Yn y gweinid y tîm yma mae'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddiogelol a'r sgwr ffr�io ar gyflwydd a'r sgwr, y ddweud o'r sgwr, yn ystod i'r ddechrau, mae hi fydd yn ei amddangos i ddweud am gweinid. Mae hi fydd yn hynny yn ei ddweud i ddweud, ond byddai'n meddwl ar gyfnod o'r ddweud, a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o ffwrdd o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud.  Rheswch yn gwneud yn cyffredinol beth sydd yn cael ei wneud. was quite expansive and so we had 5233 participants and we had 244 diary entries which were we would give students prompts each month and they would send me a had to be a minimum of 250 words but off the node right now on the diary entries and I would read them and analyse them and pull out the main themes alongside this we also did quantitative data as well and that was I think I've got some I can change some of that in in the next slides we also did a staff survey as well and that happened quite far down into the project because we sort of suddenly realised that if staff don't saw that they belong in the institutions how can they help students for that they belong and we had quite a wide range of demographics including lots of different diverse institutions as well it's really important to us that we didn't have a prescriptive model so that like Russell groups post 92s or specialist courses and colleges could relate to the research as well and so it was really big we are carrying on the research in more sort of like directives and specific point but we we just given that the crisis the engagement crisis was sort of national and like wasn't it didn't seem to be impacting any particular type of institution more we thought we'd look at like a wide range of demographics in this research we've come up with a theory that belonging is when you when you satisfy all of these four main components alongside adequate mental health support students will feel a higher range higher sense of belonging again this is this is a working theory based on our research it's not it's not necessarily something we can necessarily prove or disprove but it is based off of around 6000 participants both staff and students added together and so one of the one of the things we also looked at was this idea that a lot of students felt the central community at their core level compared to students who felt it at our university level so we looked at the course and we looked at what best practices are happening at course level we spoke to a lot of academics and we spoke to people who are colleagues in the sector who are doing sort of innovative work at the minute around connecting students now one thing that was really really interesting was that a lot of the answers were linked around building friendships and peer connections which sounds really straightforward right if you've got a good support group you're going to feel that you belong more and what is quite interesting is that actually the students weren't defined in these connections as friendships now we've got a lot of pushbacks and staff saying it's not our responsibility to you know foster friendships friendships happen organically it's not something the institution can artificially engineer but actually the students weren't actually looking for friendships they were looking to be part of a learning community which is a very different concept and these are some really good quotes that we have here so I think there was one quote uh no okay into the crowd there was one quote where they were saying like they're not really my friends but they're really important to me and but we we also found as well that staffs and talk a lot about the burden on their time academic staff particularly get laid like given a lot of kind of um extra pastoral work that isn't necessary in their remit and staff were really worried that if they were given a remit to connect students they would add to their workload however when we looked at the case studies and where this was being done in practice on campuses what we found was that if there was a there was a concerted effort at the beginning of the term to form a group a learning community um and this is done really easily it was through things like establishing a whatsapp group for the course that they tutor then leaves very important that the staff then leaves and the students have autonomy over it themselves um coffee mornings anything like this in the first couple of weeks um students would then autonomously run those groups themselves um so it actually and then the students themselves would be able to answer questions around like uh deadlines uh curriculum things that they were confused about they would go to each other rather than the tutor um so it not only did it actually lessen the burden on academics it also gave students a chance to be sort of like a mature group of scholars each of their sort of respective expertise um which is obviously what we we want to learn is um so we've got some recommendations here um so one of the really important things we we found was that all online interaction students perceived as a way of hindering or harming their sense belonging so a really um good example of this is that a lot of transgender students were saying that it was very difficult for them to change their name on the system um and universities where they could change it very easily or they didn't necessarily have to sort of turn up on campus with a deed pole and a new passport um obviously that in that heightened their sense belonging um but also just having like the human aspect of online interactions um being told what the institutions are up to is up to so students would respond really well to things like institutional strategy consultation updates um and lots of sort of like feelings that they're part of the institution the institution wants them to know what's going on and they also value their opinion a lot so a really good example of this is with um community students were uh uh invited specifically to contribute to a strategy um meeting and obviously community students we know are very hard to like foster a sense belonging in um and they said that that improved their sense belonging um the accessibility of teaching and learning is also like a huge it has a huge impact on students and mainly this comes to um being able to access your learning resources so when students face a barrier in access that damages their feelings of belonging it can encourage this engagement so for example um students with ADHD were sometimes finding that resources weren't compatible with the devices they used or the software that they used um and they would have to sort of go like an extra step to try and request that it's made compatible um things like um chart colours not being um not being able to see if you're colour blind really really difficult to understand these things particularly if the if there's no one in the department that has that particular like disability it can be quite difficult to put yourself in the shoes of a student who would have access issues it's not just around disability as well there's a lot of comments around um things like childcare so um going back to the disability one um making things always already accessible is one of the best things that you can do for students since belonging um the second is ensuring that academics are trained and equipped to upload the learning resources as soon as they can after the seminars um so speaking about students of childcare responsibilities or chronic illnesses where they may not be able to turn go to the live seminar having to wait several days that seminar to be uploaded obviously impact sense belonging impacts the academic confidence it makes them feel like they haven't had as much time to familiar familiarize themselves with the resources um as their peers um but really importantly the staff need the support in doing this um because we can't ever just assume that staff know how to do it um so yeah so staff will and readiness again we we found that all the staff we spoke to there was a really um like high interest in making their resources accessible but there was a lot of um concern anxiety and confusion about how to do that um i think there was also sometimes uh staff would worry about um making something accessible to one group and it's becoming inaccessible to another so for example um staff members who want to say that children are young children are welcome into their seminars with new parents um would sometimes bring up concerns for students with neuro diversity who would get overstimulated with like loud noises or would get distracted um by a sort of child um so there's a lots of conversations to be had around how we make things already accessible whilst acknowledging that some accessibility can impede on others um and again yeah so like one of the issues of accessibility that came up over and over again which is why students felt full on in a course level but not university level is because it wasn't consistent across the institution so uh one thing that was quite upsetting to a lot of students is well one student didn't understand why the student health centre couldn't talk to the university and obviously things like gdpr concerns etc but that was never explained to the student and there wasn't any way to remedy this so there wasn't any policy in place around data sharing um so it's it's i find this a lot of this project is about sort of like just nothing that we recommend is really radical like there's no kind of like complete restructure to the education sector but there are lots of lots of little tweaks that can be that we found um as examples of best practice um obviously we all work in universities and we know how big they are as institutions, we know how how departments are very different. I remember when I first started in a strategy team and I couldn't understand why my department had to pay another department to do something when we're all part of the same institution um but students don't understand that particularly school leavers who have had all of their care support educational um resources all of this has been done under a sort of holistic banner um they don't really understand that so again having that clear cut communication with students explaining how the institution works really helps here um in terms of inclusive content um I came into this and had my mind blown a little bit um with inclusive content so my assumption was that it was a case of oh students just want to see themselves represented in the text and that makes them feel nice right like it's oh look there's a a non-binary person in my french text like that makes me and actually it was not that at all we had maybe three comments that uh respect from the thousands of students that we spoke to the vast majority of students were really serious about being able to go into a diverse workplace and perform to a high standard so this was common across different subjects um but came out predominantly in the sciences so for example medicine students were really concerned when they only had examples of Caucasian skin and they felt they would start to question the academic rigor of the course and say I'm not sure I'm going to be able to perform in a clinical setting well because I'm not going to be able to diagnose half the patients I see because I haven't learned that you know what what this condition looks like on their skin um again things like a student who studied a world cinema course it was called and said that there was no Japanese cinema Bollywood or Nollywood and again this impacts things like student satisfaction scores because they leave their course feeling as if they haven't actually learned the whole spectrum of a subject and that there were also comments around um question the expertise of their um academics as well which obviously we don't want because we employ lead in minds and students obviously need to see that um and free speech was also something that came up and this this is really interesting because it came up on all sides of the political spectrum so obviously most of you will be aware that there is um a kind of phoenix like re rising of the cultural wars at the minute to say the least um particularly if anyone reads the Times or the Telegraph on a daily basis which for my sins I have to um but there's a real big thing around free speech and it's not just um one side or the other side of political spectrum it's all different sides um some students don't feel that they can question things like the module they don't feel that they can question the lecturer um so if you go back to the inclusivity some students were like this didn't represent x part of this discipline I don't think I can say that um right wing students often felt that they couldn't express themselves more in student unions actually um and then the facilitation of discussion is something that interacts with the online provision of resources and online space so where a where a educator may be really skilled in facilitating classroom discussion they may not have the skills to moderate an online discussion um and behaviour is slightly different online as well which made some students who weren't necessarily that confident um feel that they couldn't interact or engage in the discussion at all um so our recommendations are training on neurodiversity um training on inclusive design um and presenting course content in global historical and colonial contexts um where there are gaps in the content um we would encourage staff to be open about these and invite students to help close them and the reason we say this is because when a student have to identify the gap they normally have some knowledge themselves that they can represent in the curriculum um and actually uh we found that students that were invited to contribute to the curriculum so for example a student on a um northern american module said a mexican student said I love this module but you haven't got any mexican books and Mexico is in north america you've only got um books from the united states um that student was invited to submit texts that they recommended and obviously that student now feels that they belong more so to the to the university than before because they were given an opportunity to contribute to the function of of that course um obviously that's not to say that every course should like start out as not inclusive and let students uh remedy that to feel um included but it does speak to the power of allowing students as partners in in our in our institution um how am I doing for time so what can I do okay have it um so support is very similar to um accessibility in that we are really um encouraging institutions to make move support away from a deficit model and move it to something like is university wide um it it's not even if a student has their access needs rectified if it's only them having their access needs rectified that doesn't help them feel that they belong it makes them feel that they are an outlier there's someone who needs special help that sort of thing so having you know given dyslexic students a Gramily pass doesn't help that dyslexic student getting that academic confidence it doesn't help them feel that they belong making Gramily accessible to entire institutions so students can't so any student who wants to use Gramily can use it that increases the longing and it's also best practice as well because we know that not all our students are coming from the UK not all who who may be coming from countries that don't necessarily have special educational needs screenings they may be coming from schools that have had their budgets cuts around send students um so you may have a lot of students who are dyslexic or have ADHD who've not got a diagnosis and when institutions start putting up barriers to access and saying you have to have this official diagnosis it means I mean the most um I don't obviously it's not it's a horrible um case but we I'm sure everyone's heard of the Natasha Aberhart case at Bristol it's just a very tragic suicide case where a girl had intense anxiety but before they allowed her to access um her assessments online rather than coming in uh the university sort of sent her around the houses to get an official anxiety diagnosis um and unfortunately it was taken so long that she did take her own life during that time now if if we had always accessible resources to any student then that potentially could not have happened um obviously I can't say that for sure because I'm not a coroner um but it was a very very tragic case it came out whilst we were doing the research which was really heartbreaking for everyone involved in this project to read about um yeah so again a lot of staff are saying you know we're waiting for students to just to declare or we're waiting for students to fail before um support kicks in um and interventions around academic confidence you know they're located in WP schemes they're not across across the institution um autonomy again this links to the inclusivity so students who feel that they are empowered to act if they see opportunity to change um that increases their sense of belonging so again having like what I was saying about the North American module um having your suggestion implemented feels special and I'm confident about this course is really positioning the students as peers and co co-producers of knowledge that encourages them to be sort of like mature scholars in this area um and then yeah the other thing a lot of students are saying I mean so Gen Z move so far so I don't know if anyone has uh ever looked at TikTok but like the the trends are you get like micro trends right they're like three days long and then you're moving on to something else and I think back to when I was at university and if I wanted to talk about something I have to go to like the weekly society meeting and talk about it whereas now things will happen on campus and immediately it's on Instagram immediately it's on TikTok and we can see examples of this happening through the spiking protests that happened uh back in January 2020 no back in January 2022 it's this year um where students mobilised themselves very very quickly around an issue um and discussion and discourse around it happened very quickly now a lot of I remember at the time there was a little bit of communication disjunct between staff and students and institutions and it was because students were having this completely different perspective because of the social media technology that they were using and they were involved in in conversations around the running of their institution and the culture of their institution that the institution wasn't necessarily aware of so it's about meeting students where they're at it's about um learning from our students whether that's what they're discussing whether it's the platforms that they're discussing it on really encouraging in them to sort of take a steer in the institution as well um so yeah increase opportunities for student co-creations that comes out of practice this is a recommendation that this is also something that's seen as best practice from the quality and um the QAA quality ADP yep it's consistent thank you too many acronyms in this like sector sorry sir um and then a yeah a feed forward approach so um again academic confidence can be broken or shattered with bad feedback um we had a lot of uh one-on-one interviews or focus groups where you get to see the um the impact of bad feedback um so encouraging students to have a growth mindset and offering a variety of assessments across the curriculum including utilising technology for assessment as well um and again as for the Natasha and April Heart case like this is something that could have really helped a student um who tried to help try to leave didn't help um so we have got some issues around the recommendations around implementing them we do recognize that they're not straightforward so blurring the lines between the course and everything else the students expect a holistic model or support when you know universities can have hundreds of different departments can be difficult again mental health it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation none of us are psychological clinical practitioners we use the term mental health because it's the term that students offered to us when discussing um their mindsets um but we we haven't got the expertise or qualifications to be investigating whether it's mental health problems at impede engagement whether engagement then creates isolation and mental health problems but again this is something that we do use for our and cultural and systematic barriers so um is someone in a department that encourages innovation that encourages um the the staff to to find new ways of engaging students or are there sort of like it's just how we've always done this attitudes um um oh that's the end okay we've got time for uh kind for a question excellent yeah thank you can we give it to you on the right we've got five minutes so any questions from the group or any questions online first of all the idea of universal access and making things accessible by default um since we're back on campus you know where I've got plenty of time this way academic colleagues are locking things down more great such as access to lecture recordings because they're anxious about students not coming to lectures yeah how do we get that message across to our academic colleagues yeah that's really good there's a really good question actually because um the other issue around that is academics and intellectual property and I want it to be sort of like uploaded online um I think that there needs to be a lot of there's a lot more awareness so one of the things I get quite as somethings on this research I get quite frustrated on is sometimes I will go on Twitter and someone will have taken a picture of an empty lecture theatre and they're like don't ever complain to me about contact hours again um and I'm sort of thinking like okay but absence doesn't mean disengagement for example one of the things one of the issues we have learned and student learner analytics was that students were meeting groups one of them was logging on to the system and downloading the documents and then they were sort of like having a library session and interacting with each other and it was a really like highly engaged session but only one student looked as if they were engaged in that week and so there needs to be a sort of like this is why we had a qualitative aspect to the research that there needs to be like the story like the student view and that can come through student collaboration and student co-creation so encouraging academics to talk to student representatives like what is going on is it just that no one's turning up to the seminar because they're lazy or whatever the day they want to say to our students or is it because there's a cost of living crisis people are taking on what more part-time hours is it that one student is downloading the resources and there's so much like like so much that can be revealed once you actually understand what's going on and really encouraging academics to think it's not always what it seems when students are disengaging but yeah I do agree it is an issue at the minute I think especially because there's a which is why we talk about systematic and cultural barriers like one of the things that's fanning the flames of the sort of like frustration for academics is they're being told by their institution that they have to come in so they're coming in like getting on the tube and exposing themselves to Covid and they're sat in a room and no students coming in and it's that that would be a cultural issue right that's an issue of the department so yeah there's none of this is a sort of panacea but yeah there's a lot of conversations to be had with students to read understand what's going on I know that wasn't like a great answer but hopefully it's sort of answered a little bit maybe yeah okay cool yeah I have a question on it from online what are the recommendations for developing the sense of belonging and community on the programme to university wise spectrum and the university wise spectrum so one of the things that and this isn't an official recommendation but something that came up a lot is the concept of like into faculty learning and like cross campus learning so there was definitely some suggestions around that in terms of like a sense belonging it's not necessarily like the whole institution needs to sort of have a coffee morning with everyone from the university there so what when we talk about community we're not necessarily saying it has to be like everyone goes to a big party it's a case of like the entire institution is aligned in creating the conditions for that student to do as well as they possibly can so when a student goes to their seminar and they've got a really engaged tutor who's like you know they clued up on mental health they know to ask for pronouns or they you know they understand childcare what happens is we found that our participants would actually be back to luck and say like oh I'm just really lucky because my tutor uh did this and then they would go to like the um student support services for like a disability and say the support services were like overrun they would say oh the support services have been no help at all but my tutor was right so we found that basically when when students came to us and they had a very seamless experience where the level of support was consistent that would that would make them feel part of a wider community I understand that the language that we use around this can be slightly confusing I think um I was the same as well because I um so I'm naturally quite an introverted person so the idea of going to the coffee morning is like I would never have done it at university um but actually I do think that people want to be part of a learning community they want to be they want to feel that no matter where they are in this community everyone in the community is there to facilitate their success and at the moment that's not happening probably because we have um sort of high level senior leadership teams who create strategies that don't necessarily work with the frontline staff who are going to implement them and also governance boards are obviously very separate from the main university setting so I mean I don't I was on my university council as a student as in like the governance board because I was a student union president a while ago and even I couldn't tell you everyone who was on that governance board um so you sort of have these strategies that are designed and then not sort of fed down um or staff want to implement them but they don't know how they don't have the resources um staff members hire up maybe don't understand the data demands of staff they don't like there was a really good quote I don't actually think I put it in here but start there was an academic who said something like you know when I have to publish this many papers a year I have to do this many conferences I haven't got times make students feel like they belong like I just don't um so yeah it's it's about sort of um throwing up approach across institutions more questions yes Mr point kind of curing off my question was there anything that came out of the survey about how to sort of increase staff belonging in their workplace so this is something that we're working on at the minute um and obviously we got funding to do the research of the student belonging um but the biggest sort of threat to staff belonging at the moment is insecure job security basically um you know staff not only are thinking about all everything they've got to do but they're also thinking about the fact that their contract runs out in three months and what are they going to do afterwards and we are starting to look at staff belonging at the minute um actually on the site this week we've got a blog from a woman at the Bloomsbury Institute who contacted me after this report launched and said that she had done something called an academic saloon and it had a very similar effect to community building so do you have a look at the site this week because there's a whole sort of overview of that work but yeah basically it's that really like key shaping of you can't pull friends cups like throughout the report um if people want to read it like every single point is that this can only be done if staff are supported this can only be done if um if they feel like yeah like like they're trained and competent to power it out. Do you have a question? Any more questions? Yeah so I've worked with fully online students for about past five years online yes fully amazing and I do find that their voice is missing from studies not just the study like quite a lot of studies that have been there especially over the pandemic but there's been some interesting literature that's emerged past the years on mattering as opposed to belonging and I was wondering if you found any study were you able to identify were there fully online students and the sure and this found a difference because we did a bit of work on inclusive teaching and learning last year and we very quickly dropped the phrase belonging but the students they just didn't like it and I don't want to belong I just don't want to get behind it but I want to know and value to that in matter. Yeah this is like such an interest so I actually saw the mattering presentation online and I retweeted it and I was like because I got a lot of people who do belonging on my obviously follow me and I thought it was a really interesting angle and again I think it's one of these like sort of my brain is going to so I think it's one of these things around like language where to belong is so there were some people who identified like in order to belong you have to conform to the institution right I think that was a criticism I saw so this idea of like well in order to belong here you need to look like this speak like this act like this our our kind of use for the term belonging was that we wanted it to be that you're a student like which is why we have a lot of focus on students as like co-producers of knowledge co-producers of the curriculum things around so for example a computer student had issued library times they became part of like a sort of working group on improving accessibility to in-person resources for students who might be accessing resources at strange hours yeah it was really interesting one actually because there was part of me that was thinking I have been thinking about this a lot since I saw it I'm glad you asked the question because I was sort of thinking like is it if we have to sort of pre-premise the definition of the word every single time we use it like is it worth using that word obviously this is the title that the funding for so I have to use that word but yeah it's difficult because I think that yeah the idea of mattering is a funny one so what is that word mattering and feeling valued right yeah I mean this is just my perspective we haven't run this past like student groups um so for me I think I ended up not being as like not like still being satisfied with the word belonging because I think I was thinking like you can be valued and you can matter to an institution but that doesn't necessarily mean that you are an active agent within that institution so you can be a consumer like you know the customer's opinion matters right and whereas I think I saw belonging as a sort of like you belong somewhere because you're actively contributing to that now that's just my perception and that's based on like you know three decades of life experience as personal to me and it could be very different to the students that you've spoken to um and I think that yeah I would say that it's definitely not something that's like there's no sector consensus on it at the minute um it'd be interesting actually in the next stage of research maybe to start talking to students about language because I think that is it did they give you any like kind of did they offer any explanation was it to do with being online or no they felt excluded by the word belonging yeah as they belong to their families they belong to their communities they belong you know 98% of them were in full-time work they belong to their work faces so they didn't want community but they wanted to join a WhatsApp group so with their assignments very interesting were these mature students or mostly okay so this is a fascinating so I didn't include again I'm so glad you bought this up because I can talk about it that wasn't part of the reason wasn't part of this presentation but um one of the things around peer connections that we found was that um when we spoke to mature students or online students and we were like are you going to join a society they'd be like no I don't want anything to do with student union because I'm 36 wherever and I remember one student who was a she was married to children and she was like I have a support network I have my spouse I have my family I don't want a support network but I do want to be part of the learning community and I do want to feel like I'm part of I'm part of what's shaping this curriculum she used that term but she she was saying basically she wants to belong to the academic side of it but her life is so she doesn't need to belong and I think sometimes with which is why I always say this isn't about like getting everyone together and singing combined like you know that sort of thing and it's sometimes because sometimes I find that this research is dismissed on like oh it's all just wishing washy nice feeling stuff when actually there's like a lot of kind of like um pedagogical kind of like evidence that um feeling feeling like you can actively contribute to something is part of being being valued and obviously does have impact on your student outcomes and that sort of thing so yeah it's definitely not um there's definitely no consensus it's definitely not perfect I think it's one of those things where everyone's sort of like looking at it just from like their use of words or their sort of like background and perspective but um yeah I've come across the matter and ding actually I think someone I think someone retweeted this with that and that's why I came across it and I was like oh interesting okay fair challenge um but yeah does that answer your question or it does and I think that you drill down to learning community I think maybe to drill down for me yeah to look at that and how that's different for the post program mature student because when you think of community you often think that it's something that lasts a while yeah but for that student our student cohort you might be in community for a module because they might step off your program so that's so interesting to join another community so it can be quite different that's really interesting actually of the idea of receiving communities like a longevity thing like I think that's that's definitely something we haven't looked at yet thank you that was really interesting point actually


It's me John Park and it's time for JP's product pick of the week. Thank you all so much for stopping by. I love that song Welcome to the people in our chats. You may be watching this on one of the many platforms to which we stream, but the Chats that we look at our our own Discord server you head to a to fruit i t slash discord and jump jump on in over there That's what our server looks like Look for the live broadcast chat channel or head on over to YouTube keeping an eyeball on the chat there Hey tackle the world and Dave Odessa welcome. Thanks for stopping by. Hey Mike P and Kyoshi and C Grover Dexter, I think Todd Kurt was there Jim Hendrickson. Hello. Hello. Welcome. Thanks for stopping by so If you're not familiar, this is the show where I picked something that we have in the store sometimes a new product This is a fairly new one today And I demo it for you. I give you a humongous discount I think we got 50% off this week on the product pick And if you want to get a jump start on things head on over to that URL right there or that QR code and that will That will take you to the product page for this product inside of which this video is still playing But your discount is right there. You just refresh the page if you haven't in a while if you're over there I'm gonna do the same myself right now, and we should see that drop by 50% All right. Yes. Wow So we've stashed a bunch of these in the back Just to sell on the show. You don't need a coupon code Just put them in your cart buy them during the show during the time period of this show And you'll get the discount. You've got a little bit of a grace period afterward But it's not all day long or anything wacky like that. It's just during the show. So you are You're getting your discount by Jumping in on this now time is of the essence so Before I go any further this is one for which we did get a lady Ada new new new right before she took off to deal with other matters So I'm gonna play that for you right now. Here is the more to talk about this week's product pick take it away lady Ada The Neo pixel driver BFF so it's actually I designed this after Aaron did that project with the She was she's doing the Jelly fishes and she's like why I wanted to have a cutie pie And cut the new pixel and I was like, oh, you know, there should be a little board that kind of does all the the tough work Of that for you. So looking on the the back here In the middle is That little chip in the middle is a 74 hct 125 1g a single gate level shifter that will take the three volt logic level and Shifted up to five volts, which I thought was a nice little add-on and it uses the USB five volts to do that It's by default using pin A3 and there's jumpers you can cut inside of the jumpers So you can use like most see your RX or TX. There's no like, you know, dedicated neopixel pen Instructions are on the back. You saw it back to back You can use sockets or of course you can solder it directly if you like I perhaps like sockets and then the connector that's on most neopixels is not This is JST SH does not come in a surface mount version. So we put in a JSTPH connector And I'll show it and then I'll show you how you would connect to a neopixel strip That's not So hold on let me find my Great, here's my Okay, so let's go to the overhead So here I've got it RP 2040 QDPI, which is a great neopixel driver. It has PIO support And then you can see on the back here. I've just we've soldered a little socketed Versus I can remove it, but you don't have to you can solder directly if you want and for short strips you can power it directly from the This cable like this is a this is we stock these neopixel strips that have the JSTPH on them You get five volts from USB ground from USB and that level shifted data So here's the neopixel demo a lot of neopixel strips like you know, they don't they've come with raw wires or they come with JSTSH and again, there's no Adapter there's no surface mount version of that connector. However, you can use JST to socket Cables and then you just plug these in to the wires. Just plug the wires in and they're they're color-coded So red is power green is black is ground and white is signal. We also have a version with Plug male headers. So you know those you plug it in and then now you have a Removable plug version if you're powering a ton of neopixels like more than 30 honestly I wouldn't power it from the USB port I would have a separate five volt power supply In which case you would just connect the ground and signal and then you could cut the red wire off or just you know Tie it around here and ignore it and then you would power the strip separately But have the signal and ground still come from this board, you know, we have Wi-Fi versions of the QDPis if you want to make a W LED project. This would be a great plug-and-play way to do that It also works with the shower boards from seeds. So you want to use their Bluetooth board Make a Bluetooth neopixel project. It's just you know, it's a very inexpensive little add-on But it should just make neopixel projects a lot easier Hey, and who doesn't like easier? so Let's see. This is a cool one. Let me let me jump to the down shooter here and We can take a look at that right there flip that over we've got some a nice silk screen action on there and This is my product pick of the week this week. It is the Neopixel driver BFF for QDPi and jou boards This gives you level shifted 5 volt logic and a really nice easy JST connector for plugging in your neopixel strips You just attach this to the bottom side of a QDPi or jou board and you are off to the races lighting up your neopixels There's a great way to power it, which is over the USB from your QDPi and that's gonna allow it to use the 5 volts You can also run this off of a battery. However, I've tried it. It works and what I'd like to do is first of all Let's take a look at the product page This is it right here. You can see we have a nice Little example of it. They're plugged into one of our JST cable-ended neopixel strips We have these in a few flavors and this is The simplest way to do it really if you get one of these you just plug and play it's it's wonderful You can see here the some nice images of the board And here's an example of it being plugged to the underbelly of a QDPi using some sockets and header pins as Lady Aida mentioned You can also just solder it directly if you want to get a really nice tight little package for that And you know actually I've got some nice big pictures Posted right here. You can see it. So some things to mention about this It defaults to using a 3 as the data pin so in your code you would say hey I'm building a neopixel object and it's gonna be on pin a 3 now if you have other plans for pin a 3 if you're using it For something else, maybe you've got some bunch of potentiometers and you want to read those analog ins on your analog pins Don't worry. You can simply cut the trace on that one little you can see there's a Jumper that has a little connection in the middle you can cut that trace And then solder across one of the other sets of jumpers. So you could make this connect to TXRX SCL Mosey or SCK and then the default being the a3 You'll also notice there's a pad there. This is SIG You can see this from the Sure the bottom side of it as well So that pad right there that circular pad that is the signal pin. So that is the pin That is going to the neopixels So you could solder to this directly if you needed to if you're doing some other kind of setup but normally what you'll do is just connect it to the cutie pie and Then use either a3 or connect up these jumpers to pick something else now as Lady Aida mentioned This has the 5 volt regulator or rather this has the 5 volt level shifter on it So it is really up to spec on neopixels I know a lot of times we abuse things and we use 3 volt logic on our 5 volt neopixels and things mostly turn out Okay, but sometimes you can get flaky behavior This is really the proper way to do it is to get that level shifted to the same voltage as we're driving it with which is 5 volts in this case and You can drive around 30 to 60 neopixels with it So this type of strip right here. This is a 30 neopixel strip. This is a great one to drive as you Work with neopixels what you'll find is that you can roughly say it's 20 milliamps per Neopixel per color So if you're just lighting up red on one neopixel you're using 20 milliamps if you light one up as white So that's rg and be all full blast now you've used 60 So you can do some math there to figure out what it'll handle and I think it says in the spec sheet Which we'll look at in a second with the with the maximum is recommended for that so Now let's take a look at it in in action. So I'm gonna jump back down to my down shooter and Let's Off of there. I'm gonna pull out just a little bit on the camera. So Here is this was this idea that Liz had for color coding these so that you'd have less less Likely chance of plugging things in backwards because it is symmetrical and you'll see here on the BFF It says USB so it says the USB is up on the QT pie. So that's proper orientation. So I just picked some color color matched headers there so that I could plug that in and know that everything was in the right orientation and Let me focus this a little bit better Back this way So you can see here. I've got a QT PI RP 2040. I've got the BFF and then I'll plug in The the neopixel strip here that I have with the JST connector So only can plug in one way. That's a keyed Connection there and then I'm gonna simply plug in a USB C cable. This is going to a Powered hub on my computer And you can see there I'm lighting up some neopixels Lighting them away, and I'll show you this actually let me zoom out so you can see this a little Little better here because it's a it's a big strip and look better with More coverage. Let me see if I tilt that down. You can see a little bit better So this is running the Cable up there. This is running on circuit Python using the LED animation library And this is the simple comet using a few of these comet animations in different colors to zip along the the neopixels there so it's a fun way to to light things up and the other example I wanted to show you if I I'm gonna go ahead and unplug power on that and Lady to mention that we have some cables that you can use to make your own So here's one of these neopixel surface mount rings that we sell I don't know if we still have these in stock, but we had these at one point and I took one of our JST connectors that has pins on one end and just soldered it directly to that so that Gives me an easy way to plug this into My BFF there best friend forever. So now if I go ahead and plug this in you'll see it's actually got more LEDs on there than the code that I was using so it's only gonna light up 30 of them But let's take a look actually at what that looks like in code. This is a pretty standard neopixel code that will use For this inside of circuit Python or Arduino. So right now I've got Board imported neopixel and then the LED animation library. I'm bringing in comet I'm bringing in some colors and I'm bringing the animation sequence so that I can run multiple animation sequences one after another Here you can see I've picked board a3 and that's the default on here unless I cut that jumper and solder up a different one And then I'm saying how many pixels I've got on here. This one I think is 44 and then You know lower the brightness on this a little bit just because we've got it on camera and it's pretty Pretty dang bright about point two and the pixel speed is good the Interval speed I'm gonna set this to a second just to see if that Since we have more pixels on here if that gets us through the full comet before the next one starts up Yeah, there we go So now I've changed that to use the proper number of neopixels for the for the type of board I've got and it's all a really nice easy connection with that BFF on there So let's see. Let me let me let me know if you got any questions And We'll also take a look at the Library or the rather the learn guide for this one question We got from Kayoshi is what's the advantage of using this instead of just driving it directly aside from the removable three-pin connector? That pretty much is it other than the level shifting and the capacitors on there so sometimes you'll see in our our uber guide on neopixels really the proper way is to have a Capacitor and a resistor and five volt logic. That's really what the neopixels want. We get away with a lot So this makes it very very proper Can solve problems with the first neopixel being weird colors that that happens But that's tends to be on older neopixels the newer ones seem a little more tolerant And then yes, like you said having this this three-pin connector That's really the the big reason why Lady Aida built this originally for Erin was she was doing an installation with these LED jellyfish and she just wished she had an easy way to connect things up So instead of having to wire up your own connectors on to the cutie pie now you've got this purpose built for it and Let's see Any other questions in there Think so, so let's take a look here over at the learn guide Bring that up on my system Here you can see this takes you through All of the overview info on this gives you the pin out for it lets you know how to Adjust the jumpers Selections depending on the pin you want to send out on there's the list of pins that you can use And then we've got example code in circuit Python as well as Arduino And then we have the download section here, which will tell you Is data sheet for the level shifter we're using as well as the schematics and files So I guess we don't have info there on the maximum number Lady Aida said give it 30 to 60 neo pixels at max, but don't go full blast white So I'm guessing that 60 times 60 is more current than it can then it can draw 60 times 60 milliamps So somewhere in there your your mileage will vary Let's see Questions we've got I don't think so So head on over here. You'll see it is $1.98 today. So a significant discount And depending on the types of neo pixels you have you may already have some that have this type of Connector on there, which makes life really really easy We also have different flavors of these with with different ends on them. There's alligator clip ones There's sockets. There's pins. So you can pick up some of those cables as well if you need them and Let me see if there's Nothing else. I'm forgetting That is gonna do it. So that's the that's the site you want to go to if you're just joining us And you want to go quickly jump in on that discount action You can get up to 10 of them and no resellers allowed So you can get a whole bunch of these maybe pick up some cutie pies and some neo pixel strips along the way and do some some Do some props and cosplay and decorations holiday stuff. I believe we're past Pretty close to or past the shipping deadline for for any Christmas stuff. So I don't think Not sure, but I don't think you'll you'll you'll make that maybe unless you're in New York City They might be getting a same day I Think that's gonna do it. So thanks everyone for stopping by Just so you know, I'll be back tomorrow night for the workshop show And then there will not be a product pick the week next week, but there will be another workshop show next Wednesday Just take some time off for some of these holidays. All right, so That right there Pull this off here. Oh wait. Here's my spare That right there is my product pick of the week this week it is the neo pixel driver BFF for cutie pie and show boards and Hang this one Thanks everyone for stopping by for eight different industries. I'm John Park and this has been JP's product pick of the week. Bye. Bye


Let us now discuss about another two very significant aspects of social mobility one is the open mobility and the other the closed mobility. Depending on the degree of openness or closeness of the stratification system of any particular society we have either open or closed systems of social mobility. Now open system of mobility as the name open suggests is a system where the change in position is allowed where an individual is allowed to change his position and status. An individual may be allowed to change his rank he might be allowed to climb up the social hierarchy okay that is an open system of mobility. An open system of mobility is generally a characteristic of those societies having occupational diversity a flexible hierarchy differentiated social structure and rapidity of change. So as we have already discussed every society is stratified. If we take the example of Indian society only we know we are stratified in terms of caste in terms of class in terms of gender in terms of ethnicity so on and so forth but the two prominent systems of social stratification are the caste and the class. So in case of open system of mobility where a person is allowed to change his social position we have to take the example of class. Class is an open system of mobility class position is not a position which is given to an individual by word no doubt he is born to a particular class he is born to his parents class but there is always the flexibility that he works hard he he works hard he toils and he can change his position but caste which is ascribed by birth which is given by birth which is hereditary is very difficult to change. So caste is an example of closed system of mobility because the hierarchy the ranking of the different caste groups in society is fixed and it is very difficult for a person to move up the social ladder so therefore because it do not give the caste system does not provide enough score to an individual to change his position to change his status it is a closed system of mobility. Mobility is open in those stratification systems which are flexible and encourages competition so that individuals compete and elevate their social status according to their capability as in the case of class. Class is an open system it is flexible there is a competition between people to achieve higher class thereby you know they they they compete with each other and try to achieve a higher class position and thereby their status also changes. Birth is not the sole determining factor of a person's status in this context so in case of open system of mobility your birth is not the sole determining factor you may be born to a particular class but you have the ability to change it because your achievement capability merit skills competence achievement all of these things count you are able to change your position you are able to change your status with your achievements with your merit with your skills so your status is not fixed in open system of mobility it is not just that it is determined by a birth and it remains throughout no you may be born with a particular class into a particular class but there is always a chance that you are able to change it thus a person's position or status in this system is not based on heredity it is not hereditary you know there is there is equality there is freedom a person is given the opportunity to achieve a higher position if he desires so it is not just heredity or not just birth which determines a person's position or rank in the open system of mobility let us now move on to the closed mobility as i have already indicated while discussing about open mobility closed mobility is a system where it is very difficult for a person to change his or her position your birth plays the key determining fact the birth is the key determining factor of a person's position the position is hereditary i inherit the position of my parents i inherit the status of my parents and it is really very difficult to change it whatever i have i have been i have been given at birth or you know whatever status i am born with there there is higher chance that i die in the same status this status is ascribed here let us think the example of the caste system the indian caste system which is how many varnas there are four varnas in indian caste system the brahmins the shatryas the vaishyas and the shudras okay so a person belonging to a shudra caste is hardly given the scope to change his position the system is very closed very very closed the hierarchy is highly rigid the upper caste people would find it very difficult or are very reluctant to accommodate the lower caste people or to elevate the status of the lower caste people so here it is very very closed the position is almost fixed and there is little scope for individuals to change their positions they the individuals here becomes the member of the group or the category to which his parents belong he acquires the positions and the status of his parents and continues with it throughout his life the position or the status that a person is born with he he in most cases he die in the same position there is hardly any scope for him to change position in this closed mobility or in societies having closed mobility in such systems in societies having closed mobility individuals are assigned their place in the social structure on the basis of descriptive criteria as I have said like the age, birth, sex so on and so forth however there is no such you know it is not always so that you know these systems are perfectly closed or these are highly I mean or they are totally absolutely closed there are no chances of changing position it is not always so there are examples of change in positions but those are very limited there are very few examples or there are very few chances given to a person few chances that a person has to change his position it is very limited most often it is closed so by open and closed mobility what we understand is that depending on the nature of stratification we first we have to remember that every society is stratified and depending on the system of stratification depending on the nature of the system of stratification that exists in a particular society there that that in determines whether a person would have the chance to change his position or not the nature of the social stratification system in a particular society decides whether mobility will be open for a person or it will be closed as we have already illustrated for if we talk about Indian society and if we talk about caste-based social stratification there is very limited scope for an individual to change his caste position but if we talk about European societies mostly dominated by class class system there are higher chances that a person would be able to change his position a person will be able to change his status so what happens is in societies which are open which have where does the nature of social stratification is open there are the mobility is open the individuals can move up and down the ladder the social hierarchy but in those societies where the social stratification is a closed one where the nature of social stratification is closed is rigid the mobility is limited as in the case of caste so having understood these two systems let us now understand the difference between the closed and the open system of mobility in an open system of mobility an individual's position or status is based on merit or achievement whereas in the closed system of mobility the status is ascribed it is hereditary here in open system of mobility is flexible is open it allows person it gives ample opportunities to persons to change their status but in closed societies in societies where social stratification is very rigid very close it only there are you know very limited chances or a person hardly gets a chance to change his position and in societies where there is closed mobility a person's status therefore is more or less fixed but in case of societies which have open system of mobility a person can always change his status so it is not fixed so I think you have understood the difference the cracks of the difference is that in open systems of mobility one can change his position because here his position is not fixed or determined solely by birth he can always change his position through his achievements as in the case of class but in case of closed systems it is birth which determines his social status his social status more or less remains fixed it is descriptive and therefore there is very rare chance that he would be able to change his position in his lifetime so this is what is the difference between the closed and the open systems of mobility with this let us move towards understanding what are the factors affecting social mobility so we have by now learned that social mobility implies change in the position of a person in some societies a person is given ample opportunities to change his position while in some societies some other societies the chance to change one's position is restricted or very very limited so what are the factors which affects social mobility which helps in social mobility the first and the foremost important factor is education with the help of education with the help of knowledge a person can change his status a person may be born maybe born in a lower class a person may be born poor okay but with education with requisite qualification with knowledge okay he can rise to a higher position he can achieve a higher position so education is a very very important factor which affects social mobility along with education comes skills and training a person being skilled and trained becomes qualified to becomes qualified to get himself employed if I'm educated I'm skilled I'm trained I have a better chance in the job market I have a better chance when I face interviews when I'm being able to project myself as being trained as being skilled as having the required requisite education project myself as a better candidate and this helps me in achieving a higher position or this helps me in getting a job this helps me in seeking a position somewhere and that affects my social mobility I may move from a jobless unemployed to an employed person I might move from a lower position to a higher position from so the education skill and training are very important especially when we talk about class okay in societies which are stratified on the basis of class a person can with his education with his skills and trainings change his position another factor which affects social mobility is achievement and failures which we have which we have already discussed in our discussion on vertical I mean on upward and downward social mobility with my achievements I climb up and with my failures I climb climb down I may be born I may be a child of a very very wealthy family a very very rich very very prosperous very very well-to-do parents but if I do not or I cannot achieve something in life on my own I mean if I'm not taking I do not go for education if I'm not skilled if I'm into drugs if I'm into bad habits I might completely ruin myself I might lose the social esteem that my parents had or that I I inherited through my parents I might lose everything so depending on my achievement and failures also I either move up the social ladder or hierarchy or I move down either my social positions move I mean my social position changed to a better position or it falls down next is migration which is very very important because you see with there are three more important points migration industrialization and urbanization these three are very important factors of social mobility and they are interrelated let us talk about industrialization first before going to migration we all know that industrialization brought massive changes to the european society at in the beginning to england and then it spread across the world with the booming of industries setting up of factories people began to move from rural areas to urban areas to work in factories and industries they came to a new socio-economic social setting where you know getting a job in these industries or factories changed their socio-economic position so their position changed their socio-economic status changed their lifestyle changed so with industrialization began urbanization growth of cities and which led to migration people began to migrate their their changes changes to place in different social institutions like family there was once traditionally joint family system which subsequently declined with the formation of cities because families began to be began to have a more nuclear structure you know so they are there were different kinds of changes that were taking place in society even if we talk about caste system in India do you think the the the rigidity of the caste system has remained till date definitely no it has changed in cities today in the metropolis today the caste status hardly matters what matters is one's class position the rigidity of the caste system the practice of untouchability you know the practice of isolating one caste group from another you know or the the the tendency of one caste group to remain separated to remain isolated or to remain in distance from another has changed tremendously today in cities especially in cities in towns where you know people of different caste groups work together come together eat together sit together the caste status hardly matters okay so in the rural areas when one's caste status used to used to determine his position used to determine his lifestyle used to determine his social interactions social relationships have faded with industrialization with urbanization with migration he the the person now comes to a city gets a new job gets a new life interacts with people across different cast in communities and thereby has a different social standing or a different social status so these are different factors which leads to change in the position of a person either through education through skill through training through achievements or failures or through you know or by migrating to another place and finding a better job better livelihood opportunity a person is able to change his status so this is what we have discussed today the unit 14 of the paper introduction to sociology where we have mostly talked about the meaning of social mobility what is social mobility imply the types of social mobility the forms of vertical mobility and the openness and the closeness of social mobility and the factor that determines the factors that determines social mobility the only thing that we need to understand here is that depending upon the nature of social stratification social mobility of a person is governed the societies which have open systems of social stratification like caste people can easily change their positions people can people get numerous opportunities or they are given numerous chances they are given avenues to change their position but in those societies where the social stratification is system is very rigid which is where the hierarchy is very rigid it is very very difficult for a person to change his or her position but with the changing times with the passage of time with modernization with industrialization with the ample I mean with the different avenues of livelihood that have emerged with people migrating to cities and towns the concept of completely closed mobility or the notion of completely closed system of stratification is gradually fading even though it exists but its rigidity has somewhat declined but yes we have to say that in case of caste the hierarchy still remains though a person in might get a chance to change his position but that is very rare otherwise the completely the closed social stratification is also no longer very very closed as for its definition there is a fluidity and a person with his own achievements with his own skills with his own merit has the chance to change his or her position in a society so that is what we have discussed today we'll come back with another unit next time till then thank you stay safe


Hey, good morning everybody, Lee Lowell here, smartopsonseller.com. Today is Saturday, October 31st, 2020. Yes, it's Halloween. Happy Halloween to everybody. If you're going to be outside tonight, please be careful. Keep your distance, wear masks, and enjoy the evening. Enjoy your candy if you do get some. So, welcome to another edition of the Saturday Synopsis. We take a look at the charts, see what happened over the last week's worth of trading, and we take a look at what may come forward in next week's worth of trading. We also like to look at some free options information. I give you some good tips on how to become a better options trader. We got a lot of questions this week about people that are buying options. They're telling me, leave. The stock is moving in my direction that I think it's supposed to move, but yet the option price isn't really doing that much. It's not really moving that much for me, or it's just not moving at all. So, I've got a very important thing that I want to discuss with you all today, especially about option buying, and how it relates to how quickly the stock can move in or out of your favor, and why it's very, very important that if you have a profit built up, that you may want to look at taking profits early in the game, especially when the stock is moving in your favor, and I'll show you exactly what that means in just a few minutes. But first, let's take a look at the chart, see what happened over the last week, and what may happen moving forward. Let's open up the charts here, take a look at the SPY Exchange Traded Fund for the S&P 500 gives us the best overall view of the whole market. This last week, this week of trading was not great for the market, had a down week. Last Friday, okay, so each one of these bars is one day's worth of trading. Each bar is one day's worth of trading. So Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday. Last Friday, we ended, here is our week, week and a half of last week, part of last week and the week prior. Ended above the 20 day and 50 day moving average, which was good, this little movement here, it was a down week, but we ended above the moving averages. That is something we like to see. On an upswing, we wanna see the markets stay above the uptrending moving averages. Well, this week, that didn't happen. Started the week on a down note and it just got worse from there. This whole week, right here, these five days worth of trading, fell underneath the 20 day and 50 day moving averages, it had a gap here, this was on Wednesday. Wednesday's trading from Tuesday's trading had a gap. And that just set the tone for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. So we ended the week on a down note, this whole week, right here. So the market has had a week week, meaning it's sold off. And as I said at the end of last week, when I was doing the Saturday synopsis, I kept saying, we've had these three major news driven events here in the US that could either make or break the market. And that is, of course, the US presidential election that is happening. This coming Tuesday, November 3rd, we have coronavirus cases in the US and around the world spiking higher as well, which does not bode well for things, doesn't bode well for the economy. If people are getting sick, that means they may not be able to work or they're losing their jobs. That may mean they may not have enough money to spend and drive the economy. So the coronavirus cases are spiking up. And also in the US, we have the stimulus package to help individuals and businesses during this pandemic. And there's been no progress on those stimulus talks. So all these news events are creating a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress. And when that happens, the market typically sells off. The market does not like uncertainty, right? The market doesn't like when they don't know what's happening. So the first order of business is typically, let's just sell, let's just sell things. Okay, so that's what happened here in the market this past week, down week, blasted down below the 20 day and 50 day moving averages. What we have below is the 200 day moving average sitting down here waiting to catch any further fall if the market happens to fall further. The 200 day moving average is the next line of support. Now us being more bullish traders, we obviously don't like to see the market coming off so strongly like this. We had the all-time high here drop down, had a nice balance. So some may see this as sort of a double top pattern, double top could be a bearish type of pattern. And so we may be seeing that. If we break below the 320 level, it's a very important number, 320 on the S&P 500. This is the last line of support right here. So let's draw a little line here and show you some things that I'm looking at. So this 320 level right here is sort of like a line in the sand at the moment. Very big support area. And we want to see this line hold. You can see it bounced here. We had a lot of activity right here and some activity here. So the 320 level is pretty important. If the S&P drops below 320 or the SPY drops below 320, it's gonna target the 200 day moving average which is currently a little over $312 right now, 312 level. So we want to see if the market comes off this week, we wanna see some sort of support try to hold here right at the 320 level. And the SPX itself, the SP500, that would be the 3200 level. The SPY is about 10 times smaller. Still doesn't matter. The levels are still the same. The 320 level needs to hold. If it breaks, the 312 level comes into play here at the 200 day moving average. So being bullish, when we sell put options, the market in general, we like things to go up. So we need to see the 320 level hold. If not, we need to see the 312 level hold. If that doesn't hold, then the market's gonna be coming down. This is a very big week, presidential elections in the US on Tuesday. So Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, especially if we don't have the results of the election within the, by the end of the week, it could get a little dicey. That means there's more uncertainty around the market. So the market could sell off more. If there's a clear cut winner, then that takes the uncertainty out of the elections out of the way, then hopefully the market could keep going up. And the other thing that we have going on right now is third quarter earnings coming out. We had a big day Thursday after the market, big day for earnings. Major players will take a look at some of those charts and it didn't really go very well. That's why Friday had a pretty good down day as well. So let's take a look at the NASDAQ, see what's going on in the NASDAQ. Same thing. I had this line here from the other week, sort of a double top, just like I was saying with the S&P, double top is typically a bearish pattern. If the market could not bust above this resistance line here, it gets knocked back down. So the NASDAQ had a pretty good sell off. It's been a constant sell off for almost three weeks now, which is hard to take, right?  They're like, why isn't the market going up? Should I sell? What should I do? Should I hold? So it just makes things a little more tense with all this continual selling without any up moves to make you feel better. So you have to understand what's going on in the market and it's a lot of news driven headlines, like I said. We need to get this uncertainty out of the way. We need to get the coronavirus under control. We just need things to start to feel better. We need people to feel better so they more confident with their money. And so the market starts to sell off until it finds the bottom. And the only way to start figuring out, well, where can that bottom be? Is that you have to start looking at the moving averages because anyone who watches charts and there's millions and millions of people who watch charts, we all look at the same thing. So a lot of it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So right now, the NASDAQ has gone down below the 20 day and 50 day moving averages, heading down towards the 200 day moving average. We can take a look back here for some guidance. The market was selling off pretty hard here, came down below the moving averages and all of a sudden it just turned around and went back up. So the same thing could happen here again. It could just bounce out of nowhere. And the reason that might happen is, A, we get a clear cut winner in the election. The other third quarter earnings start to come out really good or the forward guidance, I should say, should be really good. And maybe the coronavirus vaccines will get a real concrete answer that, okay, the vaccines are ready. That could help drive the market higher. It could just turn around on a dime. If none of those things pan out and everything's still uncertain, we don't know what's going on, there will be more selling. We probably come down to the 200 day moving average line as the next support. So let's take a look at the Dow industrials. We always look at all three major indexes. Now the Dow has been the weaker of the three, tagged the 200 day moving average right here. So the Dow has been pretty weak. And so it had just 200 day moving average bounced at the end of the day on Friday, which is good. It bounced off the 200 day moving average. Let's see if we can make this a little bit bigger so everyone could see. So we see it actually fell below it intraday. During the day it fell below the 200 day moving average, but it actually closed above it, which is a good thing. We don't want it falling below the 200 day moving average. So the Dow has a little work to do. Let's see if it could bounce next week, but we have to keep an eye on all the news items. Let's take a look at some individual charts. Thursday after the bell, we had Apple and Amazon and Google and Facebook and Twitter all came out with their earnings announcements. So let's see what happened. Apple disappointed, the market didn't like what they heard. I think the earnings numbers from the quarter were okay, but the guidance probably wasn't where it needed to be. And the market, Apple came off pretty good on Friday. So it's been selling off, now it's below all the moving, the 20 day and 50 day moving averages sell off these last few weeks. So Apple is looking a little weak here. Of course, the next stop could be the 200 day moving average, but let's hope that the bottom feeders come out and say, okay, Apple has gotten cheaper, let's start to buy this thing up. But, you know, we won't know until this next week occurs. You know, it was kind of weak. There's nothing really else to say. Earnings came out, people didn't like what they saw. Let's take a look at Google because Google did very well. Earnings were very good and had a pretty monster day on Friday. It was one of the only stocks that was in the green on Friday. So Google was looking good, earnings were good. It had bounced long ago off the 200 day moving average and has been steadily rising. So Google was good, Amazon, not so good. The results were not that good and we'll look at this big down move in Amazon yesterday, Friday, October 30th. So not so great with Amazon, but we know Amazon is like the biggest seller of everything in the world, right? So it won't be held down for long because people are going to keep buying stuff. So I say this is a temporary short-term blip down, probably a good buying opportunity for some people. But if it keeps selling off, you've got the 200 day moving average line down here's support. We don't want it to come to that because that's a lot of selling. We don't wanna see that. What else happened? Twitter did not do so good yesterday. Look at this big move down in Twitter, not good. Here's a huge gap. Here's where it closed on Thursday. Here's where it traded on Friday. So you've got this huge gap right here that now needs to be filled at some time in the future. Twitter closed below the 50 day moving average as well. You can see on the chart, this bar, this little dash on the right-hand side of the bar is that's where Twitter closed for the day. And it closed below the 50 day moving average. Had some pretty good selling in Twitter. So I will have to see, will the selling continue? If it does, always look to the 200 day moving average as the next line of support, but it could just bounce out of nowhere. Stocks tend to do that at times, just bounce out of nowhere. So we'll see what happens. Last one, Facebook, I think, came out. Earnings also had a pretty big down day on Friday. Closed below the moving averages. Still in the uptrend, okay? You have to look at the long picture too. You have to look at the broader view. Still in an uptrend, we could see this as maybe a temporary pullback. I mean, we want the stocks to go up over time and so does the market. And I think people will see value and we know things are going to get better in the future. The market is an optimistic place. So even though things sell off, the market continues to go up over time. Let's take a look at the SPY one more time and take a long view. Let's move out here to a monthly view, okay? Here's the long view. Market goes up over time. Yeah, we have some pretty nasty dips sometimes. Got the dip, dip. But over the long run, market goes up. So you have to take the good with the bad. Are you able to stomach some of these moves? If so, you hold on for the long haul, the market goes up. If you're playing in the market to pay your bills, to pay the mortgage, to pay the electricity, it can be pretty treacherous because on a day-to-day basis, week-to-week basis, the market can be very erratic and it can scare you out of your positions. You hold on for the long haul, the market will reward you but it does take some patience at times. So it can be a little treacherous. Let's just hope the S&P 500 can hold at this 320 level or the 3200 level on the S&P 500 itself. This week could be a very big week. It's make or break right here at 320. So keep an eye on that. All right, so that's it for the market assessment. Let's hope we have a good week next week. Let's move on to our options information for today. This is a very important concept I wanna talk about because it has to do with how and when you can take profits if you have a profitable position built up in an options trade. Lots of people, they like to hold until expiration because they wanna get as much time as possible out of their trade, right? If you bought a three-month option, you typically would wanna hold it all through the three months to get as much out of it as possible. But sometimes that's not always the best thing to do because options can decay over time. We've talked about this before. It's called time decay. And each day that an option is in existence, it will lose a little bit of its value every single day because of the passage of time. Doesn't matter if the stock's going up or down, the option will still decay a little bit every single day. It'll lose value a little bit every single day because of time decay. Time is slipping away towards expiration. So if you have profit built up after a week or two and it's a decent profit, consider taking your gains. And I'm going to show you exactly why I say that. Let's go to our option calculator here. This is from iBallatility.com. Talked about iBallatility many times before. This is their option calculator. And an option calculator is used to figure out the call and put option values at various prices of the stock or various strike prices. You can change the expiration date. You can change the volatility numbers. You can change the price of the stock. You can do what if scenarios. And what if scenarios are, what if the stock moves up 10%? What will my option contract be worth? Well, what if volatility falls 2%? What happens to the option contract? So you can run through these scenarios. But I'm going to show you something that's very important and why you should consider taking profits very quickly if the market moves in your favor right off the bat. This option calculator has defaulted to Microsoft as of the closing prices yesterday, October 30th. And Microsoft closed at $202.47 right here. And the calculator defaults to the at the money strike and the most current expiration. But I want to show you something here. Let's consider that yesterday you bought an out of the money call option on Microsoft.  And what does that mean? Well, the strike price, we're going to choose a 230 strike price. While Microsoft said $202.47, you bought a $230 call, let's say, 230 strike price call option because that is a both strategy and you think the stock's going to go up over time. And you want to take advantage of that. Now let's move out to 90 days. That's a typical timeframe that some people would like to play with to give themselves 90 days to be right. They think Microsoft's going to go up over the next 90 days. And if so, typically a call option should gain value over time if the stock moves up in your favor. But I want to show you what happens over time that that's not always the case. So in this situation with Microsoft at $202.47, we're looking at the 230 strike price with 90 days out. What's the value of this call option? So right here we can see this call option is worth $4.17. Let's just say you paid $4.17 for this call option yesterday. And let's say Microsoft quickly jumps up to $225 in the next 10 days. So we'll change the price to 225 and we'll change the expiration down 10 days. We're going to give up 10 days and see what happens. When we click Calculate, before I click this, you see the options worth $4.17. Now Microsoft just jumped about $12.5 per share and or was it $20 something a share, right? So hit Calculate and you're going to see the call option value gain pretty good. All right, that's what happened. So Microsoft jumped a great deal in 10 days worth of time and the option has now risen to $11.14 a contract. You can sell that out if you wanted to. You'd make almost about $7 a contract. That's $700 that you can make on that contract. Now that's because Microsoft jumped from its original price in just 10 days time. Now that was a pretty big move, okay? So let's reset the numbers here. So Microsoft was at $202.47, it jumped up to $2.25, so it just gained $22.5 or so, $23 or so. And obviously the price of the call option went up. So let's see what happens if the, let's move this back to the 230 strike with 90 days to expiration, make sure we're on the same page again. Okay, so the starting value is $4.17. Now let's just say Microsoft does jump back up to $225, so it's gained $22.5 per share, but let's say that move took 70 days to occur. What happens to that option value now that it took 70 days for that jump to happen instead of 10 days? And when I hit calculate, you're gonna see something very interesting. Click calculate and there you can see what happened. The option price barely budged at all. Even though Microsoft still went up $22.5 a share, it took it a very long time to make that move. And you can see that option value barely budged at all. So there's a very important point here is that people will say, Lee, you know, the stock moved in my favor, but my option price didn't really go up so much. Well, that's because it took the stock 70 days in this case to make that move, that $22.5 up move, which is a great up move. If you own the stock, you're pretty happy. You just made $22.5 per share, but if you own this out of the money call option, the stock still made that same $22.5 jump, but it took it so long, it took 70 days to make that move that the options not going to respond as much. As you can see, it only went up about 70, 65 cents a contract, not a lot, but if it makes the move in 10 days, let's just jump to 10 days, you can see that the option contract value goes up over $11 per contract. So how quickly the stock moves in your favor is very important when you're an option buyer. You need the stock to move very, very quickly if you're an option buyer and it has to move quickly in your favor. If the stock doesn't move at all, you're toast, okay? So just think about this. If the stock moves in your favor quickly, think about taking some profits. You got a lot of money here. If you just sit there and let it do nothing over time, let's move down to say $60 a contract, 60 days left before expiration, now the option's starting to give up value. Even though the stock's the same price, time is ticking away. That means that option value is eroding as well. So be very cautious when you're an option buyer and the stock moves quickly in your favor, take some money off the table, take some of those profits because you know over time, you may end up giving away. So that's it. That's my little lesson for today. I wanna make sure everyone's aware that just know time decay is a real thing and it sets in. The longer that it takes for that stock to move in your favor, the less that option's going to move for you. So just remember that. Okay, lastly, let's go quickly to our website, smartoptionseller.com. Don't forget our put selling basics guide. This is how you sell put options. Free guide right here, click on put selling basics or you can just go to our homepage and put in your name and email address here. You will get a free copy. We love selling put options. That is our bread and butter. So let's learn about that. We have our services. Two newsletter, smart options seller newsletter, vertical spread trader newsletter. We always sell put options. One is put options and one is put option spreads. You can also contact us about our one-on-one coaching if you need some personal help. Okay, that's it for me today. If you like this YouTube video, please don't forget to subscribe in the bottom right-hand corner of that YouTube video. It's the red subscribe button. Give me a thumbs up if you like the content. You know, give me a comment below, give me a question, send me a question. Email me, I love hearing from you and I will always answer. Okay, that's it for me today. This is Lee Lowell signing off. Have a great week everybody. Happy Halloween.