to be smarter Okay Sani Sienta Okay Thank you So moving to a next question Olga Oh We are full of controversy, love it Olga is talking about theater milagro, go ahead I'm doing this for the live streaming Go ahead They can't hear Okay Yes, thank you Did we get any of that on No, okay, so just very briefly Teatro Milagro doing work since 1980, a lot of social issues human sex trafficking and many many many other than Dia de los Muertos all kinds of family work to market it in a different way Thank you Olga, that was awesome Questions A lot of people want to answer that the question is about what's missing in the Latinx TYA canon, specific communities that are not being represented I think it's out there just finding it and letting people know that it's there like I said with my book and hopefully doing another volume the hardest part was finding those stories that we knew they were out there and I think how do we as a community how do we promote each other's work is out there because it is out there but it's sometimes it's just hard to find and I don't think it's missing I just think, okay, please let us know that it's out there so that we can publish it, can't produce it we can't share it with each other for me that's the biggest thing is trying to get the awareness out as a community so we know those stories out there I think for me it's about access and mentorship we have we have to mentor we have to teach what we've been taught and if we weren't taught that I hope we can learn to teach the artists are going to show up they're going to show up it's just being able to have that access of people who have the foresight to see talent to nurture talent and then let them rip what they need to find their voice because it takes a while to find your voice and mentorship is important because most of the time they don't have people who have gone through this they're the first man, if you will, you know that film you know Armstrong landing on the moon, right we need a lot of those types of folks you're good you need to believe in yourself and I see your talent I see your vision, I see your heart but it's also about a craft and they need that support to develop their craft Oscar? I think I was going back a little bit to that same point that the work is out there I know that without the review we do a new play festival every year and there's a lot of work that comes our way that there's a lot of resources there's only so much you can do but the work is all out there and we see it and we see all literally from all kinds of topics and all kinds of just experiences I'll say then of experiences from non-binary Latinx stories to I think this was maybe two years ago we came across a story of it was a but it was from the perspective of a deaf community and a deaf family and that was a little bit harder to sort of find resources for that in the sense that when it hasn't been produced it's like who do we know that has all this or what actors do we know in the city that are deaf actors that we can help all put together and sometimes that works out sometimes they don't but now that we know let's say that playwright we know that particular play we need to be able to find a way to share that and say you know what we couldn't do that here but how can I take your work how can I take this and share it with people and say here's something if you're able to help and fund maybe this project or you have the artists that are able to do that like here's the work instead of like oh we couldn't do it and then just kind of leave it there the work is out there and it's all about that and about finding those resources to work with people so easily through technology across the world other folks want to dig into that I just it also makes me think a lot about the leadership in different organizations and even theater companies so who is in the board of directors and taking a look of okay who are we are we representing the stories of the people we want like the stories we're representing and just also I feel like there needs to be more groups of younger people who get together produce work do things share stories I think that's something I would like to okay thank you so then just to to dig a little more into what you asked because I think you asked about some specific communities indigenous Latinx communities if you will Afro-Latinx communities so in this work that is available so I hear that it's there it's just not being done is that what I'm hearing I think just today on the first day of the conference and all the different workshops I've been at I've heard so many different stories and what's needed all of those stories are things that could be written about I mean just everything we heard today that you shared someone else there's another story I was like we as a people are very very diverse we're not homogenous do you speak Spanish or not speak Spanish are you a third generation versus a first generation are you the indigenous questions colorism questions people with physical challenges the deaf community and other physical challenges there's so much there's a never ending supply of stories there's just never they'll never end so it's a matter like Jose said of trying to get these stories on the page seeing talent harnessing that talent and getting someone to help you say go Karen once told me shut up go write a play shut up and go write your play once the stories on the page is there a certain kind of Latinx story that our folks who are producing work in the US want to produce is that a thing is there a certain kind of Latinx story that our theater companies in the US want to do or no I really have that question and then I'll open up it again we have like time for one more question after that I'm on a journey right now with I've never saw it as an adult play it's playing in regional theaters but it's been a family play all along in my mind and to watch new audiences come into traditional regional theaters with their families is such a beautiful thing to sit in a house of 600 people and suddenly hear giggles with a grown up play and everybody's enjoying it from the little people to the grandparents and I think that that's a place I feel where we can do more work our audiences are hungry for the work and we just have to find those right pieces that can be emerged because it's a different sort of animal and I would say on top of that it is family I think of this T-L-A's family and all of that generation my parents they're hungry for this stuff they've never had it so being able to fill across generations it's a need that is universal in our population and I think because we do it is about humanity and the humanness of us all is just for everyone to understand that this is these are American plays they're universal and also I think that we're thinking about theater for children for young people but look at us we're old guys and we still have a heart of a child so like children with some experience that's it but we're all children okay I got the English from Abigail Vega so the great, the most beautiful thing is that these folks are not going anywhere because they have, you know, we won't let them but also a quality that every person here shares is the incredible generosity of spirit and willingness to mentor and talk about their story so can I say that if you have more questions which I'm sure you do please, please ask they, you know, obviously their hearts are open and I appreciate so much hearing from all of you this collective wisdom experience and passion so thank you, thank you, thank you so much


Hello? Down here we're discussing motivation. It's a very fancy looking theoretical flyer down here about motivation. It has graphs, figures, diagrams, arousal theory, that sounds interesting. If you need some motivation right down here. Free motivation. Alright, so today we are launching into the third sort of unit of the class. This is on. Oh, maybe we are. Maybe we're having issues with this again. There we go. Okay, so today we're going to start talking about disks and stable storage. So of all the, so we talked about the CPU, we've talked about memory, now we're on to kind of the third big part of the system. Disks are probably the place where I would argue there's been the most sort of radical change within your lifetimes and my lifetime in terms of the storage hierarchy. You know, we have more cores than we used to. Memory technologies are a little bit different although fundamental sort of properties of memory are pretty much the same. But with disks, you know, the move that's going on right now from spinning disks to flash really changes a lot about how the operating system interfaces with those devices. We're going to talk about hard disk drives in this class and spinning disks and that's mainly because there's 40, 50, 60 years of really beautiful important work on file system design that, you know, is useful for you as a software developer to think about and learn from. However, you know, it's worth pointing out that flash drives are making a lot of this work obsolete or at least allowing us to rethink a lot of this work. So let's keep that in mind as we go along. Assignment three is due a week from Friday. There's motivation down here if you need it. Hopefully assignment three is motivation enough. Please, you know, like I pointed out, the first part of assignment three is not necessarily that difficult. Please don't use that an excuse to wait to get started. Instead, get it done and then you can move on to the other parts. So we also opened up the leader boards today so those are now publicly visible. If you, I posted on discourse about this, if you have tried to make a submission visible and it is not visible, it is possible that your partner is the problem. We're going to try to make this a little bit more clear. In order for your submission to show up on the leader board, if you have a perfect score, both you and your partner have to allow it on some level, either anonymously or sort of fully anonymously. So again, Yee Hong is working on making that a little bit more obvious in cases where you don't see your submission and you're wondering why. Okay. Any questions on VM before we go on? This is it. Yeah. Okay. Does anyone remember when I promised that we would have the midterm grades back? Two weeks from last Friday. Yes. So tax day, I guess. Is that true? No, April 8th. So I think it's the same day as the assignment three. What's that? I don't know about you. I have to pay taxes. Yeah, if it's not tax day, it's April 8th. That's our target for the midterm grading. Ali, are we on target for the midterm grading? Ali says we are. Okay, great. Yeah. So that's when we'll have the midterms back.  We're going to scan all the midterms before we return them. So we already have the original.   You're welcome to wander off. And at that point, the complaint period will officially begin. All right, good question. Any questions about VM? All right, so let's talk about something new. Disks. So when we start talking about disks, I mean, a lot of you are probably familiar with this. You know, we talk about, so stable storage is the general catch term that describes both and variety of different technologies that we're going to be talking about. That's just storage that doesn't lose its contents when it's powered off. That's a way to, you know, hold those contents for a long period of time. There's two primary types of stable storage that we're going to talk about. And, you know, one is sort of the past and the other is the future. Hard disk drives. Hard disk drives, and we have some fun videos to watch today, but hard disk drives store data on a magnetic medium and move. So that's the big thing. So the way that hard drives, spinning disks, magnetic hard drives, retrieve data is by, is by moving. They spin the platters, they move things around. That's how you get data on and off of them. And that makes them, from a computer science perspective, fairly interesting. Flash drives, on the other hand, are what are known as solid state drives. Has anyone ever taken a part of flash drive? Opened up the case? It's really funny because, like, they're in a form factor that's designed around the old spinning disks, right? So spinning disks, if you take us, has anyone opened up a spinning disk before? So if you open up a spinning disk, there's stuff in there, right?  There's a bunch of stuff inside. If you open up the equivalent flash drive, it's like empty. It's mostly air. And there's a couple of chips sort of tucked away in one corner on a board, and that's it. So the, the solid state drives store things in what's known as non-volatile memory. There's some caveats and some consequences of this. But still today, and it's actually pretty impressive how the gap has shrunk. So I'll ask you guys in a sec if you can sort of predict this. Hard disk drives, spinning disks, are still cheaper than flash drives. And they also tend to be, because of that reason, they tend to be larger. They're cheaper in terms of price per gigabyte for capacity. So organizations that are doing large amounts of storage typically do sort of warm storage on spinning disks simply because it's still more cost effective. Now here's the interesting thing. So back when I started teaching this class, that was 2011. The difference was about an order of magnitude. So back then, about 10 cents per gigabyte for a hard disk drive, versus about a dollar for a solid state drive. Anyone know what that number is today? Anyone priced out disks recently? Want to pick a guess? Yeah. Quarter to a dollar, okay. So that that would indicate that it's shrunk to kind of a factor of four. I guess the question is, in this was projected for 2012, it was going to be an order of magnitude difference in price per capacity. Anyone want to guess what that is now? Yeah. 15 cents, okay. That's actually pretty close. What is it for the hard disk drive? What's the ratio here? How much more am I paying per unit capacity for a solid state drive? Pretty close. Yeah, so it's about 7 cents to 15 cents. So we're only talking about a factor of two. So go out and buy a solid state drive, because it's worth it. But this number is shrunk quite a bit, so this is pretty interesting. I don't know enough about the EE underlying these things to understand what's driving these trends. But it's certainly quite interesting that you're seeing a very, in a relatively short amount of time, a pretty significant narrowing in the gap. It is no longer prohibitively expensive to buy large solid state disk drives. And the performance that you can get from those drives in certain cases is much, much better than you would get from a spinning disk. How many people have a computer with a spinning disk in it still? Okay, how many people have a mobile device with a spinning disk in it?  Get rid of that thing. It's going to break, trust me. I went through at least seven hard drives on my laptop when I was in graduate school. All right, so and when we talk about now some of the file system designs we're going to talk about, and more mature file system designs, we're still frequently designed around the capabilities and limitations and the problems associated with spinning disks that we're going to introduce today. But if you're confused about what we're talking about, please ask, because there's pretty significant differences with the new technology. Okay, so I talked a little bit about this, but you know, why bother? Right? I mean, this is a class, you know, maybe when when the department introduces the modern operating systems course, they'll stop talking about, about flash drives. But I think that it's worth. I mean, first of all, there's still a gazillion of these hard disk drives around. They're still out there in the world, they're still in active use. If you are really interested in just capacity per unit dollar, the hard disk drives are still a big win. And if you're a company like, I don't know, Dropbox, for example, that has to provision terabytes upon terabytes of storage, that multiplier of two is actually kind of important. For you, when you buy your laptop, maybe you're willing to pay another hundred bucks to get a flash drive. But, but for them, that's really an issue of sort of the bottom line. Why would, you know, get so, so let's just presume for now that flash drives perform a lot better, they're a little bit more expensive. What would be an application where you might still want to use a spinning disk? Yeah. Oh, that's an interesting question. Yeah. Okay. So, so here's another question. Do flash drives last forever? No, negative. Yeah. In terms of flash drives wear out, they wear out in a different way than hard disk drives. But they still, yeah, so flash drives are not forever. But, but what's an, you know, what's an example of a type of data that you might think would be okay to store on, on a hard disk drive? Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, in, in generally, we think of sort of cold or warm storage, things that don't get touched very often. What's an example of this from your own life? Give me some piece of data that you have stored in the cloud that is probably completely okay to move on to a spinning hard drive. Yeah. Your textbooks. I like that. That's a good answer. Pictures, maybe. I mean, what about the emails that you sent in 2010? You could still find those, right? I mean, Google still has those, or whoever you use as a cloud email provider probably still has them, but they're not hot. They're not stuff that you're looking at often. And so, to some degree, the story that we're starting to see emerge with the introduction of flash is it provides an interesting additional tier in the storage hierarchy, where if we have stuff that's really hot and is accessed really often, it might make sense in certain cases when I have performance constraints to move that stuff into flash, whereas stuff that's sort of coldish can be easily moved into, into spinning disks, where it's accessible. It's a lot more accessible than something like tape, which is super slow to access. But, you know, it's not, there's not a performance bottleneck when you're talking about really ancient email. It's kind of impressive to me to think about the fact that emails that I will probably never read again are sitting on some computer in one of Google's data centers. That is just a total waste of space. I'm just, I'm sorry. But there they are, right? It's kind of interesting. So, hierarchical file systems is the time that we talk about. How many people still organize their files on their computer? In like a, okay, now we all want to be organized, so I understand that.  Okay, there we go. See, you guys, the other ones, you're not really that organized, right? So, so yeah, I mean the idea of moving things, you know, you know, accessing stuff through folders. When you guys want to play a song on your computer, do you navigate to the folder where the song is located and double click on the mp3 or whatever it is? How many people do that? Yeah, okay. What do the rest of you do? Just don't listen to music? That's cool. Let's say. How do you find it? Okay, let's presume that you have some music somewhere that you can call up. How do you locate it? How do you, how do you get at it? You search, you start typing in the, you misspell the artist's name badly and Google's smart enough to figure it out. It's like, okay, here's which one. Yeah, so search is really changing the way that people interact with data. And if you listen to certain, you know, prognosticators, it's all ruining our minds and we can't think clearly anymore because all we have to do is like type of badly worded sentence into Google and it just is like, oh, here's what you want. But, but you know, the fact is like all these search tools like spotlight and, you know, any search tool that's built into apps that you guys use, these are still built on top of hierarchical storage.  I don't know how long that's going to be the case. I mean, this stuff changes very slowly. We're talking about data that's going to be around for decades. It's unlikely that Google is going to be really excited about a big project to move all of their completely cold and useless data onto some new file system who cares, right? It works, it's there, it doesn't matter. But there are sort of new trends emerging in this space and I think search is one of them. But fundamentally I mean understanding the future in this case always is always used to study what we've done and understand the past, where things came from. Because I think there are probably design quirks about file systems and storage that are inherited from spinning disks that will be with us for a long time if not for. And we will talk about flash. I'll probably add maybe a lecture this year on just entirely on flash storage. And the goal here just to keep this, you know, keep this in mind is to talk about the system design principle because while hard drives have changed, the principles of hard drives that make file system design very exciting. So there's a lot of work on file system design for decades and there's a variety of reasons for that. But one of the reasons for it is that there are things about hard drives that are difficult to deal with. And those things aren't gone. There may be hard drives don't fail in the same way that they used to, but other types of systems fail in the same way. And so it's still useful to talk about this. Okay, so let's talk about spinning disks. As you, if you've taught, I should really start doing this. I mean, I think when I took this lecture, Margot, she brought like a hard disk to class, right? So this is the one part of the computer and it's kind of, I mean, that's the kind of thing that's sad about flash. I mean, if you take apart a computer, it's not very interesting. It's like, there's, I don't know, some blob of integrated circuits over there and there's another blob over there and who knows when anything does, right? I mean, and the processor's cool, right? But of course, you're going to touch that and then it's going to like bonk out, you'll be out 200 bucks. You know, you can kind of see that, you can kind of see memory. But disks were the one thing that was kind of fun to take apart because there's moving parts in there and, you know, it's a little, little sort of, there's stuff that goes on. So where data is actually stored, these are called platters. Platter is coated with some sort of magnetic medium. Data is written in red to and from these, these platters. That's what actually, that's where the bit of data is actually located. The spindle, so the way that the spinning disks work is they have a bunch of platters, they all rotate together and the rotation is part of how we navigate to a particular spot on disk. And we'll talk about this more later. And then the, most of the, the brains and most of the complexity here is in what's called the disk head. So the head is the sensor and actuator that is actually reading and writing data from the disk. The heads also move, so they move and that allows them to move from one side of the platter to the other. Okay, here's a diagram. Let's check this out. Platters, right, and there's a stack of these. There's not just one. Modern disks would have, I don't know, eight, ten, twelve, a whole stack of these. Each one of them has some amount of capacity on it. They're rotating around the spindle. Here's, and the heads are on this arm, right? This arm swings back and forth, which is what allows the heads to reach any spot on disk. So through some combination of moving the head and allowing the disk to spin underneath the heads, I can reach any part of the disk that I would need to, need to reach. Just make sense? Many people have seen this before. Okay, cool, great. How do you get to other platters? Great question. Anyone know? Yeah. Okay, let's, anyone want to guess which one it is? Yeah, so what that arm is actually like a rake, right? So there's heads on at least the top and probably actually, so each platter has two sides, so there's actually heads facing every platter all the way up and down.  Now that has consequences, right? Because all the heads are in the same position on the disk at one, at any given time. So if I have, if I have some data, so that, that affects what the heads can read at the same time. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think there's a, let me, okay. So we talk about places on the disk. So the disk has actual physical locality, which is kind of interesting, right? I mean, we talk about memory. You think about physical memory as having some sort of address space from low address to the high address.  It would be interesting to be able to figure out like what stick of actual physical memory is this address on. But we usually don't care. With the disk we do, because it affects a lot of how performance on disks works and how we design file systems. So the track is, you know, one, think of like a race track or the track is a lane on a race track that runs all the way around the platter. The track is what I can read without moving the heads. So if all I do is let the disk spin, I can read all the data on one track. So a sector resembles something like this. So this is like a slice of pie. And the cylinder is one track dropped through all the platters. And here's a diagram. So the track is the yellow part. The sector is this. This is not a arrow. This is an actual slice. So that's one sector on the disk potentially. And the cylinder is a little hard to think about, but it's almost like a can that's been dropped all the way through the disk. Does that make sense? The cylinder is interesting because that's all the data I can read from the entire disk without moving the heads. Just letting the disk spin. Okay, so we have some fun videos to watch today. Because this move, right? I mean you could make a video of memory and use, but it's not very interesting. Whereas at disk it's alright. So let's check this out. Alright. Free advertising for whoever this guy is. So we've got platters, right? Spindle. This is the head. And again if you rotated this you would see that this head has identical arms. Sorry, the arm has identical sort of components that are in between each track. Sorry, in between each platter. There we go. Oops. There we go. So that's cool, right? Now you know what made that noise, right? So I suspect what the noise is is actually the heads stopping or you know getting to one point and turning around, right? So this is fairly inexplicable. This is clearly a Windows machine because I'm serious because deleting a folder should not take this much time. It's not like it was just really one thing you have to do and then it's kind of gone, right? But anyway, okay, here we go. Oh, sorry. We're still going. We're still deleting that folder.  So this is kind of cool, right? So this is a copy-paste. Now here you can really see locality. One of the files is over here on the disk, literally located there. The other one is over here and you can, if you watch carefully, you can see the heads essentially picking up a little bit of data on one side and dropping it on the other. Oops, sorry. Alright, so now we're doing a quick format. Alright, questions about this? It's kind of cool. Yeah. Oh, good question. Yeah. What fails? All sorts of things can fail. I mean the magnetism I suspect is usually not the problem, right? The disk has physical parts. This is why spinning disks, for a long time, I mean particularly on mobile devices, spinning disks were a serious and problematic cause of failure. This is one of the reasons why flash drives are so great, particularly if you have a laptop.  Sometimes you were lucky. Sometimes actually you'd pick it up and you'd have about 20 seconds to say goodbye. That was it. And then something would freeze and that would be it. And we'll talk about why that happens in a second. So usually, now once you start dropping the disk or doing other things to it, all sorts of things can go wrong. But the physical parts of the disk are usually what fail. So the and when we start talking about file systems, just always have to keep this in mind. Discs move and that really sets them apart from everything else we studied. And that movement causes failures, it causes things to wear out, it causes delays that are different in computer time from the other delays that we've talked about. The delay to move a physical object is always way way way bigger than to like throw some electrons across a bus. And that starts to impact how file systems are designed, caching all sorts of other things. Yeah and that causes, that's really what caused disks to be slow. The old spinning disk was the fact that there was things moving. Now if you want to get something done fast, don't move. Like don't move physically and you'll go a lot faster. The other thing is sort of how disks are integrated into the rest of the system. So the things that we've been talking about before, the CPU and memory, these things are really tightly integrated into the OS. Discs less so, right? How can you tell? What is the kind of hint that you might have if you use a modern computer system that the disk is a little bit more separated from the operating system? Well I have two different technologies, so that's a good point. I mean it's important that those two technologies expose the same interface. But where do I see differences in software? Yeah. Okay so that's, yeah I mean disks show up on your computer as devices, which is, but again it's sort of a hint at what's going on here. But what's, where do I see the difference? Right? I mean maybe let me put it another way. So with the CPU, a lot of the fancy stuff that goes on in CPUs is done internally. So if you think about things like out-of-order execution and pipelining and all sorts of things like that, that's stuff that the CPU does without the operating systems help at all. Memory, the OS is really heavily involved in providing this address space abstraction that's very common. On the disk there's a lot of software involved and again how can you tell? How many people have installed a Linux or an Ubuntu type system before? Okay. You have to make a choice at some point. Maybe you didn't notice. Did you choose something about the type of memory management abstractions you wanted to provide when you install the operating system? You did? What choice did you make? No, okay sorry. No, the memory. So did you make any choices related to the virtual memory subsystem? Yeah okay that's not a big deal, right? It's not like, it was like what type of virtual memory system would you like? Did it ask you what type of you know schedule or did you like? No, you just got the schedule that was built in. You got the virtual memory system that was built in but you made a choice which he pointed out which is what file system do you want, right? File systems are software and I think that's the other reason why they're fun, right? They're fun to talk about is because we have a lot of choice. You guys could go out and build your own file system and you could integrate it with Linux pretty easily if you want to. In fact, there are tools that allowed you to build file systems in software, right? Above the OS interface so you can actually something called fuse which allows you to implement a file system entirely, sorry not in software, that's clear in user space. You don't even have to have kernel privileges. You can just take a file, like an area on disk and build your own file system there and go wild in case you want to build a file system. That would be cool, yeah? Like open, when I open a file it plays a YouTube video, right? So yeah, I mean like the disk, the underlying disk interface and abstraction will talk about. There's not a lot there, it's basically just chunks of data. What you do with that in software and how you build a file system on top of it is really up to you, yeah? So what I mean is that the interface that people use to find things, so 30 years ago if you wanted to find something on your computer, you either opened up some sort of nasty gooey and started clicking on folders and you're like oh where did I put that letter? I'm going to look oh it's my letters folder and it's in this whatever. Now people don't do that, right? They just open spotlight or whatever the dog thing on Microsoft is called. I don't think it's the dog anymore, whatever they call.  It's built in index basically. To some degree I would argue a lot of computers just have no idea where things are anymore.  I bet most people could not find that file on their computer if they tried, right? But they know how to find, they know how to locate it which is either they open Microsoft Word again they say oh recent files or something or they search or whatever. So just the way that people locate things is different, right? The location. Now again under the covers there is a hierarchical file, something that this is all built on top of. But you can imagine getting rid of that. You can imagine having a file system that you couldn't browse in the same way hierarchically but you could still search. I mean to some degree this is almost like that. Anyone ever remember using Yahoo? Ever used Yahoo? Back when they had, so Yahoo had this heroic effort to essentially build a hierarchical quote-unquote kind of topic-based file system on top of the internet. You know it was like topic, subtopic. I mean they tried to classify everything. It was very Java-like. It's like we must have a type hierarchy. And Google was like no way. Who cares? Search, right? Like you just put in your search terms. Google is not trying to build this like rigid hierarchical structure. They're just trying to help you find things. So maybe that embodies the difference. It's just how people locate things. Yahoo thought somebody would locate, if they're looking for computer help, they would click on the computers section and then they would click on the help section and then they would click on the Microsoft Windows section and they would click on whatever, right? So it's just a different interface, a different way of locating things. And the web is really what's driving this, right? I mean Google is really sort of that that functionality is really what's changing a lot of how people interact with their computer. And I would argue maybe for the better, unless you're one of the people who thinks that we're all stupider because we can use Google to search for things. I guess. I don't know. To me that seems weird. We can find out a lot more than we used to. So I don't know how that makes it stupider. Okay, so I already pointed this out. I mean because this move we do a lot of work at the file system level to try to hide these latencies. And there's tricks upon tricks upon tricks. Some of them feel like hacks now that are all based around this idea. And that's what's so interesting about flash because flash doesn't move, flash doesn't have the same locality constraints. So to some degree flash comes in and just says I don't care about this problem any more. And all the file system people are like we've been solving this problem for 40 years and we're so good at it. And yet gone. All this locality stuff is gone. But it's still fun to talk about. And again clearly moving things around is slow. So accessing the byte of memory fast, moving the head across the disk. Now you saw that head. That looked fast. Right?  So in the time that it took that head to move from one part of the disk to the other, I just got like a gigabyte from my RAM chip easily or something like that. It just doesn't compare. Disks also fail. So one of the fun, some of the fun and I would argue more lasting contributions of file system design have to do with failure and figuring out ways to recover from failures, anticipate failures, things like this. Disks can fail. So this is a fun fact. And there's an interesting paper maybe we'll read. We're getting to the part of the class where I start to assign research papers for you guys to look at. Little ones that are fun. About five years later there was a group that did this really fun study. So they bought ten, or I don't know what it was, twenty identical hard drives. Okay? Quote unquote identical. They were by the same maker, same manufacturer, same vendor ID, same lot number. You know they might have come off the factory line like next to each other. What they found is that there were huge performance differences between these discs. And a lot of it has to do with sort of manufacturing defects that disc cover up. So in a lot of cases spinning discs have, they come with bad sectors. They come with parts of the disc that don't work. And I do not know why this is. I'm sure this is just some sort of manufacturing process problem. But instead of, this is kind of clever, instead of trying to make the manufacturing process perfect what the vendors do is they just say as long as the disc knows what parts are bad and avoids those, doesn't let you use them, then it's okay. So discs do these checks where they figure out, okay that sectors gone, I'm not using that anymore. And this can happen over time as well. So in certain cases you can have sectors that sort of fail. And again I have no idea why this is but it happens and discs will kind of remap things to make those sectors go away. But this can cause some of those performance differences. All right. And discs can fail all at once. So that's kind of like slow decline. Now when we talk about flash, flash can also fail in this slow burn sort of sense. Where it turns out after a long period of time, flash has a certain number of times that it could read, it can erase, sorry, it can basically write a particular part of the flash drive. And once you exceed that number there's a probability that those will fail. At which point that chunk of the flash drive is gone. And so we'll come back to this when we talk about flash. But flash chips do all sorts of funny things to try to make that problem go away. So discs can also fail in these ugly ways. So a head crash, you saw those heads as you know they were you know flying back and forth across the disc. In order to improve density, those heads sit like, I don't know, it's an engineer number. It's like a nanometer or something above the surface of the disc. They are really really really close to the platter. And of course it makes sense, you know the farther away I am the harder it is to read or write data to it. In the closer I am I can write smaller and smaller and smaller tracks which makes the overall capacity of the disc larger. Unfortunately if I, I can't touch the platter. The platter is moving quite quickly. My heads have like little sharp edges on them. And what can happen if I do, if I do touch the platter, this is what's called a head crash. And this just will wipe out a disc. Right? I mean this basically ruins the whole thing. And this is I'm sure what I did to like disc after disc when I was in college. Just by dropping them. So here we go. Let's watch another video.  Can anyone see it? Can anyone see the problem? It's so funny. It almost looks like a racing stripe. You're like oh that's a fancy hard drive right? I didn't know they can. Does that make it go faster? You know like a someone told me the other day if I had a racing stripe to my car, 10% faster immediately. Right? Can anyone, can anyone see the problem? Yeah, like this is not good. That's not, again, that's not a decal. That's where he'll explain it. Oops. Sorry. Notice here, notice that this only occurred in a small area of the platter creating a cylindrical scratch. Yeah, so this is also kind of interesting because of the fact that that discs are so kinetic. They do a little bit of work. I mean this is not some sort of advanced filtration system.  But they try to avoid getting particles in here. Because you can imagine if I have a little piece of something hard and it ends up inside the disc case and starts bouncing around. It could do some damage. Right? There we go. How many people do backups? Okay, thank you. I'll see you get, by the way, gets a great backup tool. Okay, so we're going to talk about RAID later, which is a cool way to bring multiple discs together to basically both improve performance and reliability. But there's also a fair amount of fault tolerance that's done at the file assistant level. And there's a bunch of, again, I think they're enduring contributions from the file system community. There's several that have to do with failure handling. Okay, so now let's talk about the fact that discs are slow. So disc fail. I'll talk a little bit about that. Because discs are slow, they're often the part of the system that everything else is waiting on. If I have to read or write from a file, if I have to actually do some IO. And this is still true, even when I'm using flash. I mean flash is faster, but it's still way slower than memory, way slower than registers or first or second level caches. And so the file system does a lot to try to hide this. And in this case, the operating system is really intimately involved. So go back to the processor example. The out of order execution the processors do to try to hide memory latencies is totally opaque to the operating system. All the operating system knows is that instructions go in one end and come out the other. And they come out in order. What the processor is doing in internally? No clue. It's too fast. It's happening too fast. With the file system on the other hand, sort of the difference in speed between the memory subsystem and the files and the disc is something that the OS is very involved in handling in software. And so there's a bunch of things that we can learn here. We use the fact that all these system design, classic system design techniques have been applied to this problem. You know, wait to do things. And I just set this. So the OS is really much more involved in hiding these latencies and so there's more for us to learn here about some of the classic approaches to doing this. So let's talk about what's slow about reader writing to disk. So it's a brief primer in terms of what you actually have to do to read or write to disk. So the first thing I have to do is tell the disk what to do. Disk is a device so there's some protocol I have to use to speak to it and tell it for example I have this buffer of data and I want you to write it at this point to this address on the disk. And at this point we're not talking about file systems. There's no notion of a file name or anything else. This could be anything. We'll come back and talk about the interface that disks expose but it's quite simple. Essentially an array of chunks of data of a fixed size like 256 or 512 bytes. So I tell it what to do. The drive then has to move the heads. Now this is simplified somewhat. There's more there's buffering that goes on here as well. The drive has to move the heads to that location. Then there's something called settle time which I love which is essentially the time it takes for the heads to stabilize. So the heads have been on a very exciting journey from one side of the disk to the other. And they made that journey as fast as possible but when they get over to the other side they're kind of like shaking back and forth a little bit. So you have to kind of wait for them to stabilize so they're centered on the track that you're trying to read or write from. And then there's a rotation time where the platters actually have to rotate the position where the data is located. The disk reads this internally and then transfers the data back to the OS or back to the system over some kind of bus. Yeah. I have no idea. Small. Right. Yeah. Small as possible. So the capacity increases that we've seen in disks which I have a slide to show you in just a second are really the function of just being able to make tracks smaller and smaller and smaller and to make the heads smaller and smaller and smaller and to make everything more precise. So in the past you've had much larger disks. The tracks were a lot wider. You know you couldn't stabilize the heads is well enough. So I think there's a lot of kind of cool electrical and mechanical engineering that went into being able to make the tracks and also materials engineering. Right. To make the tracks so so small. Obviously the problem is at some point if they're too if they're too narrow there's not enough magnetic material to really hold the information. When they're too narrow and too close together I also have interference. Let's think about it. And again I'm way out of my league here. But imagine you're the head. You're like holding a magnet over the disk and like magnetizing various parts and un-magnetizing other parts. But there's two other tracks right there. And so those two tracks are too close to me. I end up actually spreading a little bit of that over into other regions. And this happens naturally. But there's enough sort of redundancy in how the disk is used in order to prevent it from being a problem. But I certainly don't want to erase data on a neighboring track. So over time when we looked at improving spinning disks. So one of the things that happened is capacity went up because tracks got smaller. Internet connect speeds got much much faster. What about the seek time? So the seek is actually moving the head from one part of the disk to the other. How much do you think that improved over the past 20 years? Moore's law, like that? Not so much. So this just doesn't is not improving that rapidly. And there's just fundamental physical constraints here that come into play.  I don't think those exist actually. I think those would like, I don't know, they might be unstable and fly out of control and shatter everywhere or something. But it turns out that the rotation latency is just not the problem. By the time I get to the track, waiting for the disk to rotate around just turns out to not take very long compared with the amount of time it's taking me to get there and stabilize the heads. So this just turns out to not be a huge component of overall speed. So over the past 30 years, there's interesting trends going on, right? So on one hand, you had Moore's law that was making processors and other parts of the system a lot faster. And on the other hand, you had disks and there were two problems with this. First of all, disks were not getting faster very quickly. But people kept buying bigger and bigger and bigger disks. I mean, it's it's sort of shocking. I mean, I know that processors are faster now. But the amount of disk space that my computer has now compared to what it had when I was in college is really amazing to me, right? I mean, in college, I bought a 20 gigabyte hard drive and I thought that was huge.  Now it's like I have like two terabyte drives that are an array to raise. Why not, you know?  Like I don't know what people are using all the storage for, but clearly they are because people kept buying these things, right? So here's just let me finish with like two two graphs. So here's a fun graph. This is showing from 84 until 06. So it ends relatively recently sort of the progression of a couple of different types of disk technologies. These are the three and a half inch drives that you typically find in desktop machines. These are the two and a half inch drives that you find more commonly in laptops. These are some of the smaller micro drives that you were seeing in things like iPod. And so this is a log scale. So this is capacity. So capacity is going up exponentially over time. On the other hand, here are the performance. This is performance in terms of the the amount of data I can get on or off the disk. Now this looks like this kind of the only problem is this is not a log scale. So this is linear. So over the same period of time, you had roughly three orders of magnitude improvements in capacity, but only two in speed. So I've got more and more stuff on the disk and yet the ratio between disk performance and disk capacity is changing. The other thing of course that's happening around the same time are processors in memory are getting way, way, way faster. So this ratio really defines a lot of what we're going to talk about over the next couple of weeks. Okay. So I will pick up here on Wednesday. Wait, it is Wednesday. Friday, Friday. I'll see you guys on Friday.


This paper discusses the use of electron beam melting to create knee and hip implant components with porous structures. It also examines how these components can be designed to optimize stress shielding and bone cell growth. The paper concludes that patient-specific, monolithic, multifunctional orthopedic implants can be created using electron beam melting. This article was authored by Lawrence Ema, Sara M. Guyton, Edwin Martinez, and others.