It's an honor to have Dr. David Berlinsky with us. How are you, sir? I'm just fine. Thank you for having me. Well, thank you for coming all the way from Paris to our little place. It was endless. It was endless. Okay. Imagine a hundred years ago. Now, that was endless. It was worse. My trip was worse. David Berlinsky, I want to talk today with you, and you're uniquely qualified to do this, about evolution, science, and progressivism. Because there's a link through them. You've written about this and spoken about this many, many times. You received your PhD in philosophy from Princeton University, later a post-doctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. Glad I didn't take any of those courses. Senior fellow in the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture. You've taught philosophy, mathematics, English at Stanford, Rutgers, City University of New York, and in Paris. And you're now the editor of Inference, International Review of Science. Let's get started. You wrote a book about a decade ago that I read about a decade ago. And in doing this program, I started to think about it. And I said, I think it's important that we have this discussion about science, evolution, progressivism. And I want to start where you started. Let me read you one paragraph. I'm a secular Jew, you write. My religious education did not take. I can barely remember a word of Hebrew. I cannot pray. I've spent more years than I care to remember in studying mathematics and writing about the sciences. Yet, as you wrote in the preface of this book, the book that follows is in some sense a defense of religious thought and sentiment. Biblical verses are the least of it. The defense is needed because none has been forthcoming. The discussion has been ceded to men who regard religious belief with frivolous contempt. The books have in recent years poured from every press, and although differing widely in their style, they're identical in their message, because scientific theories are true, religious beliefs must be false. From your book, The Devil's Delusion, Atheism, and its Scientific Pretensions. That is the thesis, that is the foundational point of your book. Can you expand on that? Well, something particular and peculiar seems to have come over American intellectual life, Anglo-American intellectual life, perhaps 20 years ago. In the 1950s and 1960s, the position that was academically tolerated was a kind of cheerful agnosticism with respect to the religious tradition of mankind. It could be with respect to God's existence. Maybe, maybe not, but this isn't an issue that vexes us profoundly as members of the scientific community. That all changed. Now a kind of very, very vociferous and dogmatic atheism has become obligatory in the scientific community. There are exceptions. There are always going to be exceptions. For all I know, some distinguished physicist may be plotting jihad. I have no idea. But by and large, atheism has replaced any kind of tolerant and forebearing agnosticism as the de facto standard in Anglo-American scientific intellectual life. And as a result, the religious tradition that is a very, very long 5,000-year-old tradition has been made into an object of faint derision among sophisticated men and women. Much to the consternation of people who deeply, deeply admire that tradition. And that I think is a change in the diapason of life that we need to pay attention to. It's relatively new. I think it started around 1980, 1985. But it has become an accelerating force in intellectual life. If you are minded to be a serious Christian or an extremely devout and orthodox Jew or even a serious Muslim, better not go into the scientific community and tell your fraternity brothers that that is what you are. Best to keep your mouth closed. And I think that's generally true. It's among the various topics about which it is not a particularly good idea to make broadcast your views. And then you add, following up on your point, no scientific theory touches on the mysteries that the religious tradition addresses. A man asking why his days are short is not disposed to turn to algebraic quantum field theory for the answer. The answers that prominent scientific figures have offered are remarkable in their shallowness. They hypothesize that we are nothing more than cosmic accidents have been widely accepted by the scientific community. And you say, basically science has nothing to say about life and love and death and meaning. Hardly a controversial point, is it? I mean, if I am asking certain kinds of questions, look around you. There's something there. Open your eyes. You're struck by the existence of the universe. Why is that there? You look at the answers forthcoming from the physics community. They can be described in one of two ways. Well, what do you expect? We're here. Therefore, there's something there. Or it's kind of an accident. These are not the kind of answers intelligent men and women are searching for. They correspond to no deep intellectual need. They're frivolous. Physics really has nothing to tell us. For example, about the origins and appearance of the universe. It has a lot of interesting things to say about cosmology, but it's not the same question. The most radical question you can ask is why is there something, anything, rather than what? Nothing. Well, why is there? It's perfectly possible to propose that there could have been nothing whatsoever. I don't mean some pre-existing stuff. I mean nothing. Well, that's not the world we live in. How come? It's a good question. What's your answer? And when you actually look at the physicists or the biologists or the chemists, their answer is, we know how it happened. We open our eyes to there's something. And we can explain the origin of all that by appealing to some pre-existing something. Are you satisfied with that? If not, well, you're not scientifically literate. Lawrence Kraus makes exactly that same argument. Well, the reason that the universe popped into existence was a pre-existing quantum field from which it arose by a probable situation. And they have no real solid idea, do they? None whatsoever. And yet, they continue to push their theories out as if it's science. Well, let's be fair. Wouldn't you do the same thing if you were a leading physicist? I sure would. If I had a theory that deep down I knew it was no good, but there were all sorts of emoluments, richness, awards, prestige associated with it. I would push it for all its worth, too. Is this why we get these arguments about climate change where the same scientists can't tell you? I'm talking about the top physicist's climate change. We've got to go down that ladder all the way into the bottom. And yet, for a lot of us, it's just a mush out there. In other words, you're saying the top physicist. And what I'm saying is, when we take a look at climate change, we have a community that can't tell us the temperature in a week within 10 degrees, but they can tell us the temperature in 100 years within a one degree. And what I'm saying is you're saying these top physicists, isn't it pervasive? Isn't this a pervasive problem throughout science? To a certain extent. Look, look, science is an enormous enterprise. How many guys, how many women, men and women affirm themselves as scientist worldwide today? Do you happen to have the number? It's 7 million. 7 million people are engaged in the scientific enterprise. And of course, you're going to find very repetitive sociological patterns when there is something as important as the environment or climate. You're going to find groups forming, factions splitting off from the initial group, a tremendous amount of propaganda, elaborate approaches to government resources. There's a great deal of money to be had. And it's not coming from the private sector. It's coming from the federal government. When I talk about fundamental questions about the origin of the universe, we're appealing to the very top of the intellectual ladder. When I talk about climate change, we're talking about some competent people, not many, some competent people with moderately conflicting views, both about the origins of climate change. Yes, the world is getting warmer. The nature of climate change, the reliability of the climatic models, the theories that go into them, and prognostications for the future. It's not entirely clear exactly which group has the most overwhelming and persuasive evidence. Well, let's talk about the top, if you think this fellow, at least arguably Darwin. A lot of theories, a lot of arguments, a lot of science, so to speak. What is Darwinianism? What is that? Well, Darwin comes a mid-19th century figure, 1859. He published what is arguably his masterpiece, The Origin of Species. And the question that Darwin asked himself was a question that all of the 19th century biologists were asking. What is the nature of life? What is the origin of individual species? How did life emerge from inorganic matter? And what are the dynamic laws that change one species into another? If there is such a thing as a change of species. Don't forget alchemy promoted a very similar thesis when it said base metals could be transmuted into gold. It was an argument for transmutation of elements. Darwin provided an alchemical explanation for biology. Species could be transformed into other species. Well, how can this come about? We don't see it every day. It comes about because there are small variations within each species. And these variations are seized upon by the mechanism of natural selection, which simply means some survive, some don't survive. Over vast periods of time these small variations accumulate. They converge on a different structure and various different structures in turn converge on a new body plan, a new organism, a new species, a new entry in the vast pharmacopia of life. That's Darwinism. And it's a position which is being increasingly held as a secular doctrine comparable to the book of Genesis. Was he right? I have a lot of doubts. I have a lot of doubts and so do other people. There are many, many places when one looks at Darwinism, when one says, hey look, this just isn't the scientific theory. It's a collection of anecdotes. Why did the giraffe develop such a long neck? Well, he wanted to reach the trees on the top. Well, how come other animals didn't develop the long neck? Well, they didn't want to reach the trees on the top. How come certain kinds of European eels have to swim across the Atlantic in order to mate? Other kinds of eels are perfectly happy fornicating close to home. Well, it worked for one seal, it didn't work for the other. Why aren't women born with tails like cats? Well, women don't seem to need the tails, even though it would make them even more luring than they are. Why don't cats rule the world? Considering they have every reason and every opportunity to do so. Well, their content being our domestic masters. I mean, the anecdotes pile on interminably. And there's no fundamental leading principle. Do you find that most atheists, more prominent atheists embrace Darwinism? Every last one. And why do they do that? Because it's a secular myth. Even atheists need some compelling myth. How we got here, what we're doing here, what our purpose is. How we got here, it was an accident. What are we doing here? We have no idea. What is our purpose? It's replication, fornication and replication. That's about it. But it's a very, very viable myth. People believe it. They act according to it. And it also doesn't tolerate much as you're right. And as people experience it, doesn't tolerate much religion or people of faith. Atheism, Darwinism, they can't really tolerate religion, can they? Not with any degree of enthusiasm. I mean, everyone will say religion is a matter of what you do in the privacy and therefore the confines of your own home. As long as it doesn't come into the academic world and pollute the stream of vigorous science, you can do whatever you want. That is a way of maintaining the fiction of certain kinds of constitutional protections and at the same time upholding the values of the academy, which are frankly anti-religious. There's no question about that. What's the title of Christopher Hitchens book? Religion Poisons Everything. And I look at this and then you look at our Declaration of Independence. Natural rights, natural law, God given, unalienable rights. How can this notion of Darwinism, atheism, really progressivism, which I want to get into with you in a moment, they really don't work with constitutionalism, do they? We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are endowed by their creator. Oh, wait a second. That has nothing to do. It is flatly inconsistent with the Darwinian hypothesis. All men are not endowed by their creator. All men are not brothers. Quite a different scenario is playing out in the biological world. If you want a comparison look to our nearest neighbors, you would never say all chimpanzees are brothers endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Why should we say that about it? But we do. That's the crucial point. We tolerate the inconsistency because we're forced to. We tolerate the inconsistency, but when it comes to actual governance, the inconsistency in many ways isn't even tolerated. What I mean by that is it's a point of propaganda. It's a point of emotion. But there are parties, there are efforts, right, that adopt this notion of progressivism. And the old progressives who take a lot of their arguments from Hegel and Marx, Woodrow Wilson, or all these fellows Dewey, they would attack the Declaration. They would attack the Constitution. They would attack these traditions. This is old stuff. It's time to move along. All that is holy is profane, Marx said. Right. And so in America today, do you think this notion of Darwinianism that you were talking about, this push towards, I would argue, public atheism. In other words, religion out of the public square. We got to clean it off out of the parks. We got to clean it out of the schools. Get rid of it wherever it is. Yeah. Doesn't this undermine the foundational principles of the United States? Probably. Probably. But look, let me put the point to you in a slightly different way. Suppose you were coming from outer space.  You come to the earth. And you listen to a long lecture about Darwin, the immense importance of Darwinian biology. But then you open your own eyes. Say you're from Mars, you open your eyes. What are the two things that would most strike you about living systems on the face of the earth? Not the Darwinian rhetoric, but I would suggest the evidence of your own eyes. One is that all life is related. There's no question about that. Biochemistry is the same throughout life. All life has very, very many of its properties in common. There's one living system on the face of the planet, not a multitude of species, one living system. That's the first thing you'd notice. The second thing you'd notice, if you're honest, is that there is a vast inseparable distinction between two kinds of living systems, human beings and all the rest. That is something that's rarely noticed, rarely emphasized. The distance between a human being and our nearest chimpanzee-like ancestors, common ancestors, is much, much, much greater than the difference between a chimpanzee and a flower. We're talking about a bifurcation and a manifold of biology, human beings on one side, the rest of the animal kingdom or the plant kingdom and the other. These are facts that I think that any untroubled observer, and by untroubled I mean someone who has not previously adhered to any kind of ideology such as Darwinism, would at once recognize life is connected. It's in some sense one living system, but profoundly divided between human beings and all the rest. That's the first step toward some sort of system of reconciliation because it prompts the inevitable question, hey, how come? Why are human beings so different? Why do they organize themselves differently? Why do they have mathematics, literature? Why do they speak to one another? Why do they have creative thoughts? A chimpanzee is probably a lovable animal, but nobody ever asked a chimpanzee a question that was possible for the chimpanzee to answer. So these are, I would say, orthogonal to the main axis of ideology. But in public schools today, in colleges and universities today, again, it's broad stroke, even engaging that kind of discussion. Forbidden, playing football. Exactly. And so what we're really talking about is we're supposed to accept, I think Hegel called it the final end, we're supposed to accept the absolute, the only quibbling is how we get there. And so when we have people teaching like that, people pressing that kind of dogmatism, it becomes much more difficult to have the discussion that even we're having right now. It becomes very difficult. We all know that. That's part of the problem that any secular society faces. The minute that the society becomes secular, it needs embrace a certain kind of ideological system which largely replaces religious thought and tradition. Once that ideological system is in place, of course, the natural self-protective mechanism clicks into place and an effort is made to eradicate any form of dissent. Did you expect anything else? Well, I hope so. But, you know, when this country was founded, they did something very unique in the Declaration of Independence. They wrote this down where few other countries ever wrote. What's the date? I agree. About 1776. Then they set up this constitutional construct. 1781 and thereafter. 1787. And why did they do that? In order to preserve the principles in the Declaration of Independence. This raises an interesting point, then, in response to your question. Ask me. Can there ever be a lasting society that embraces anything other than this notion of Darwinianism, which might lead to progressivism, forms of Marxism, or whatever those isms are? So, is Darwinianism and these very political tributaries really, in many respects, lead to forms of tyranny, in my view, in my opinion? Because government replaces essentially faith, replaces all these other traditions and customs, or at least lords of them. Is that inevitable? Yes. It's inevitable. Look, inevitable. I think you're looking at the wrong focal length. Darwinism is a particular kind of scientific doctrine. It's actually anecdotal. It's very far removed from physics or mathematics. And it plays a certain role in the ceremonies of democratic life. And it has played that role for half a century or so. But, of course, it's like everything else. It's changing. It's undergoing change because of the intense intellectual pressures being brought on any scientific theory dealing with these profound questions. For example, we know perfectly well the questions about the origins of life. From the standpoint of 2018 are hopeless. We do not understand how life emerged from whatever muck it did emerge. We're simply unable to make a coherent chemical account. Jim Tour, a very good synthetic chemist at Rice University, has written about this, for instance, the journal that I'm editing. And he says it's time to call for a moratorium on origins of life research. It's not going anywhere. That's one thing. And then, as inevitably happens, Darwinian biologists by calling attention to themselves so very flamboyantly have called in to question the very structure of the theories they're defending because the physicists have said, hey, you know, that's interesting the guy kind of claims you guys are making. It's all nonsense. But we physicists can handle it a lot better. Somebody, for example, I think his first name is Diane Fisher at Stanford, top-notch physicist. And I've seen a preprint of his. He said, well, you know, Darwin is a very, very interesting theory. But it has no quantitative properties. It's not like a theory in physics. And there's a kind of collective heart attack among the Darwinian biologists. Not like physics. Not like gravity. Say it isn't so. But it isn't so. And so the physicists are subtly changing the profile. But what I'm trying to get at was it inevitable is that that science, which is applied by the progressives, by the communists, political science, behavioral science, social science and so forth that have their birth out of, among others, Darwinianism. Are they as amenable to rethinking these scientific theories from which they borrow in order to organize man? I don't think so. Marx-Planck said science progresses one funeral at a time. It's true. Certain generations are going to die out. The next generation is going to be very careful about the kinds of claims they're making. Darwinism is a movement, is an ideology, is a position in thought, is a triumphant creation, is like any other movement in thought. It has its ups and its downs. And it's clearly on the point of radical dissolution right now. What's going to replace it? Whether it will evoke the same clamorous contingent of supporters that Darwinism has evoked? I don't know. We'll see. A lot of sinister developments happening. I mean, big data is itself a response of a kind to the absence of theory and biology and psychology. Big data. Yeah. I mean the collection of health records, social media. Tons and tons of data together with artificial intelligence probing the data. If you really don't understand what's going on in psychology and we don't, if you don't understand what's going on in biology, might as well heap together a ton of data and start looking at it. That's a response. That's something different. That was not expected. Hearing what you've talked about in atheism, Darwinism and so forth. And I read your secular joke. Do you reject the idea that there is a supernatural, that there is a God? Or how do you deal with that? Do I reject it personally? Yeah. And how do you deal with it? God forbid. I should reject such a thing. There's a vast difference between being a believer, having a commitment of obeying a certain set of religious prescriptions. A vast difference between that and fundamental rejection. No, I don't reject it. I can't live with it. I admit that. And what does that mean? It means I'm like everyone else. I'm a secular individual. I like to think that I'm better than I am. I like to think that there's certain forms of consciousness, certain imperatives that I respect, which are religious in nature, but I know I'm kidding myself. I'm a secular human being who tries to do, for the most part, pretty much what he feels like doing. Have a good time all the time as a secular model, right? You have a good time all the time? It's hard. Any form of faith is difficult. You get into these debates with atheists. You defend not, in your view, that they're necessarily as a god or a right religion and so forth, but that you don't know. And what you seem to be saying is, the scientists don't know what they don't know. And yet they insist. Not all. I'm talking about certain specific ones. The atheists. And yet they insist that there is no god and religion is bad and so forth and so on. How do you struggle with this? Or do you struggle with this? Look, the struggle begins by making important distinction. I can say, I believe there is no god. That's one kind of commitment. And that's essentially an atheist position. I believe, for whatever reasons, that god does not exist. But I can say in a much more ameliorative sense, I don't believe that god exists. Quite different. I withdraw some form of assent. I believe god does not exist. It's not the case that I believe god exists. I believe the proposition, god does not exist. I can defend that. That's the atheist speaking. I would say I don't have an intense belief with respect to god's existence. It hasn't been vouchsafed to me. It's not the case. It's not the case that I believe that god exists. But I'm not tempted to say I believe that he does not exist. I'm tempted only to temporize. And I think that is fundamentally the way most people in a secular society think. And yet, you aggressively, from an intellectual point of view, battle the atheists, which is your point, who insist that god does not exist and what you seem to be saying is, look, I don't know. But I can't reject it out of hand and I can't embrace what you're selling as a replacement. No, that's absolutely the way I feel. I do battle with the atheists. That's a wonderfully vivid image. Chiefly, because I think there are windbags. And if they were arguing another position, I do battle with them too. Dawkins, Harris. Yeah, the whole crew of Jerry Coyne, Dawkins, Charlotte, Harris. Christopher Hitchens was different. He was a very sophisticated guy. And he knew that a lot of what he was saying was absurd. I mean, he would get up and say, never believe anything without evidence. And I would say, what about what you just said? What's your evidence for never believe anything without evidence? And he would say, well, it's just a sentence, which is literally what he said. It's just a sentence, something I say. But yeah, I think dogmatic atheism, the movement of atheism is an embarrassment and contemporary thought. And I think I'm pretty much alone in thinking that. It is a very popular or very effervescent movement. Their whole societies consecrated to upholding atheism. And of course, the first thing they do when they gather together in ecumenical devotion is form factions and start hurling anathemas. Oh yeah, there's atheism, atheism plus. And when they finished hurling anathemas, of course, the women discovered that they've been sexually oppressed by the men.  And of course, for somebody like me, that's just a joy to watch. The atheist movement tends to be a movement of the left. Yeah. I don't know many conservatives, so-called conservatives, some are, some are, but most aren't, who are atheists. Why is that? Well, to the extent that Marx offers a substitute for religion, you would not expect a dogmatic or an orthodox communist to say, yeah, the scientific system of society is what Marx has given us as a tool of analysis, but it all is contingent upon the whims of a deity. That doesn't fit very well with communism or with Marxism. It seems an irrelevant postulate. But there are plenty of rotten guys on the conservative side, for example, the Nazis. You don't think of the Nazis in terms of radical atheism. I don't think of them as conservatives, though. Well, they were pretty lousy. Fashions. They were pretty lousy. But so what? I mean, with respect to the Nazis, even if the SS executioners took communion after murdering a lot of elderly Jewish women, who cares? But when we come back, what I'm trying to expose, I think, and you may disagree, is that Hegel, Marx, Rousseau, this whole collective philosophy with their differences and so forth, they have to reject religion. They have to reject traditions. They have to reject customs. Or their philosophies don't make any sense. That's that more broadly when we return. Philosophers, ideologues, their progeny, various intellectuals of the turn of the last century, pushing this agenda of human sciences, they call them, behavioral sciences, political sciences. And they're built on this notion of science. And yet they also embrace, I was saying, you know, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, this sort of thing, who really do insist that you basically have to destroy the existing society in order to get to the promised land for a variety of reasons, materialism or whatever it is. We've heard that before. We've heard that before. The modern incarnation of this, of this attitude, of this belief system, the progressives, the so-called democratic socialists, isn't this where they're dragging countries or maybe not dragging them, where people want to go in these various countries in Europe, in the United States? Sure. Everybody wants to go there, provided they can go there without any personal inconvenience. Me too. I'm not objecting to universal health care in France. It doesn't work. It's the only problem. Yeah, it worked for me. That's all I care about. Exactly, right. And if you have 40 million other people who say exactly the same thing, you will have a system exactly like the socialized system of medicine in France, which I must say did a great job on me. You know, it gave me a new aortic valve. Actually, it may not. Yeah, well, that's not really my problem. And there you've touched on a crucial point. These usual frucks destroy the bonds of solidarity, don't they? You cannot endlessly profit from a state subsidized system and spend a lot of time worrying about your obligations to other people in the same situation. You can spend a lot of time talking about your obligations, but worrying about them, that's quite different. He said, I'm doing well. This guy may not be. I got no complaints. But isn't that the point when you're unmoored from these principles? When you're unmoored from values, belief systems, or faith, wherever one believes they come from, that's what it comes down to. I got what I want. He didn't get it. That's his problem. Aren't societies developing more and more in that direction, unfortunately? Well, secular societies tend to atomize very frequently. They dissolve into individual constituents. And the social sciences, that used to be called methodological individualism. The unit of analysis is always the individual, but the unit of agency is also the individual. And I think that is a feature of a secular society, and it seems to be a feature of secular societies that's deeply desired by the inhabitants of a secular society. One thing we have to understand and accept, however reluctantly, is something like the second law of thermodynamics. Second law of thermodynamics. You got it. What is it? Things go from bad to worse, and they go in only one direction. It's a great law of physics. Is that where we're headed? I'm telling you what the second law of therm... There better be another law. As far as I know, that's it. Things go from bad to worse. Look at us. Yes. It goes in one direction. Young ones, we're getting old now, right? I'm only speaking the truth. Speak truths to power. Right. And the second law of thermodynamics embodies the most ancient part of human wisdom. Things go from bad to worse. How about societies? Them too. Do they ever recover? Do they recover? No, but new societies form. After all, every human birth is an achievement in violating the second law of thermodynamics, isn't it? Every time a flower buds, we have a violation. But it's not all bad. Societies do change very radically, and they generally change in one way. The only problem is what takes place when they change. If it's a violent change, then we have a problem on our hands. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you for having me. My pleasure.


I say we rent it up, what we playin' to? No, you should get a bad to I say you should get a bad to Cause when I was broke, I feel bad to When I was broke, I was mad to


Epic Games sold the new AAA game Avatar Frontiers of Pandora for $289. Hooray! That's way cheaper than the $70 price the rest of the world paid. But wait, Epic then took back the game and started refunding customers. The posted price had been a mistake. Instead of $289, the game was supposed to be $2,899. But there's a strong argument to make that under Philippine law, the buyers can rely on the posted price of $289. And thus, it was illegal for Epic to unilaterally refund and nullify the sale. Even if the posted price was a mistake, Section 19 of R88792, the Electronic Commerce Act, says that in case of an error on electronic data message, the address C, in this case the public, is entitled to regard the electronic data message, in this case the price posted, as that which the originator, Epic, intended to send and to act on that assumption. Hindi ko alam na mali, I bought in good faith, valid sale yun, na hindi po'y edeng basta-basta lang i-cancel.


Live from San Jose, California, it's The Cube. Covering Big Data Silicon Valley 2017. Life of the Cube coverage of Big Data Silicon Valley or Big Data SV hashtag, Big Data SV. In conjunction with Strata Hadoop, I'm John Furrier with The Cube and my co-host George Gilbert, analyst at Wikibon. I'm excited to have our next guest, Yaron Jave, who's the founder and CTO of Gazio. Just wrote in a post up on SiliconANGLE, check it out, welcome to The Cube. Thanks, John. Great to see you. You've been a guest blog this week on SiliconANGLE and always great on Twitter, because Dave will always like to bring you into the contentious conversations. I like the controversy one. And you add a lot of good color on that, so let's just get right into it. So your company is doing some really innovative things. We were just talking before we came on camera here about some of the amazing performance improvements you guys have on many different levels. But first, take a step back and let's talk about what this continuous analytics platform is, because it's unique, it's different, and it's got impact. Take a minute to explain. Sure, so first few words on Iguazu. We're developing a data platform which is unified so basically you can interest data through many different APIs and it's more like a cloud service. It is for on-prem and edge locations and co-location, but it's managed more like a cloud platform. So very similar experience to Amazon. It's software. It's software. We do integrate a lot with hardware in order to achieve our performance, which is really about 10 to 100 times faster than what exists today. But the point that we're, we've talked to a lot of customers and what we really want to focus with customers is solving business problems, because I think a lot of the Duke camps started with more solving IT problems. So IT is going kicking tires and eventually failing based on your statistics and gardener statistics. So what we really wanted to solve is big business problems. And what we figured out that this notion of pipeline architecture, where you ingest data and then curate it and fix it, et cetera, which was very good for the early days of a Duke. If you think about how a Duke started was page ranking from Google. There was no time sensitivity. You could take days to calculate it and recalibrate your search engine. Based on your research, everyone is now looking for real-time insights. So there is sensor data from cores. There is stock data from exchanges. There is fraud data from banks. And you need to act very quickly. So this notion of... And I can give you examples from customers. This notion of taking data, creating Parquet file and log files and storing them in S3 and then taking Redshift and analyzing them and then maybe few hours later having an insight. This is not going to work. And what you need to fix is you have to put some structure into the data because if you need to update a single record, you cannot just create a huge file of 10 gigabytes and then analyze it. So what we did is basically a mechanism where you ingest data. As you ingest the data, you can run multiple different processes on the same thing and you can also serve the data immediately, okay? And a few examples that we demonstrate here in the show. One is video surveillance, very nice movie-style example that you basically ingest pictures for our S3 API, for Object API. You analyze the picture to detect faces, to detect scenery, to extract geolocation from pictures and all that. All those through different processes, TensorFlow doing one serverless functions that we have to do other simpler tasks. And at the same time, you can have dashboards that just show everything and you can have Spark that basically does a query. So where was this guy last seen or who was he with, think about the Boston-Born example, you could just do it in real time because you don't need this notion of pipeline. And this solves very hard business problems for some of the customers we work with. So that's the key innovation, there's no pipelining. No pipelining. And what's the secret sauce? So first, our system does about a couple of million of transactions per second and we are a multi-model database. So basically you can ingest data as a stream, exactly the same data could be read by Spark as a table. So basically issue a query on the same data, give me everything that has a certain pattern or something and could also be served immediately through RESTful APIs to a dashboard running AngularJS or something like that. So that's the secret sauce is by having this integration and this unique data model, it allows you all those things to work together. There are other aspects, like we have transactional semantics. One of the challenges is how do you make sure that a bunch of processes don't collide when they update the same data? So first, you need a very low granularity because each one may update a different field. Like this example that I gave with geo data, the serverless function that does the geo data extraction only updates the geo data fields within the records. And maybe TensorFlow updates information about the image in a different location in the record or in potentially different records. So you have to have that along with transaction safety, along with security. We have very tight security at the field level, identity level. So that's rethinking the entire architecture. And I think what many of the companies you'll see at the show, they say, okay, Hadoop is given. Let's build some sort of a convenience tools around it. Let's do some scripting, let's do automation but sort of the underlying thing, I won't use dirty words, but it's not well equipped to the new challenges of real time. And we basically restructured everything. We took the notions of cloud native architectures. We took the notions of flash and latest flash technologies, a lot of parallelism on CPUs. We didn't take anything for granted on the underlying architecture. So when you found the company, just take a personal story here. What was the itch you were scratching? Why did you get into this? Lastly, you have a huge tech advantage, which is we'll double down on the research piece that George will have some questions. But what got you going with the company? You got a unique approach. People would love to do it with the pipeline. It sounds great. And the performance, you said, what, 100X? So how did you get here? Tell the story. So if you know my background, I ran all the data center activities in Melanox and you know Melanox, I know Kevin was here. And my role was to take Melanox technology, which is 100 gig networking and silicon and fit it into the different applications. So I worked with SAP HANA, I worked with Teradata, I worked on Oracle Exadata, I worked with all the cloud service providers on building their own object storage and no SQL and other solutions. I also owned all the open source activities around Hadoop and SAF and all those projects. And my role was to fix many of those or to come to customers says, I don't need 100 gig, it's too fast for me. And how do I, and my role was to convince him that, yes, I can open up all the bottleneck all the way up to your stack so you can leverage those new technologies. For that, we basically sew the inefficiencies in those stacks. So you had a good purview of the marketplace. You had open source on one hand and then all the storage, vendors, network. All the database players and all the cloud service providers were my customers. So you're a very unique point where you see the trajectory of cloud doing things totally different. And I sometimes I see the trajectory of enterprise storage and all flash, all that legacy technologies where sort of cloud providers are all about object, key value, no SQL, you know. And you're trying to convince those guys that maybe they were going the wrong way, but it's pretty hard. But how are they going the wrong way? I think they are going the wrong way. Everyone, for example, is running to do NVMeover Fabric now. That's the new fashion, okay? I did the first implementation of NVMeover Fabric in my team at Melanox. And I really loved that at that time, but databases cannot work on top of storage or networks because there are serialization problems. Okay, if you use a storage or a network, that means that every node in the cluster have to go and serialize an operation against a shared media. And that's not how Google and Amazon works. There's a lot more databases out there too and a lot more data sources, got the edge. Yeah, but all the new databases, all the modern databases, they basically shard the data across the different nodes. So there are no serialization problems. So that's why Oracle doesn't scale or scale to 10 nodes at best with a lot of our DMA as a backplane to allow that. And that's why Amazon can scale to 1,000 nodes or Google spanner. And that's the horizontally scalable piece that's happening. Yeah, because basically the data distribution has to move into the higher layers of the data. And not the lower layers of the data. And that's really the trajectory where the traditional legacy storage and system vendors are going. And we sort of followed the way the cloud guys went. Just with our knowledge of the infrastructure, we sort of did it better than what the cloud guys did. Because the cloud guys focus more on the higher levels of the implementation, the algorithms, the Paxos and all that. Their implementation is not that efficient. And we did both sides extremely efficient. How about the edge? Because that's edge is now part of cloud. And you got cloud, it's got the compute, all the benefits you were saying. And still they have their own consumption opportunities and challenges that for everyone else does. But edge is now exploding. The combination of those things coming together at the intersection of that is deep learning, machine learning, which is powering the AI hype. So how is the edge factoring into your plan and were architectures for the cloud? So I wrote a bunch of posts that are not published yet about the edge. But my analysis, along with your analysis and Pierre Levine's analysis, is that cloud have to sort of start distributing more. And because if you're looking at the trends, 5G Wi-Fi and wireless networking is going to be gigabit traffic. Gigabit to the home driven by Google, 70 bucks a month. It's going to push a lot more bandwidth at the edge. On the same time, cloud providers, in order to lower costs and deal with energy problems, they are going to rural areas. And the traditional way we solve cloud problems was to put CDNs. So every time you download a picture or a video, you go to a CDN. When you go to Netflix, you don't really go to Amazon. You go to a Netflix pop, one of 250 locations. But the new workloads are different because they're no longer pictures that need to be cached. First, there are a lot of data going up. Sensor data, upload files, et cetera. Data is becoming a lot more structured. Sensor data is structured. All this current information will be structured. And you want to basically digest or summarize the data. So you need technologies like machine learning and all those things. So you need something which is like CDNs, just a mini version of cloud that sits somewhere in between the edge and the cloud. And this is our approach. And now, because we can sort of string grab a mini cloud, a mini Amazon and way more dense approach, then this is a play that we're going to take. And we have a very good partnership with Equinix, which is distributed in 170 something locations. We have a very good relation. So you're essentially going to disrupt the CDN. And something that I've been writing about and tweeting about, CDNs were based on the old Yahoo days, caching images you mentioned. That's, you know, give me 1999 back, please. You know, that's old school today standards. So it's a whole new architecture because of how things are stored. You have to be a lot more distributed. What is the architecture? So in our innovation, we have two layers of innovation. One is sort of on the lower layers of, we actually have three main innovations. One is sort of on the lower layers of what we discussed. The other one is sort of the security layer, where we classify everything, layer seven at 100 gig traffic rates. And the third one is all this notion of distributed system. We can actually run multiple systems in multiple locations and manage them as one logical entity through high-level semantics, high-level policies. Okay, so when we take theCUBE global, we're going to have you guys on every pop. No, this is a legit question. No, it's going to take time for us. You know, we're not going to do everything in one day and we're starting with local problems. Well, this is digital transmission. So stay with us for a second. So here's the, stay with this scenario. So video like Netflix is pretty much one dimensions video and so there's a, there's certainly a new CDNs but when you start thinking in different content types, so I'm going to have a video with maybe a CGI overlay or social graph data coming in from tweets at the same time with Instagram pictures, I might be accessing multiple data everywhere to watch a movie or something. That would require beyond a CDN thinking. And you have to run continuous analytics because you cannot afford batch. You cannot afford a pipeline because you ingest picture data, you may need to add some subtext with the data and feed it directly to the consumer. So you have to move to those two elements of moving more stuff into the edge and running into continuous analytics versus batch and pipeline. So you think based on that scenario, I just said that there's going to be an opportunity for somebody to take over the media landscape for sure. Yeah, I think if you're also looking at the statistics for, I've seen a nice article, I told George about it, that looking at analyzing the Intel chip distribution. And what you see is that there is a 30% growth on Intel chips into cloud, which is faster than what most analysts anticipate in terms of cloud growth. That means actually that cloud is going to cannibalize enterprise faster than what most think. Enterprise is shrinking about 7%, and there is another place which is growing. It's telcos. It's not growing like cloud, but part of it is because of this move towards the edge and the move of telcos buying white boxes. And 5G and access over the top too. Yeah, but that's server chips. So basically there's going to be more and more computation in the different telecommunications. And yeah, and this is an opportunity that we can capitalize on if we run fast enough. It sounds as though because you've implemented these sort of industry standard APIs that come from largely the open source ecosystem, that you can propagate those two areas on the network that the vendors who are behind those APIs can't necessarily do into the telcos, towards the edge. And I assume part of that is because of the density and the simplicity, like so that essentially your footprint's smaller in terms of hardware. And the operational simplicity is greater. Is that a fair assessment? Yes, and also we support a lot of Amazon compatible APIs which are RESTful, typically HTTP based, very convenient to work with in a cloud environment. Another thing is because we're sort of taking all the state on ourself, the different forms of states, whether it's a message queue or a table or an object, et cetera, that makes the computation layer very simple. So one of the things that we're also demonstrating is the integration we have with Kubernetes that basically now simplifies Kubernetes because you don't have to build all those different data services for cloud native infrastructure. You just run Kubernetes, where the volume driver, where the database, where the message queues, where everything underneath Kubernetes, and then you just run Spark or TensorFlow or a serverless function as a Kubernetes microservice. And that allows you now elastically to increase the number of Spark jobs that you need or maybe you have another tenant, you just spawn a Spark job. Yarn has some of those attributes, but Yarn is very limited, very confined to the Hadoop ecosystem. TensorFlow is not an Hadoop player and a bunch of those new tools are not an Hadoop player and everyone is now adopting a new way of doing streaming and they just call it serverless. Serverless and streaming are very similar technologies. The advantage of serverless is all this prepackaging and all this automation of the CI CD, the continuous integration, continuous development. So we're taking, in order to simplify the developer and operation aspects, we're trying to integrate more and more with cloud native approach around CI CD and integration with Kubernetes and cloud native technologies. Would it be fair to say that from a developer or admin point of view, you're pushing out from the cloud towards the edge faster than if the existing implementations, you know, say the Apache ecosystem or the AWS ecosystem, you know, where they, AWS has something on the edge. I forgot that, whether it's Snowball or Greengrass or whatever, you know, where they at least get the Lambda function. They're fuel, by the way, and it's interesting to see. One of the things they did, they allowed Lambda functions in their CDNs, which is sort of going the direction I mentioned, just very minimal functionality. Another thing that they have those boxes where they have a single VM and they can run Lambda function as well. But I think their ability to run computation is very limited and also their focus is on shipping the boxes through mail and we want it to be always connected. You're on final question for you, just to get your thoughts, great statement, by the way, it's very informative and we should do a follow up on Skype on our studio for Silicon Valley Friday show. But, I mean, Google Next was interesting. I mean, they're serious about the enterprise but you can see that they're not yet there. What is the enterprise readiness perspective from your perspective? Because Google has the tech and they try to flaunt the tech. We're great, we're Google, look at us, therefore you should buy us. It's not that easy in the enterprise. How would you size up the different players because they're not all like Amazon, although Amazon is winning. You get Amazon, Azure, and Google. Your thoughts on the cloud players? Yeah, so the way we attack enterprise, we don't attack it from an enterprise perspective or IT perspective, we attack it from a business use case perspective, especially because we're small and we have to run fast. So you need to identify a real critical business problem. We're working with stock exchanges and they have a lot of issues around monitoring the daily trade activities in real time, okay? And if you compare what we do with them on this continuous analytics notion to how they work with excels and sort of doops, it's like totally different and now they could do things which are way different. And I think that one of the things that those customers, if Google wants to succeed against Amazon, they have to find a way of how to approach those business owners and say, here's a problem, Mr. Customers, here's a business challenge, here's what I'm going to solve. If they're just going to say, you know what, my VMs are cheaper than Amazon, it's not going to be a huge issue. Yeah, also they're doing the whole, they're calling lift and shift, which is code word for rip and replace in the enterprise. So that's essentially, I guess, a good opportunity if you can get people to do that, but not everyone's ripping and replacing and lifting and shifting. But a lot of Google advantages around areas of AI and things like that. So they should try and leverage, if you think about Amazon approach to AI, they sort of funded the university to build the project and then sort of set its hours, where Google created TensorFlow and created a lot of other IPs and data flow and all those solutions and contributed to the community. So I really love Google's approach of contributing Kubernetes, contributing TensorFlow. And this way, they're sort of planning the seeds. So the new generation that is going to work with Kubernetes and TensorFlow, so you know what, why would I mess with this thing on-prem? I'll just go in. Right to the cloud. Do multi-cloud. Right to the cloud. But I think a lot of criticism about Google is that they're too sort of research-oriented, they don't know how to monetize and approach them. Yeah, it's just enterprise is a whole different drumbeat. And I think that's the only thing I'm my complaint with them is they got to get that knowledge and or buy companies. Have a quick final point on Spanner, any analysis of Spanner that went from paper to pretty quickly from paper to product? So before we started Iguazio, I studied Spanner quite a bit. All the publications that was there and all the other things like Spanner and Spanner has the underlying layer called Colossus and our data layer is very similar to how Colossus works. So we're very familiar. We took a lot of concepts from Spanner. And you like Spanner, it's legit. Yes, again, I think that we haven't copied, you borrow some good practice. Well, I think I studied about 300 research papers before we did the architecture. Wow. But we basically took the best of each one of them because there's still a lot of issues. Most of those technologies, by the way, are designed for mechanical disks. And we can talk about it in a different way. And you have Flash. All right, Yaron, we had gone over here, great segment, we're here live in Silicon Valley, breaking it down, getting into the under the hood, looking at a 10X, 100X performance advantages, keep an eye on Agazio, they're looking like they've got some great product. Check them out. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with George Gilbert. We'll be back with more after this short break. Thanks.


Hello everyone, this is Amit Dhan and on this channel you'll find financial travel and more videos. If you like what you see, please do the thumbs up and consider subscribing. Thank you. Hello everyone, I have my stack prepaid master card is in this envelope and I'll be unboxing the credit card very shortly. And once I'm done with the unboxing, then I'll talk about some features or some of the benefits this card offers. And for which I'll take you to stack website, which is ready on my computer. So let's start with the unboxing. So the envelope came just like this. This is a very simple and plain envelope. And then let's take out the whole package or whole information folder. Okay, so the envelope is empty right now, which I'll set it aside. And the credit card is in here and let's see what type of attachments they have included. So here we have a card holder agreement. And this is a master card, although it's a prepaid credit card, but it's a master card. So you'll be able to use this anywhere master cards are accepted.  And here some information I can see which may be helpful. So maximum card balance is 20,000, maximum number of loads per day. Four loads, you cannot load more than four times each day and you cannot have more than 20,000 balance. Maximum number of loads per month, which is 20, so you cannot load more than 20 times per month. And maximum amount per single load transaction is $8,000. And then we have maximum daily cumulative amount, 8,000 again. And then maximum monthly 20,000. Maximum number of points of sale transaction per day is 15. Maximum amount per single point of sale transaction, 2,500. So if you try to, let's say, make a purchase of $2,501 to decline. Maximum daily cumulative amount is 5,000. Maximum monthly 20,000. Maximum number of ATM transaction per day is 2. So you'll not be able to withdraw money more than two times per day. And maximum amount per single ATM transaction is 5,000. So each time you can do maximum 5,000 and you cannot exceed more than 1,000 daily. Maximum daily cumulative amount 1,000, maximum monthly 2,000. So per month, you'll not be able to withdraw 2,000. So that's the monthly limit. Maximum amount per single card to card transaction. So it has a feature which lets you transfer money from one stack account to another stack account. And there's a limit to that which is 2,500. And maximum daily cumulative which you can do it looks like two times. And the maximum daily combined spend and card cash withdraw $5,000. Okay, let's see if there's anything else in here. And then we'll move to the card shortly. So here are just some other information. I believe we'll come across this information again on the website or when I talk about the card. So I'll just put this aside here. And so here is our stack credit card. So we have a welcome letter. So it just tells you that welcome, here's your card and it has some features. Now this card, actually you will earn rewards when you use this card. So although it's a prepaid master card or prepaid credit card, it still, you know, it lets you allow rewards. And so we have a card here and let me just, you know, remove the card and then I will show you the card. Okay, so here is stack prepaid master card credit card. So stack is written here. If you, okay, you'll be able to see right now, see this is the stack and it's all black. The card actually looks pretty good being a prepaid credit card. So this is our card. I'll just set this aside for now. It's a good looking card, no doubt. And let's go to stack website and I'll show you some. If you type in stack in the Google search box and then hit enter. So this is going to be your first match and this is the stack site right here. So it's a get stack.ca and let's take a look what you have here. So here it says stop banking.  So whether it's a free latte from your favorite coffee shop or VIP access to a sold out show, you'll get covered with rewards you really want. Now it looks like a stack is attached to some sort of rewards, but they're not giving much details about what type of reward or, you know, if it's a reward for everything or only for these selected merchants and at what rate you'll be earning reward. But definitely there is a reward for a stack. So the next one we have here is that money made easy right now. Okay, so Rich Your Financial goes faster with automated savings, weekly spending tallies and fee free services. Okay, so it looks like they have some sort of report you'll be receiving. You'll be getting every week showing your like, you know, it's kind of a budget pie chart or spending categories chart, which will show you how much you're spending in which category. And then it will like, you know, it has a savings program. You can you'll be able to save money right from the card. And so for example, this works this way. So no matter what you're saving for, whether you're making a purchase will automatically round up your purchase to the next $1, $1, $2, $5 or $10 and put it towards your savings goals. So if you can choose like, you know, add to what round up next round up you'd like to do and you can save either $1, $2, $5 or $10 based on your option and you can save that amount for you. So that's another feature. And then stack to stack transfer is free. Okay, that's good. And then let's see what else here and smarter spending with categorized spending and weekly tallies. So this is the one I was just telling you that, you know, you'll be getting some sort of report or chart or picture from stack, which will let you visualize where you're spending money. And then we have, okay, so here the foreign exchange fees is zero, stack to stack transfer zero, ATM withdrawal zero, replacement card zero, monthly account zero, no fees. Okay, so I already talked about this before, no foreign exchange fee, no ATM withdrawal fee, but ATM withdrawal is limited to two transactions per day. And then you're limited to 2000 per month, but you know, it should be enough when you travel because this is, I'm going to be using this car basically when I'm in a foreign country. And, you know, there's no ATM fee imposed by stack, but keep in mind that if you're using it for an ATM, that ATM itself might charge you a fee. So that's something you need to aware of, but the stack will not be charging any ATM fees. Let's see if you're using other Canadian cards or other bank cards or anything. Usually there is a fee. So that's where you save, especially when you travel. Okay, so the next one we have here is the security feature. So this is like, you know, you'll be able to freeze and defreeze your card via the app. So which is another good reason to have a stack because like, you know, if you're in a foreign country, you can have the peace of mind and you can only open unlock the card when you want to make a purchase. And then also another feature you can use that you can just keep very low balance. And knowing that, you know, if you lose your card, it should be okay. You don't have to carry something with a huge available credit limit. So here you're the one who's controlling everything. The future of money here. So that's it in terms of the stack website. So it's getstack.ca. That's all for today. Definitely this is not your average, everyday average Joe prepaid mastercard. Some of the features and benefits this card is giving you is hard to find even other in other paid high end credit cards. So for that reason, definitely this is a good card to consider if you're traveling or even if you're not traveling. But you know, if you're just within the country and want to have more control on your money. So that's all for now. If you like what you see, please give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing on this channel. I do financial travel and all other sorts of videos which are informational and helpful videos. So subscribe now and I'll see you shortly. Thank you for watching.


Are you eager to get started with DevOps for your organization or agency, but you wish that someone could tell you some practical advice about the dos, the don'ts before you even get started? Raven Menwell, with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, part of the Smithsonian, will talk to us today about DevOps 101, getting to minimal viable DevOps-ness. Hello, my name is Raven Menwell, and I am from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and welcome to my talk on getting to minimal viable DevOps-ness here at GitLab's Commit Conference. And so here is our agenda. We're going to talk a little bit about myself, where I'm from, some questions to ponder and beginning this journey and getting started. Lessons learned, some DevOps patterns and minimal viable DevOps-ness, which is the name of my talk. And when I was thinking about getting started and getting to an end state for DevOps, minimum viable product is what you would call if you are doing an application. So you go from the requirements, and then you get to that minimum product where you have reached, where a stakeholder can say yes or no, you have achieved it. And that's what I was thinking of when I was considering, when you start your journey, how do you know that you've gotten to the point where you are at some place where you can measure where you've been? And so that is what minimal viable DevOps-ness is. And at the end of this particular journey that I'm speaking with you, you will understand what that means. So a little bit about myself and where I work. The Smithsonian Institution was established with funds from James Smithson, a British scientist, who left his estate to the United States to found at Washington under the name of the Smithsonian Institution and establishment for the increase in diffusion of knowledge, the U.S. Senate passed the Act Organizing the Smithsonian, and it was signed into law by President Polk in August 1846. The Smithsonian is made up of 19 museums, 21 libraries and the National Zoo and a number of national education and research centers, one being the Observatory, Outropical Research Center and the Education Center. So that is us. And if you've not been here to the Smithsonian to see us other than the castle, I would suggest that you do come and visit. And while you were there, you can come to where I work, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is the only National Museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American history, life history and culture. We were opened to our doors on September 24th, 2016 and was established by the Act of Congress in 2003. It took 13 years for that museum to open, and now we have more than 40,000 artifacts and over 100,000 members. And while you're there visiting the rest of the Smithsonian, I would totally, your visit there would not be complete unless you've been to our museum and I just say that because, yes, I work at the best museum ever. Sorry to my peers that are at the other museums and galleries, but this is a really awesome place for you to visit to get a taste of Black American history. And here is me sworn in. On January, 2017, I am the Senior Application Developer and Dev Ops Engineer for the museum. I work in the Digital Media Group. I am the principal programmer responsible for the planning, design and implementation of some of the web-based interactive developed by the museum. I'm also the DevOps team lead. I define the standards and some of the, well, most of the workflows and recommend the appropriate tools that are going to be used by our development teams. I'm also there to help our leadership with the adoption or the adoption of any of our digital products. And I also administer the cloud-based resources that we use in our workflow. I also ensure that our units, our practices, security practices, specifically are according to what we have set up and what our Enterprise IT have set up. So when you're getting started, the first thing you need to know is your pain points. And if you don't know your pain points, then you don't know where to fix them. And DevOps, you have to define what it means to you. It's designed to facilitate and ease that pain of getting started. But you have to understand, does it add value? What does it do for you? What can you do with it? With it, because it's not a panacea for all. It can help with performance, but you have to think about certain things about DevOps and when you're implementing it in your workspace. Does it is there somebody, some group that will that's not working as efficiently as possible? Are there some dependencies, whether it be your workflows, your processes, your groups that are being impacted and the performance is not as high as you want them to be? Are there tools maybe out there in the cosmos that you feel that will facilitate your way of getting done? These questions, if you ponder them, they'll help you with your journey into the world and realm of DevOps. Our unit at the beginning, in the beginning, before we got started, we were on a very strong footing. We had a very strong, we have a very strong, very focused, small, well-practiced teams. We are very cohesive in what we do and we are very well practiced in our agile workflow. We have a prioritized list of features and bugs in our backlog. We use a source code version control system. We have transparency into our issue tracker. We do those scrum, sprints, retroactive, all of those agile things. We're very good at that. And that is what gave us a very strong beginning in our particular journey. So how did we get started? Like, what made us begin? How did we know where to begin? First, we decided to look at things that could address our performance. So that's what we decided we would do, to address performance and see what things we could fix to get us to a place that we could judge and have metrics to see whether they're not, they were fixed. Because you can't judge if you fix something, if you don't know that it's broken and whether or not, when you get there, it's not broken anymore. So we decided to look at our application workflow because we did have several challenges there, and one was dependencies. We were dependent on several teams to get our environments up and running. And that made it so that when we had our onboarding process, it took us two to three weeks to get started from this the time when they were approved to the time that we were actually able to do integration testing. Up until that point, we lived in a very unsustainable environment where we, as developers, were developing on our local dev environment, but we could push them to the repo, but we couldn't get them past the repo because we didn't have a development environment to actually push them to. So our issue was our onboarding. The problem was our dependency, and the results of those dependencies meant that it took us two to three weeks before we could get started. So now that we knew what our issues were, we could actually address it. So documentation and incremental implementation of some fixes were how we started our journey very, very slowly. We took advantage of our cloud-based resources, which we weren't really leveraging before. And because we were able to do that, we were able to just wipe away the dependency, especially when we got started. But of course, like everything, you have to document. If you don't document, then you do a disservice for yourself because you have no archival information to work off of, and you also don't have a way to look back to see what things need to be tweaked. So documentation and incremental implementation are very key in getting in your journey. One thing that, so you're always learning lessons, and one of the lessons learned was that commitment and commitment to change is scary. It's not something that everybody, even though everybody was on board, all the people that were needed said, yes, we wanted to do this, but the focus was on the temporary wins, the easy wins, and even I fell into that trap, that snare. I promised my management that, yes, we could go ahead and meet these deliverables, meet these timelines, have these tools, and they would really enhance our performance, which they did, the automation that we actually implemented. But in the end, we had to stop. We had to pause because I found out that the way we worked, even as a cohesive team, it was too brittle, it was too fragile, because as I added more tools, added more things to our processes, it made the team slower, and then it started impacting performance in a way that did not anticipate it to impact our team. And that was because I put too much emphasis on the tools and workflow than I did on the people and the process. So where we are right now, current state is that we've stopped. We've actually hit pause and we decided that first what we need to do is look at our whole processes and find a way to fix the processes to get us so that we're not as brittle in the way we work. And that is where our end state is. We're headed towards our end state. And one thing that I'm doing is I'm looking at design patterns. One of the design patterns that I'm looking at and what a design pattern is is I've co-opted this phrase from Brad Frost, who has published the atomic design. It's interactive interface design. And what it's meant to do as it states here in the slides, it's a methodology to create interface design systems in a more deliberate and hierarchical manner. And the whole point of it is to look at a business problem and to see how you can solve that business problem by creating user interfaces that are modular and that can be adapted to the different devices. So it's more about how to adapt and how to be flexible in the business environment and your needs and for our My Museum for the African American History and Culture. Since we are not a product development team, we don't develop products for our, for any customer base. We do develop interactives and we do have digital products to meet our visitors. And so what we need is a pattern that will help us to be adaptable and flexible to the needs of our visitors, but also to the needs of the stakeholders who are our curators and our educators. They want to get across a story. And to get the story across, we need to build a digital product. But how do we get that product out there using dev ops, using the agile methodology in a way that's consistent across, no matter what the digital product is, since our digital products, except for with the exception of our main website, which was one of our starting points. That's where we started with our critical app and one of the interactive apps. And we tried to find something that would meet the needs for both of those applications. So the process to keep us from being brittle is to come up with a design pattern. So I've developed a design pattern that is adaptable, that is flexible, that will get our teams up and running using industry best practices, using the buzzwords of tools and technologies, but in a way that's mindful to our needs. And that's what you need to think about. You need to be able to take the dev ops methodology, the pseudo-religion, and make it so that it actually works for your organization, and not that your organization is trying to be adaptable and flexible to some rigid system. And so what we've come up with, our dev ops design patterns, and notice I don't use dev sec ops, because the use dev sec ops indicates that security needs to be pulled out and highlighted as if it's not part of already part of the process. And that is not the case. Security is embedded in everything. So in the dev ops design pattern that we are looking at, that we are documenting for our organization has two main levels, our product delivery and our product development. Those are the key foundations for the pattern. Above the pattern sits these major components, and these components are embedded and included in everything. You'll see that in this image, security, governance and compliance, stakeholder communication, accessibility design, tooling and automation, testing in metrics, administration and operations, and service delivery are all equally, they're all equal and they're all going to be embedded. There are all things that you have to consider when you're looking at this pattern. So why the pattern? What is this pattern supposed to do? What the pattern is supposed to do, it is supposed to give us a lens to look at our digital products. When we have an onboarding of a digital product, what we're going to do is look at each of these segments and determine how much or how little of this segment plays a role, which security is going to always be a major segment because it is. Regardless of whether it sits in our internal host providers, what we're internally in our, I'm losing the word right now, in our data centers or if it sits with a cloud provider because the cloud provider does expect that their tenants are going to have some level of responsibility for security. So you'll never hear me myself say DevSecOps because I think that security along with governance, along with tooling are just, they're all as important and they all need to be embedded. So the design pattern has these knowledge domains and then it has these major components that the knowledge domains actually interlock with. So the minimal viable DevOpness for NAMOC, and I shouldn't say that and I just said that. I didn't need to say that, which is the end goal is that in our onboarding process, we will evaluate each project via this lens of DevOp's design pattern so that we can structure an appropriate DevOp strategy and an efficient way of working to achieve these incremental and continuous efficiencies. And by doing this and by including all of those particular knowledge domains in the pattern, we should be able to document because we will come up with a plan and we will document the plan. And if we follow that plan, we should be able to meet the minimal viable DevOpness for every digital project in a very consistent but continuous incremental manner. And that is all I've got for you for today. Thank you very much for joining me at our Git Lab Commit. And if you have any questions, feel free to put them in the chat and if I am online and I'm here, I will answer them for you. Thank you.


All right, so thank you everyone. My name is Hayford Mansa Ayracwa. So Ayracwa is a surname. That's why it's here I'm with the University of Ghana and more recently with Lund University in Sweden, doing my PhD. I have been working with a unit of the Investicle Institute of Statistical Social and Economic Research, ISSA, which primary goal is to do a lot of social economic related research to influence policy both in Ghana and Africa. I've been privileged to be part of this cash transfer evaluation and so I present to you an aspect of a broader evaluation that we did last year and which we ended this year. And so all right, so as we can see the topic I'm looking at impact of cash transfer house, impact of cash transfers on household consumption expenditures. The Ghana government started this cash transfer program in 2008 as a pilot program and the whole objective was to help extremely poor households. Of course, we have this GLS S5 which is Ghana Livingston S7 which is done over time and the fifth one of course classifies some group of people as extremely poor. So the target of this program is looking at extremely poor, bottom 20% of the extremely poor households. And so to do this at the same time when we're thinking about this program, the Yale University in collaboration with the University of Ghana, specifically my unit, were considering a panel survey and so we decided to build this into the whole program to allow for the evaluation process and to be enrolled or to get part of this program, what the condition were to first of all, there were a whole lot of conditions, but the target was to target people who were extremely disadvantaged, for example, people with severe disabilities and have had no working capability, people, children, OVCs, we also had in mind the aged with no productive capacity among several other conditions. The objective for getting these people into the cash transfer program was to help them, you know, in the short run to smoothen their consumption, but of course in the long run we were looking at the opportunity for them building human capital that would enable them to be able to effectively take part in day-to-day activities in the economy. Now, how do we go about this whole thing? I already mentioned that we did this at the same time when Yeo and Issa were trying to do start their panel data and so a pilot started in 2008 and originally we had sampled 700 beneficiaries in some districts across the country and so these districts were kept as our treated community and after the baseline we of course rode out the program for them and at the same time Yeo also took their baseline in the same year and so in 2012 when we have to go back to the same to do our evaluation we had to do a matching of the people in the yield sample that matched our sample in the LEAP communities so that we're able to get a equally a balanced sample to be able to do any useful assessment, impact assessment. Now what happened the interesting thing we found was that you know at the time of follow-up we realized that some of the households that we had airmarked as a control because of their condition of course this is politically also you know in a part of the world in my country your sustainability in office depends on what people are seeing and so sometimes governments want to also roll out things quickly to let people know that we are about do we are making some impact and so some of the control groups had been rolled up onto the LEAP or had been scaled up onto the LEAP so in analysis we try to regroup them just so that we don't buy us our work of course with the panel data of the sort we the literature gives a clear direction of what to do and the DID has featured prominently the difference in difference analysis has featured prominently in analysis of this nature And so that is what we adopted to look at that now This is just some extracts from the results and some summary of the key findings that I want to show to you The consumption of course which is the objective of the program to smooth in consumption So question is is it really helping improve in the consumption and of course if it's improving consumption What are the sort of things that people are consuming is that statue base is that so my point was whether or not We haven't a more balanced meal at the household level than it used to be in the past and so I try to Disaggregate consumption into different components and now you have your serious nuts bread fast and all spices protein fruits staples confectionery beverages restaurant among other things and Pretty interesting. Of course, we see spell with regards to protein a sharp something here, but a test of Mees show that there is no significant difference between the treatment and control group at the baseline So this is at a baseline just to show that the people we are trying to look at of course are much They are comparable in the first place So this basically gives us that assurance that things are okay now when we apply the the model The difference in difference application. We realize that overall The beneficiary households seem to have had a sharp reduction in the expenditure regards to consumption and Was really striking because we're expecting otherwise And I'll tell you soon why this happened We also realized that there was no impact on protein related foods fats and most of the indicators that we thought that once we are getting some Assistance we expect an improvement in some of these indicators rather. We're not finding any significant thing there again for me was striking what is happening and Observed a negative impact on expenditures on cereals beverages and spices So the results really don't look too good from the reset a point of view and of course within poor policy point of view However Something interesting what we tried to find out was whether or not proud to the program Where beneficiary households depending on say own produce? for their consumption or They were relying on remittances from other people for consumption Or after the initiative are they now depending a lot more on purchases Than you know and we live in a the culture setting is such that once everybody knows that you are really poor society or other households tend to have some Some concern for you and would want to extend a helping hand when they need arises but immediately you are mapped and said that you are part of this initiative obviously people step back and So we realized that some of these things were into playing And so we saw that now there was a bit more a switch from own produce which used to be the case at a time of rolling on to the program to consumption that was now dependent on you know purchases Now what we realized to be driving this result as I conclude is that for most of these beneficiary households as I mentioned earlier the Benefits or their remittances were not coming and other people were not helping but unfortunately the Transfers were not coming regularly as they should have come for example in a situation for example in 2011 2012 up to about eight months beneficiary households had not received their Subventions and of course you don't expect them to consume if they cannot get the money to consume and also That's social protection assistance that we're getting from community and family relations had also gone away So again, this is what we so the major recommendation out of this work. I seem to be projecting is that Transfers to beneficiary households should be consistent to smoothing consumption as the program objective wants to do. Thank you


Right so we're going to do something a bit different in this video. We're going to do Q&A but I'm not just going to answer one question, I'm actually going to answer several questions at the same time. So the first question is from Jesseil and he says I've tried to have my first lucid dream and tried to succeed with that but then I feel like when I'm in it I sort of immediately wake up. How can I avoid awakening during lucid dreaming? Well what you can do is you can start to look at prolonging your lucid dream. So for example doing things like rubbing your palms together during the dream. You can look at spinning round. You can look at spinning round on the spot. These are all things that are going to sort of make the dream a bit longer. Next question is are binaural beats effective? Now for those of you who don't know who, a binaural beat is like an audio track which plays a certain frequency in each ear. Different frequencies in each ear and then your brain perceives the difference between the frequencies allowing you to experience frequencies that otherwise you would never have been able to experience. By doing that you put your brainwaves into a certain state and you can get binaural beats packages for example that move your brainwaves into a state that is very susceptible to lucid dreaming. Yes they work, yes they're very effective but not all of them work because there are different levels of quality associated with them. You know for example the companies that are actually set up properly will make good quality beats and obviously they'll cost a bit more but then if you go to YouTube and look for free binaural beats they're not going to be as effective. Next question comes from someone asking about sleep paralysis. Now the thing with sleep paralysis is it does happen for everybody you know every night you experience sleep paralysis or at least sleep paralysis happened but you're only aware of it if you're going to be in a lucid dream or if you're trying to you know stay awake during that process so there's nothing really to worry about just bear in mind that if you're trying to lucid dream, if you're trying to lucid dream sleep paralysis will obviously be effective. Next question from Pervesh is it true that apple juice gives you lucid dreams? Well not directly but it has been sort of spoken about online especially on reddit. It has been reported to have some sort of effect although it's unclear whether that's just because you know maybe the the sugar in it has some sort of effect or something like that. By the way you guys I'm getting a lot of emails which are really long and detailed obviously that's that's really good and it's great that you're showing so much detail but it's obviously a lot harder and it takes a lot longer for me to answer a big massive question um so if you do email me try and like keep the email as concise as possible try and make the question either very obvious at the start or the bottom of the email just so that when I'm scanning through them I can easily pick them out and say okay that's this question and I'll have an answer for it. By the way for those of you who are struggling to do um reality checks I think I mentioned before that there are these little stickers I made let me show you. These little are you dreaming stickers you can just get these by searching online for howtolooted.com sticker and you'll see this. I've got them everywhere the light switches. So what did you think of this new Q&A style? I think it's going to be a bit easier to answer a lot of questions at the same time instead of having you know one video per question because a lot of these questions don't really need an entire video to explain them you know they're usually quite simple.


So the reason I wanted to pursue a master's degree in business was that I was looking for a career change. As someone who came from hardcore engineering and tech, I realized that it would be really powerful to have a more business-minded perspective and that's something that aligns with my career goals as well. So I think the University of Edinburgh Business School's courses and student development programs here particularly suited my career aspirations in transitioning from engineering to business management. Honestly, the University of Edinburgh chose me so I would have done extensive research over the years, you know, comparing different programs specific to the fintech field and what I really loved about the University of Edinburgh was the balance of finance, technology and policy, especially the policy component. That's something that a lot of programs were lacking. So no matter how much I tried to compare another school, look into the area, ultimately it boiled onto the program for me and I ended up right here.


You know how sometimes when you first see a trailer or a poster for a film and you're instantly turned off, that's like, oh my gosh, I don't want to see that. But that's how I felt about Krampus. I'm Brandon Keith Avery and this is just my opinion. Krampus. And he isn't Santa Claus, he is the demonic shadow of Santa Claus and doesn't come to give gifts, but to take away naughty children. Now I'll go ahead and tell you off top guys, I did not like this film for the most part or at all. I did not care about the story. I didn't care about what happened to the characters. And it's mainly because it was just so inconsistent. The thing that turned me off the most was the main character Max. He is just too old to still be believing in Santa Claus. The main family doesn't stand up for themselves and then the in-laws or cousins that come in, they're just a bunch of bullies. I did like the aunt, she was funny and the comedy goes all to her. She's just blatantly honest with everybody and it's funny I did laugh a few times when she was making jokes and being herself. Krampus is supposed to come when kids are acting naughty, but the only child that was not acting naughty is the one getting punished, Max. For one, he still believes in Santa Claus. He wants his family to love each other and put all the differences aside. So if he is so driven on that fact, why is Krampus there in the first place?  But as soon as they put a plan together, they leave it five seconds later and go do random things. Another thing that annoyed the hell out of me is that this old lady grandma in the role that she doesn't speak that much English, but she knows what's going on the whole time but doesn't want to tell anybody. Why didn't you say this before him? But no, the camera just wants to look at her with dead stairs and have her cut away to try to create some mystery, but it doesn't work. It's just silly.    Yes, shoot them. Oh my God, I don't want to shoot them. I don't want to shoot them. Then it gives the thing a 15 second head start to get away. But no, but when the monsters are far away going in the ground in the snow, you can't see them. Then they want to empty the clip, then they want to turn in the Rambo and act like they're all badass. It just, it doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense. Overall guys, I really didn't care for this film. It was only an hour and 38 minutes, but I couldn't wait for it to be over. If I had to rate this film out of one out of 10, I would probably give it a three out of 10. Yes, a three out of 10. And that's not that good if you ask me. But hey, guys, that is just my opinion. What did you think of Krampus? Have you seen it? Do you want to see it? Have I turned you on? Have I turned you off? Do you agree with me or do you disagree with me? Let me know in the comment section below. Let's get this conversation going and keep it flowing. If you liked this video, go ahead and give me the thumbs up. And if you didn't like the video, that's fine. Just leave me a comment down below letting me know why and still give me the thumbs up. And if you're watching this on YouTube, go ahead and subscribe to the YouTube channel to become one of my subscribers and get all the content that I have to buy in the past and in the future. If you would like a written review of this or any of the films I've seen in the past, just head over to the website, it's www.justmyapinion.net. And if you would like to find the official Facebook page you can at facebook.com slash just my opinion. And if you're into social media, which I'm sure you are, you can find me at Instagram and Twitter at justmyapinion84. So guys, that's just my opinion on Krampus. What did you think? Let me know. Leave me a comment down below. Give me that thumbs up. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Head over to the site. Find me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all that good stuff. And share the video. I'm not going to get mad if you share the video. But guys, thank you for tuning in. And before you go, don't forget that my name is Brennan Keith-Avery. And that's just my opinion. Peace.


We seek to build the next generation of change agents and leaders in Latin America and in Africa, and we really believe that you can be one of them. My name is Christopher Mejia, I'm the director of the Graduate Certificate in Logistics and Supply Chain Management, the G.C.L.O. program that we teach here at MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. The main purpose of this program is to look for people who are looking forward to embrace and face the challenges in logistics and supply chain management in Latin America and Africa because we believe that these people can become change agents in those regions to change the reality that we are now living and for the betterment of the humankind. This program is composed of four models. The first model is an online course that we call G.C.X and the idea is to offer you six weeks of content that will build your fundamentals about supply chain management and logistics. The second model is our first residential experience. It's a three-week intensive period where you will receive all the state-of-the-art from our foremost thinkers in supply chain management from the faculty of G.D.L. The third model is the CAPSUM project because actually we need to guarantee that you are able to apply whatever you have received during the new life experience and you will receive the guidance of an MIT faculty member. And the fourth model is our second residential experience that is also composed of three weeks but is developed in January. You will be sharing with people from all over the world, from our scale programs here at MIT. The profile of the students that we look forward to having in the G.C.L.O. program are outstanding students, of course, from graduate programs in their home countries. But they should be enrolled, admitted, or they should have graduated not more than two years ago. And of course, it's important for you to know that we have already graduated 250 people out of this program. And you can be part of the next generation as well. Do you still have questions? You can visit our website or reach out to us directly in our email. Do not hesitate to contact us. We are always successful.  This will be a tremendous experience that will change your life and shape your professional future.