Hello and welcome back to the craft box. My name is friend and today we're on episode 70 of the pirate 101 walkthrough series If you haven't checked out last episode go do that And if you haven't checked out any of the previous episodes go click the link in the description to go to the playlist right down below But today we are doing the labyrinth So yeah, let's let's go in and have some fun.  Thank you Okay, um, so yeah If we go too far and we may never find our way out. What did you expect? It is a maze after all Enchanted to confuse us no doubt Look at that raised platform there. I bet from it. We could see the layout of the whole place. Let's make for it Okay So basically, this is cool place. This is labyrinth It's great. So, yeah, he can probably go this way Oh look our first fight. What a surprise Okay, um, so I'll do this battle I'll probably do every second like I normally do Um, so, yeah, that sounds good. We'll do that. We'll do that. We'll do that. We'll do We'll do that. Sure done. Okay So your last episode we went and found Hork Hillies who was on a telos and now we are Trying to defeat the minotaur So fun fun fun. Yep Agility Times a billion. Yay And we're still here super. It's yas Nice double tap Okay, ha ha ha. Yeah, okay overwatch block. That's unlucky blocks. That's good Overwatch. Okay burst fire. Nice overwatch. Yay. Okay. We're going well Don't go too close to me dodge cheeky Okay This is actually going surprisingly well These two are in perfect position. What is Hork Hillies doing? Okay, um, sweet So, what are we gonna do? We will hit both of these guys. I think, can we? No, we can If we, you know what, we might just do that like that. That sounds fun, right?  I don't know I don't know Sweet So yeah, I can't believe we're on episode 70 already Like Let's say this is really like 5, 10 episodes, but like seriously We're so close to finishing It's not crazy Basically after this we've got to do a couple more episodes in Aquila and then we go for our 5 or 6 episodes stint in Valencia I don't even know how many episodes I plan for Valencia, but like it's not long And it could be shorter, but I'm making kind of short episodes in Valencia Next episode we are defeating the Hydra, I know that And I'm gonna try and solo that, so that's gonna be interesting Yee Overwatch, nice Attack Blup, oh god Calm down, RIP, Lowy That is not good Okay, these guys are actually kind of annoying, they do good damage Blup, okay, that's unlucky Unlucky, Orcules might die, this is not good At least one's down, that's good, that's always good What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do, do, do, do, do? We will do that, we will do that That, and hopefully that will get at least one of them out If not two, but I doubt it One, definitely Hopefully, possibly Hopefully Maybe two, who knows Double tap again, okay Okay That's good, one left, that's cool, Overwatch, kill it No Attack Um, okay Go, Orcules Yay, there we go Okay, so that battle's done, that's good Um, let's go and click these chests Blup, look at that gold Well, let's see if we can get to that platform Okay, let's get some health, because health is great I think we're going with El Toro next, which is good Okay Okie dokie And we're going this way, oh my This is crazy Of course, so We started here and we went this way and now we're here, okay And then we need to go on there, apparently And we'll have to end up down there We'll find out it's a dead end or something, I don't know how it works, I can't remember You're brave coming here, I shall crush you At last, come Minotaur, come dance with Hockulees I am back, just finished off that battle Boop and boop, but done Nessus, son of the Minotaur, you are beaten I have to say, you're not half as mighty as the legends say Pipe down, you lemex, do you want to call the other two and their daddy down on us all at once? Bring them on, I'd prefer an honest fight to all this sneaking and creeping This way, let's get to that platform Okay, let's head on through, continue through this way We're so close to leveling up, like, so so close Okay, so we can skip this battle I know that, I remember that, there's quite a few of those sort of things around here This way, it's actually a maze, this is kind of funny Ah, you must be number two, son, even uglier than your brother Smarter too, let's see how strong you are, monster Okay, let us do this battle Okay, we'll do this Ah, done, bloop Amazing, accuracy, loss, and morgility Sweet, and dodge, perfect Okay, let's do this Their weapons are actually really cool Like, super really cool Okay, that was good to start with, sweet And what can we do, what killies, what are you doing? Overwatch, unlucky Okay, let's do this We'll do that, we'll go over there for that And we'll get you, and we'll get you, done Okay, hopefully this is good That's good, one at half, which is good Okay, oh my, this is actually really good Look at this, nearly at half health here Half health, perfect, unlucky First fire, blue, okay El Toro, go Yay, one down, that's good, Bladestorm, and that's unlucky Oh, well, one down is always good Okay, that's fine Um, cheaty, cheaty cheater Double tap, yes Double tap again, yes Perfect, burst fire, nice Burst fire, nice, there we go Yay, that's always good, dodge Thank you Post, epic hit, nice Okay, and what killies, what are you doing? Vengeance strike And attack, push your mark, yes Okay, sweet That was actually really good Okay, um, and we've got two left So we can probably just see how that goes Done, okay, how does this go? Yay, one down, that's good, Bladestorm Okay, hopefully this guy should go Look, yes, there we go, oh yay With a lot of nice, that's amazing Okie dokie I bit these beasts, twisted by their father's curse Trapped down here for so long, in another life What good might you have done?  That's great, okay Um, what's in here, nothing, that's cool This way, this way Oh hello Who is this, more strangers Are you lost, poor little sheep Don't worry about finding the way out It's too late for that now What are you trying to do? Scare me, me, son of Zeus Come get some Okay, let's do this battle Um, yeah, let's do this one We'll do that, we'll do that, we'll do that, we'll do that Okay done, perfect, sweet Bloop Okay, hopefully this battle can go kind of Quite clear, that would be great Bloop Yay Blah Okie dokie This is very good Okay, and then what are you going to do?  Unlucky You see, the mighty Harkulius can use guile as well as brawl People are safe when they are hit Well done, travelers, and well done, Harkulius Okay Um, yeah, let's go and find the exit Right back through where we came from Except there's a fight in the middle Ha ha ha ha, didn't expect that one, did we? JK, we did because we checked the map And there's an X, and it's not right the way through So that's unlucky Um, okay This way This is the way This is actually a really cool place It's actually a really cool place, I love this I love the leverage so much Um, short lived, but it's great Um, and there's a fight here Oh, oh, you cannot get away You have humbled us And humiliated our father We shall have our vengeance Now rematch of it, I'm ready Okay Um, this is an epic fight Okay, let's do this one on camera because it's epic Um, no other reason just because it's epic So, yeah, defeat just the bosses Okay Oh, that's easy Jesus Christ, who do you think we are? Noobs, probably Okay Agility Agility Bloop Okay Bloop Okay This fight is actually kinda easy, I remember It's pretty easy It's easy as well, so that's cool I think that removes off Yeah, that removes where we can walk Which is fine because we don't usually walk anywhere anyway For removed crit, which one of them does But that would be bad Burst fire, blah blah blah Dodge, cheeky Okay And your bloody shade, you can just stay there That's actually important Okay, that was good Um And we are going to go And do this little thing here It is called this Might as well, yeah, no Do that We'll do that We'll do that Let's do that done Sounds good Blah blah blah blah Bladestorm, blah blah blah Sweet Sweet Blah blah blah blah Double tap, nice And burp, relentless No, that's fine Cool New wood, wouldn't you? And what are you going to do? Who are you attacking? Overwatch, yay You would have taken my pit, wouldn't you? Burst fire, perfect Nearly did Bladestorm Dodge, thank you Rapost Cheers, fam Blah blah blah Okay, and here's nearly did That's good, you might be dead, yep There we go, one down, two to go Oh yeah, that's right, they kind of get angry They become bigger, that's right I forget that They get really angry if you kill one of them Do they heal up? No, they don't Okay They just get angry Okay, what?  I don't even know, boring Um, let's hit on out And I think That is actually the end of that quest, is it? The dungeon quest Yeah, it is, okay It's cool, we could have used our port But you know what, we might as well enjoy the labyrinth Because it's a great place Great maze, absolutely amazing maze It's an amazing maze, yep And this way, sweet Okay So yeah, let us head back out and Talk to Argos Slaying the Hydra is one of my labours Argos, you hold the doors And I'll kill two tasks with one stone It will be perfect Not this time, Son of Zeus I helped through the festus install that chain Only I can hold it And while I'm gone, the doors must be held The many-headed Pyro cannot be defeated Cut down one head and two will win its place How can we beat the beast? The Oracle may know May the immortals guide your steps, friend Argos I shall stay here and help my cousin Hockily's keep the watch Good hunting Okie dokie, so next episode we Will go and slay the Hydra, it seems So yeah, thank you for watching Remember to leave a like and subscribe And if you've already subscribed, press the wee little bell So you know exactly when next episode comes And remember, craft, outside the box


the history and importance of the Austrian theory of the market process. That is the assigned title of my talk this evening. And I believe that this is an appropriate topic as an introduction to a seminar on advanced Austrian economics. The Austrian school is usually dated as beginning in 1871. That's 145 years ago. And the midpoint of that would be in the mid 1940s. And it is somewhat embarrassing for me to recognize that almost all of those last half years was while I was part of the Austrian program, the Austrian economics venture. What I would like to point out this evening is that the history and importance of the Austrian theory of the market process boils down to the history of the second half of the history of the Austrian school. That's what it boils down to. And there is a certain drama in the description of this history because at the beginning of that period, in other words, by the middle of the 1940s, it had generally been understood that Austrian economics was dead, that the Austrian economics school was a closed chapter in the history of economic thought. That picture began to develop during the latter 30s. And by the time I began my studies in 1952 or 1954, the Austrian school was pronounced as dead. You had a chapter on them in the history of economic thought, and that was it. Some were willing to give it a decent burial, and some were not even willing to do that. It was simply dead. Now, the Austrian school is usually, and quite correctly, identified with subjectivism. Subjectivism in economics means that when we are convinced, Austrian economists are convinced that the regularities in economic life, and we do see regularities, these regularities can be understood only by focusing analytical attention on individual actions with full attention to what people have perceived in undertaking those actions. This contrasts with the earlier, the classical view, that saw the root of explanation for economic phenomena, for change of economic causation, as arising from physical constants, from the rate of population growth, from the fertility of ground, from the Lord diminishing returns in physical terms. This is how the classical economists saw, they were powerful thinkers, and they were masterful thinkers, and they saw a great deal. But they failed to recognize that the human decision is that which plays the crucial role in determining economic outcomes. It was the Austrian school before some of the other neoclassical schools that focused attention on the human decision, on the individual decision. It was the individual decision, and the individual decision has to be understood in terms of what the individual sees, what he expects, and so on. It's in terms of these decisions that we have to look for the explanation for economic phenomena. And I will be attempting this evening to develop a link between the Austrian theory of the market process and this notion of subjectivism, as being the central idea in Austrian economics. Let me focus on the decade from around 1937 to around 1948. It's my position, I've developed this many times, that they're developed during that decade as sophisticated Austrian understanding of the market process, which had not been present in the Austrian literature until that time. It had not been present in any economic literature at that time. The key figures in that development were Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. These were responsible for this new understanding. It wasn't a joint effort. The Missessian development of ideas were separate, distinct from the Hayekian. But they together, they constituted a radical novelty in subjectivism and a radical novelty in explaining market processes. It's strange, in a way, that neither Hayek nor Mises quite recognized the novelty of what they were doing and certainly not the drama of what they were engaged in. They thought that they were merely stating carefully what everybody understood till now. And this requires some explanation. Why did they not see what they were innovating? Why did they not see the almost revolutionary character of the explanations that they were giving? Let me start with an oft-quoted statement that Mises published in 1933. 1933, he published it in German. It was translated into English in 1960. But the paragraph that he wrote in 1933 was as follows. Within moderns, he was quoting Oscar Morgenstern in the following terms. Within modern subjectivist economics, notice what he means by there. Modern subjectivist economics will soon see what he means. It has become customary to distinguish several schools. We usually speak of the Austrian, the Anglo-American schools, and the school of Lausanne. Now notice that he's calling all of these the subjectivist economics. He's calling all of these schools the schools of modern subjectivist economics. And within modern subjectivist economics, he was pointing out, there were several schools. People usually talk about several schools. But Morgenstern wrote, Well, what Mises wrote is, Morgenstern's work has said almost all that is necessary about the fact that these three schools of thought differ only in their mode of expressing the same fundamental idea. Mises was then saying in 1933 that the Anglo-American school, the Austrian school, and the school of Lausanne, that's while raising economics, they are all saying the same idea. And that they are divided more by their terminology and by peculiarities of presentation than by the substance of their teachings. I find this a remarkable statement.  He would never have said that his ideas of the Austrian school are basically the same as the Anglo-American school as the school of Lausanne. He would never have said that. In fact, what was projected at that time in Mises' lectures and in his writings and his courses and his seminars, what was projected was the sharp contrast between these newfangled schools that teach wrong things and the truth, the Austrian economics. The Mises in 1933 missed what was going on. He hadn't realized that by 1933, there was no longer a common understanding of a dynamic market process. What Morgenstern and Mises both meant in 1933 was that in the post-1870 development of economics, that was the development of subjectivist economics. There was the Austrian development, there was Walras and there was Jebens in England, okay? So there was all these, were all subjectivist branches of economics, the subjectivist versions of economics. They were all focusing on marginal utility. They were all explaining price in terms of diminishing marginal utility, that's subjectivism. So of course, these subjectivisms, all these different schools of subjectivist thought were basically saying the same thing. They were all explaining market developments as being the consistent consequences and outcomes of decisions based on these subjectivist perceptions of utility, diminishing marginal utility and so on. And yet, as I say, by 1933, this was no longer the case. Mises hadn't seen it. I mean, Mises didn't know what hit him. By the end of the 30s, Mises hadn't realized what had hit him. By 1954, when I came into Mises' seminar, he had realized it. He was reeling at that time by being hit over the head, but he hadn't realized what hit him. By 1933, he hadn't realized that. What had happened was that as a result of, perhaps three developments, doctrinal developments, the gradual acceptance of the Walrasian perspective, general equilibrium, the introduction by Frank Knight of his sophisticated concept of perfect competition, which hadn't existed before. Frank Knight developed that. It was developed in his 1921 risk uncertainty and profit. It became articulated in his subsequent writings. Later on, it entered the textbooks. But until then, it was never in the textbooks. Textbooks talk about competition, not about perfect competition. Perfect competition was introduced as an analytical concept, as a little tool by Frank Knight. And the Marshalian supply-demand diagrammatics tended to focus attention on the intersection point of those two lines, the supply and demand economics. Now, I yield to no one in my recognition of the value of simple supply and demand diagrams. If I had to teach simple economics in one lecture, the supply and demand diagram would be the center of attention. But it nonetheless remains true that as a result of that emphasis on supply-demand intersections, especially on the intersection point, economists gradually came to perceive economics as being the subject that has to determine the intersection point, that economics has to explain the intersection point. Perfect competition exists at the intersection point. While Rayesian general equilibrium occurs when that intersection point is fulfilled in every single market simultaneously. In 1933, Mises haven't realized that. When I came in 1954, he was teaching me, he was teaching the exact opposite. He was teaching that one has to stay away from those heretical approaches. What was it that finally taught Mises and Hayek that the old orthodoxy had crumbled? I would suggest that it was the socialist calculation debate of the mid 1930s. I see many of you have the late professor Don LaVoy's brilliant book, Rivalry and Central Planning. I think if you read that book, you will understand what I'm trying to say here. That it was the socialist calculation debate that finally taught Mises and Hayek what had happened to mainstream economics. They hadn't realized it until then. They had pointed out, this was a brilliant innovation by Mises, that socialist economic planning, central economic planning is impossible. Is impossible. Central economic planning is impossible. Now that was a revolutionary idea. It was an idea which captured professional attention. It triggered a tremendous series of attempts by socialist economists to find a flaw in the Misesian argument. And that resulted in a vigorous debate. And it was that debate, it seems to me, which the mainstream literature considered to have resulted in an outstanding victory for the socialist concept? It was that debate that taught Mises and Hayek that they had to go back to the drawing board and restate the central orthodoxy which had suddenly disappeared from the mainstream. It's a great interest that from the end of World War II, until the 1970s, all the textbooks dealing with comparative economic systems all taught that Mises and Hayek had been decisively refuted during the socialist calculation debate. It was during the 70s, to a large extent, as a result of Professor Lavoie's brilliant work, that the general professional view began to waver. It began to become less solid. And gradually it came to be recognized that the refutations in 1936 by the various socialist writers, Oskar Lange, Abba P. Lerner, were really faulty, were not as solid as had been understood earlier. What was it that had earlier been the common position shared by all the neoclassical schools? What did Morgenstern and Mises mean when they say all the neoclassical subjective schools were saying the same thing? Well, I believe that all these schools had a healthily vague, sometimes vagueness is healthy. They had a healthily vague understanding that the dynamic competition which is always at work in free markets continually inspires market movements, movements in prices and methods of production and in the arrays of products being produced. It continually inspires these movements to tend to identify and to correct wasteful or inefficient uses of resources. If resources were being used in non-optable methods of production, this would generate patterns of costs and prices which would invite entrepreneurs, inviting quotes. Invite entrepreneurs through opportunities for pure profit. It would invite them to bid away resources from less socially valued uses towards more valuable uses. I'm putting it very crudely. There are a lot of sophistication that would have to be added to make this absolutely analytically airtight, but that's basically the healthily vague insight that all the schools shared. The market is a market of dynamic competition, not the perfectly competitive model. It's a process, a competitive process, a dynamic competitive process. The process consisting somebody realizes that you can make money by buying resources cheap and selling output more expensively. What that does is to pull away resources from where they're being used at a low-value use and to transfer them to a higher-valued use. And it's the continual shurning of entrepreneurial discoveries and entrepreneurial profit-making changes that pull and push the market away from wastefulness, away from inefficiency towards, if you will, towards a more efficiently allocated system. It was a vague understanding. There was not too much effort to precisely identify the entrepreneurial role, to identify the role of entrepreneurial competition. But in the general, it was understood. That, unfortunately, by 1933, despite the fact that Mises hadn't recognized it, by 1933, that general vague understanding had gradually come to be quote unquote refined and restated in equilibrium terms. The tools of Marshallian geometry, while raising in general equilibrium and knight's articulation of the conditions for perfect competition, gradually focused economists' attention on the state of affairs in which inefficiencies have somehow been eliminated by being rendered impossible, unthinkable. By the end, by the mid 1940s, it was generally understood that any position outside equilibrium was, in a way, impossible, impossible. If you remember the simple supply-demand analysis, you've got a supply curve, you've got a demand curve, and where's the market price? Well, obviously, at the intersection. That's it. That's it. If sometimes the professor in economics 101 would say supposing the price was above equilibrium, well, there would be an oversupply. Obviously, if there's an oversupply, the price is gonna sink until it reaches the equilibrium. It has to be that way, automatic, spontaneous, immediate. There was no attempt to understand the process by which prices would be forced down. It was simply taken for granted. The price is gonna drop. If there's an oversupply, the price drops. If there's a shortage, the price hikes. Why? How? The truth is that the price dropped in the price hikes as a result of entrepreneurial competition. That was, as I say, in the earlier versions, it was understood in a vague way. Without getting too precise about it, it was generally understood. But in a vague way, by the time of the mid-30s and the early 40s, the profession had become mathematically sophisticated. And the answer to an economic question was seen to consist strictly and solely in the equilibrium conditions relevant to that market. Gradually, as this was happening in the pure analytics, something parallel was happening in so-called welfare economics. It was about this time that welfare economics was developing, and what it was teaching was that in order for an economy to be pronounced to be efficient, it was necessary for the system to be in equilibrium. So that economic optimality was identified with equilibrium. And it was this equilibrium understanding, both of the positive analytics of the market and also of the normative aspects of welfare economics. It was this. It was this that inspired the various refutations of the Mises Hayek demonstration of the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism. That demonstration, what Mises and Hayek showed was that without market prices for resources, there would be no way of estimating the relative importance of resources in different uses. In order to know that the resources being used less optimally in this industry, and it could be used more optimally in that industry, you have to know something about prices. Without market prices, and by definition in the socialist economy, resources have no market prices. They can have all kinds of quote unquote prices, but they're not market prices. Without market prices, the central planners would have no way of understanding the possible misallocations. They would have no way of understanding how allocation could be improved. But if you start out with a mindset of instantaneous equilibration, that markets equilibrate instantaneously, then it doesn't seem strange to postulate that central planners could emulate that instantaneous corrections, those instantaneous corrections. And there were all kinds of demonstrations, how the managers of socialist enterprises would realize that at the current prices there's an oversupply or an excess demand, and they will immediately wire the central authorities to adjust prices, and immediately everything would be okay. It was the uncritical confidence in rapid market corrections that made it possible to imagine that socialist managers would be able to rapidly signal to central planners when prices were too high or too low. My contention is that it is exposure to these kinds of arguments that gradually enabled Mises and Hayek to grasp how differently these critics understood the workings of markets, how differently they understood it from the way in which the earlier commonly shared near classical understandings of the markets operated. And this led them to restate more carefully, more precisely, more articulately what really happens in markets, what really happens under competitive conditions. And it was that that constituted, in my reading of the history, it constituted a dramatic deepening of the subjectivism of the Austrian school and a dramatic series of advances in the substance of Austrian economic theory. Hayek wrote a remarkable series of papers between 1937 and 1945. He wrote a remarkable series of papers. These have been reprinted in his Individualism and Economic Order. And in these papers, he pointed out the role of knowledge and the discovery of knowledge in competitive markets. He was able to point out that equilibrium is the state of perfect knowledge. So that what mainstream economists were saying, were working with, was a world of perfect knowledge. I don't know what world you grew up in. I grew up in a world without perfect knowledge. And to explain markets as expressing perfect knowledge leaves a lot to be desired. Hayek was able to show how, unlike in the textbook models of perfect competition, genuine dynamic competition is the manner in which market knowledge is arrived at and is disseminated. It is not the state of initial perfect knowledge, which what perfect competition is, one of the conditions of perfect competition is complete knowledge about everybody, what everybody else is doing. Dynamic competition, as Hayek pointed out, represents the discovery of knowledge that had hitherto not been recognized. Where the equilibrium model simply assumed perfect knowledge, in when you draw some Marshalian supply and demand curve, you say it's opposing the prices above equilibrium. What are you saying? Everybody knows that that's the price. Everybody knows the price. You start out by saying everybody knows the price. You have to recognize that in markets, people very often do not know what the price is. In fact, there is no such thing as the price. There are prices, and these prices may be all over them all over the lot. There is a process of reaching a single price, which may of course be above equilibrium, may be above the intersection point. But Hayek pointed out that it is during the equilibrating movements of the market under dynamic competition that the mistakes that were being made, those mistakes generate a learning process which teaches market participants where the mistakes had been made and inspires them to correct them. So Hayek focused on knowledge. Mises did not focus on knowledge. He's not explicitly not directly. He focused on entrepreneurship, on human action. He replaced rabbincy and economizing. You see, Robbins, Lionel Robbins, great British economist, wrote a book in 1932, The Nature's Significance of Economic Science. Economics, economic science, in which he developed the idea that economics deals with the implications of the circumstance that individuals economize. That is, that they allocate resources, scarce resources, among competing multiple ends. Robbins wrote that book under Austrian influence. But he articulated that Austrian influence in a manner which served the equilibrium theories of the mainstream economists of the 1930s. The mainstream textbooks traced back directly to Robbins of 1932. Mises chose, and he was explicit on this, to replace the emphasis on economizing, on efficient allocation, on constrained maximization, to replace that concept by the broader, more profound concept of human action. He even shows that as the title of his book. Each market participant is seen as an entrepreneur, meaning an individual who is alert to opportunities that are around the corner. They are being offered in the market around the corner. Why did, why are these opportunities being offered? Well, they're being offered because people made mistakes. People have made mistakes because knowledge is imperfect. It's the discovery of these mistakes that constitutes the entrepreneurial process. The process of dynamic competition then consists of the entrepreneurial steps taken by competing entrants into the market. I myself have argued that every such entrepreneurial step must be seen as competitive. Every competitive step must be seen as entrepreneurial. So Mises and Hayek enriched the account of the steps taken during the market process. I don't believe they saw themselves as innovating. I believe they merely thought they were elaborating on an earlier, widely accepted neoclassical understanding of markets. But I have maintained that what they were doing in these years, Hayek in his series of papers between 1937 and 1945, Mises in his national economy of 1940, which developed into the human action of 1948. In the same decade, they were both articulating the same insistence that the market is an entrepreneurial process, a process of dynamic competition. I don't believe they quite realized that in presenting all this, they were in fact deepening and extending the scope of Austrian economics. To illustrate what I mean by attributing to Mises the entrepreneurial theory of human action. What does the decision mean? Standard economics based on decision, microeconomics, Rebenzian economics, based on the decision. That's subjectivist, right? Subjectivist, decisions, that's subjectivist. But for a Rebenzian, for a Walrasian, for a mainstream neoclassicist in its 20th century meaning of the term, to decide is to compute the solution to a mathematical problem. I often put it this way. Supposing there's a room with a sign outside, decision making room. You want to make a decision? Knock on the door, open the window. What would you like to do? I'd like to make a decision.  Just present us with your objective function. Objective presents us with your list of resources. We'll do the calculation. You can have a cup of coffee and we'll tell you what you decided. That's the decision making room. Because that's all that's what it is. It's a calculation based on decisions. Now, I don't know how many of you have made a decision whether or not to get married, but that's not the way you make a decision. That's not the way you make a decision. That's not the way you make a decision whether or not to get married. That's not the way you make a decision whether or not to go to law school. It's not the way you make a decision when you decide whether or not to buy a dining room set. Well, whatever decision you're making is not made on the basis of a mathematical calculation. It's made primarily on your estimation of what's going to be in the future, what you will need, what she will look like in 10 years' time. What the dining room set will look like in 10 years' time? That's how you make a decision. That's not a mathematical calculation. They can't help you in that room. They can have super-duper computers. They can calculate solve equations one, two, three. But your decision consists in identifying the parameters of the equation that need to be solved. That's the Missessian recognition of what decision-making means. Decision-making is subjectivist, not merely in the sense that you are making the calculation. It's subjectivist that you are determining what the parameters are of that which has to be calculated. You have to make decisions as to what the future is going to be. If you decide whether or not to go to medical school to become a heart specialist, you've got to make an assessment of the future trends of smoking. You've got to make an assessment of the future role of medications having to do with heart surgery. For mainstream economics, the market outcome consists of a pattern of interlocking, economizing decisions, each correctly aware of the other relevant decisions. In other words, you've got a whole series of these decision-making rooms. And somehow or other, they're all in touch with each other. And the market somehow arranges that all of these decisions should fit. So if you want to become a heart specialist, there's a medical school that's willing to take you. And so on. Whereas the truth is that decisions are made in ways which do not fully take into account the decisions that are simultaneously been made by others. And that's exactly what you discover in the real world. You discover that you decided to buy a dining room set and it's too expensive for you. That's what happens in markets. You discover that people are making decisions which don't fit the decisions that other people are making. You learn. You discover that some people have been over-optimistic. Some people have been insufficiently optimistic. For Mises and Hayek, a market outcome is the set of open-ended entrepreneurial decisions, each taking advantage of the opportunities believed to have been discovered in these decisions. For mainstream economics, the market functions as a computer, determining the solution to the set of simultaneous Waldrazian equations. That's how they perceive the market. For Mises and Hayek, the market functions as a discovery procedure. That phrase is a phrase of a paper by Hayek. Discovery procedure. The market functions as a discovery procedure. It discovers the parameters of the relevant equations. Notice that when we talk about discovery in Austrian economics, we are not talking about the economics of search, which in mainstream economics has become a fairly prominent branch of analysis. In the economics of search, it is recognized, and we're happy to see that it has been recognized, that knowledge is imperfect. OK, if knowledge is imperfect, what do you do? You buy some knowledge.  How much knowledge do you buy? Well, as much knowledge as it's worth buying. You know in advance how much knowledge is worth buying. And you know in advance what it costs to get the knowledge, what the knowledge will enable you to achieve, and you make a decision as to how much knowledge to produce, how much knowledge to buy, and so on. In other words, you know what it is you don't know. Not that you know the information, but you know the value of the information. You know how to get the information. That's economics of search, which is a very, very valuable piece of analysis. But it has nothing to do with discovery. Discovery refers to discovering something that you didn't know you didn't know, which is the world in which we live. We live in the world in which we are continually encountering discoveries. Gee, I never knew this. I never even knew that I didn't know it. Now you know. That's the discovery. And the market is a discovery procedure. Nothing to do with economics of search. I repeat, I'm not denigrating economics of search. But economics of search is like the economics of production. You can have the economics of production as if you know exactly what needs to be produced. You know exactly what the inputs are. You know exactly how much they cost. You know exactly how much the output is worth. And you can make a maximizing decision based on that. In the case of search, you can decide optimally how much to search. But that's not the same thing as discovery. The market process is the discovery procedure. It is a procedure by which people are continually made aware of that which they didn't know. They didn't know, they didn't know it. That's what discovery is about. Hayek wrote this paper called the meaning of competition. He wrote that paper in the early 40s, mid 40s I guess. And when I began studying under Mises, he sent me to read that paper. I'm emphasizing that he sent me to read it to emphasize that people very often exaggerate the differences between Mises and Hayek. Mises thoroughly appreciated the emphasis of Hayek on knowledge. He thoroughly appreciated that. That was not his own emphasis. But he appreciated Hayek's emphasis on knowledge. He sent me to read the meaning of competition. When competition is understood in this dynamic sense, then one's attitude to public policy measures aimed at promoting and enhancing the advantages of competition change dramatically. For the competitive process, it's not important how many competitors there are in a market. The, for decades, public policy regarding competition has involved counting the number of competitors. That's not important. The number of competitors is not important. The competitive process depends on one condition only, freedom of entry. If people are free to enter, they are invited in to enter if they discover profit opportunities, which means they are discovering errors on the part of other market participants. When you discover error, you enter, and that's competition. The potential for pure profit opportunity to be noticed and acted upon, that's the important element in the dynamic competition upon which the market depends. The secret of the Mises Hayek understanding of the market process, I think, can be best set forth by juxtaposing two statements. A statement which I remember hearing from Hayek in the early 60s, and a statement that's printed, was published by Mises a few years before that. Hayek referred to what he called the fundamental law enunciated by economic theory, the law of the single price. But when he said, when he enunciated that law, he right away added, of course, there's only a tendency towards a single price. There is no guarantee of a single price ever. But there was always a tendency towards a single price. What is that tendency? What is responsible for that tendency? Competition. If there is more than one price for a single item, there is profit to be made by buying where the price is low and selling where the price is high. That invites discovery. That's the competitive process leading towards a single price. There is a competitive process that is leading towards a single price. Will the single price ever be really achieved? Of course not. Because long before that price is achieved, parameters will have changed, and there will be a whole new set of competitive steps to be taken. That is the first statement, that the fundamental law of economics is the law of the single price. Now let me juxtapose that with a statement by Mises. I remember when I first saw that this statement, it opened my eyes. He made this following statement. He's giving us a theory of pure profit. Pure profit. Pure entrepreneurial profit. What does that mean? What causes pure entrepreneurial profit? What is it? Mises wrote as follows, what makes profit emerge is the fact that the entrepreneur who judges the future prices of the products more correctly than other people do buys some or all of the factors of production at prices which, seen from the point of view of the future state of the market, are too low. This difference is entrepreneurial profit. In other words, what drives entrepreneurial profit is the absence of a single price. So that Mises was saying, what drives the market is what Hayek was pointing to. There is a tendency for a uniform price to emerge. There is a tendency for zero profit to emerge. How does zero profit emerge by the fact that profit opportunities attract attention? That is the secret of the market. And that is the shared secret of Mises and Hayek. It's a focus on the market process. It's a process of entrepreneurial discovery. It turns out then that the entrepreneurial drive for pure profit, which drives the most complicated and complex market systems, is the very tendency responsible for the simplest, most fundamental law of economics, as Hayek defined it, the tendency towards a single price. This is a remarkable insight when you put together the statement that I heard from Hayek and the statement that's published by Mises, you begin to understand the market process. During the resurgence of interest in the Austrian school, which has occurred over the past few decades, I believe that the insights of Mises and Hayek that we've been describing here this evening, insights into the economics of the market process under open-ended free entry competition, I believe that these insights have played a central role in the development of Austrian economics over the past 40 years or so. So that when we come to return to the title of this talk, the history and importance of the Austrian theory of the market process, I believe that we can see that the importance of this Austrian theory consists not only in the illumination it provides, for example, for competition policy, for the critique of socialist planning, for the critique of interventionist economic policy, not only for all that, but also in the role that this theory has played in generating the fascinating intellectual development in contemporary economic thought. That is the resurgence of Austrian economics, which is you. Thank you very much.


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Right, so I lead the data visualization team at Twitter. We build tools to help the company explore, analyze, and visualize all our large data sets, which mostly contain people saying that they are eating sandwiches, stuff like that. But there's some interesting stuff happening there, too. Part of my job is to design and develop data visualizations that run in the web. To do this, we've used several of the different web graphics APIs that we all have available. So today, I'm going to give you a brief overview of these technologies. I'm going to show you a couple of examples that we developed on Twitter. And then, based on those examples, I'm going to give you some basic guidelines on when to use or avoid these technologies. So I figured that the best way to start my talk about web graphics API was to use them. So I'm just drawing a set of circles using four different technologies. In the top left, I'm just using HTML and CSS. In the top right, I'm using SVG, which stands for Scalable Vector Graphics, and it's a vector image format that has support for interactions and animation, and it's widely supported by modern web browsers. In the bottom left, I'm using Canvas, which is an element introduced with HTML5 that can allow for scriptable rendering of 2D shapes and bitmap images, and in the bottom right, I'm using WebGL, which is a JavaScript API for rendering 2D and 3D visualizations. Now, these technologies are very complex, and I'm not going to explain them in depth, but I'm just going to show some concepts that I believe are important in order to explain the examples that I'm going to show you. Now, to us, these circles all look the same, but the web browsers, they look quite different. I'm going to use a tool called Tilt for Firefox that let anyone visualize any website, and here you can see the first difference in these technologies, and it's the mode in which we are rendering the circles that we're drawing. So the ones in the top, both HTML and SVG, use a more called retain mode in which you're basically saying, I'm half a circle, I'm going to put it there, and then that circle has some properties and some attributes that you can retrieve and change later. The ones in the bottom, they look like an image right now. It's like you're just stamping a circle there and just forgetting about it. So for the ones in the top, both HTML and SVG, I like to compare them to these shape puzzles that we use as kids, in which you have shapes that you can touch, you can move around, they have some color, they have some properties, and theoretically you could change their shape by destroying them or painting them or something like that. So on the other hand, in media drawing, which is the one that Canvas and WebGL use, I like to compare them to a physical Canvas where JavaScript is your brush and you're just drawing around, and it's up to you to keep references to what you are drawing in order to change it later. Now, these metaphors are not perfect, especially because unlike the physical space in Canvas, in SVG, you can redraw really fast, like in milliseconds. So this allows you to do some effects that are not possible to do with a physical Canvas. Now, I have a very simple example of a graphic in the web using both SVG and Canvas, and this is how you draw a basic circle using SVG. You just open an SVG tag, it's an XML-based language, and then inside, you say, I have a circle here, I'm going to put it in these coordinates, both CX and CY, and I want the circle to have these radios, which is R, and then I want to fill it with this color, which is the property style where you can just put CSS rules. Now, if you're building interactive visualizations, you're probably not going to be coding SVG directly. You're probably going to be using JavaScript, so you can add elements dynamically, remove them, move them around, or so on. On top of that, you're probably using a library. In my case, I like to use these three, which is relatively new, but very well known library to manipulate documents. And what's happening here is basically the same thing. It's just some more programmatic way. We're just creating an SVG object, and we're appending a circle to it. And know that we have a variable core circle here, where we are storing the reference to the object that we create. And then we can just apply properties to the circle. So for example, here I'm just saying I want this circle to have the radius of 10 pixels instead of 100. And I want that to happen in five seconds. You'll see how the circle just shrinks. So now I'm going to draw the same circle using canvas. And I'm not going to go through the code, but it's a bit different. In canvas, you just get the context outside the canvas. And you perform operations in the context. You don't say I have a circle here, I'm going to put it in the canvas.  But that doesn't mean that you cannot get this circle unanimated. You could very rapidly redraw the canvas, store your radius of the properties of the circle yourself, and then do the same effect that I show you with the SVG example. So you have to recap here. Retain mobile, SVG, and HTML. You have objects with some properties that you can retrieve and change later. In canvas, it's up to you. You draw and forget. Or as a developer, you can make objects of whatever you're drawing, and then later on revisit them, and if you want to change them. So now I'm going to move to show you some real-life examples of data visualizations in the web that we've done on Twitter. We're going to start by showing you an interactive visualization that we published last fall before the 2012 US election. And for this visualization, what we did was taking all the tweets of the candidates were posting before the elections during the campaign, and we tried to see if there was something interesting going on with these tweets. One way to look at it was to get all the responses to the tweets, especially the positive responses, which in our case were favorites and retweets, which are mostly people saying, I agree with this or I want to share this. So they probably agree with what the candidate was saying, and we divide them by different states, by all the 50 states, and we also tag the tweets with different topics. I'm going to show you the visualization, and you can actually access this right now. It's on elections.twitter.com slash map. I'm going to explain what's happening a little bit. Left and right, we have the tweets on the candidates represented by bar charts. The size is the total engagement, which is measured by using favorites and retweets, and also normalized by the Twitter population in the different states. And in the center, you have the tweet that you're looking at, and you can do search, for example, you can search for some interesting tweets, like tweets from Romney about coal, which get a lot of engagement in states like Kentucky and West Virginia where coal production is very high. You could search for Pell Grant where there are tweets that have very unusual engagement in a cluster of southeastern states. By the way, in the map, what we are coloring is the amount of engagement that the tweet received in that particular state. So you can click the map, you can click the tweets, like I show you, you can click the maps, and when you click the maps, we have a summary chart in the bottom that represents the topics on tweets which the users on a particular state engage the most. So if you click on Texas or California, that topic would be immigration. If you click on New York, it's abortion. Washington state is gay rights, and Nevada is taxes. So there are very different properties on the tweets based on the response by users from different states or U.S. Now, we'll open tilt again just to show how the visualization was done, and I'm only going to split the map. The map, because the bar charts are very simple, it's just HTML, the element size by the width on the CSS. But for the map, as we wanted something highly interactive, we're using SVG here, and we were able to draw all the 50 states, and the main reason we use SVG is for the interactivity that it provides. You can click in a particular state, and you can also attach data to the objects. In this case, I'm highlighting the object representing California, and in the ID parameter, we have the tooler ID for the country, for the state, and that let us do things like, whenever I click on a tweet and I need to call our state, you know, in some way, we can query the state directly and say, I want California to have this shade of blue. And it also helps us to do event handling, so whenever you also click on the state, you can update the visualization based on the particular state that you clicked on. And one last thing is that you don't see it here, but below or behind the SVG map, we have a static image that we generated for all the tweets, and this was to support browsers that have no support for SVG. So we have an image that represents the distribution of engagement for that particular tweet, even though you cannot click on the image, you see something, you don't see an error message or an empty screen. So for this visualization, we have a low number of elements. I have a couple of attributes here that I like to use whenever we start to do a visualization on the web, by the way. And the elements are complex, especially the shapes of the states, where the majority of them is an interactive visualization. You can click on the map, you can click on the different tweets, and you can search, and that will update the UI. There's no animation going on. We had to support i7 and 8, because a lot of our users did use i7 and 8, and it doesn't have support for SVG, so that's why we added the static image. So they saw something, and we used D3. There's a lot of examples on how draw interactive maps using D3, so that was very helpful. And for this example, again, we use SVG and HTML. Very easy to do interactions to draw complex shapes, like the shapes of countries or states in this case. And we got a lot for free for the interactivity of the visualization. Like I showed you event handling, you can attach data to the elements and so on. So the second example is a visualization of the flow of tweets that we did after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011. Whenever something happens, even if it's a very small earthquake on LA, people tweet about it a lot, and you can see these massive spikes going on, and that's already something normal. But with Japan, not only the spike was just unprecedented, it was huge. But also, we got reports of users telling us that after the earthquake, they came to Twitter to share news and to let friends know that they were okay because the normal channels of communication were not working very well. So we wanted to try to see at this, and this was more, the visualization was a complement to a larger story that we share on our story's website, and I have a video for it here that I want to show you. It has sound, but the sound doesn't matter that much. So the quality is not that good, but here what you're looking at is white line representing tweets that Japanese users sent that are mentioning users from different parts of the world, and the blue line represent the other way around. Users from all over the world mentioning users from Japan. And that's before the earthquake, and this is after that text where the earthquake happened. So there's some massive amount of tweets flowing in and out of Japan. And then there's a second visualization that shouldn't be blended here. You're just, at the end, you're just gonna see a mess. But there were actually two different visualizations. But I wanted to explain a little bit what the second was, which is the yellow and green lines. Yellow lines are tweets that were sent from Japan and people from all different parts of the world were retweeting them. So if I am in California and I retweet a tweet from Japan about the earthquake, then I have a yellow line going from Japan to California. And then when you retweet a tweet, you're propagating it to your network. So in my case, there's probably a lot of people from Puerto Rico, from Latin America, and from different parts of the world reading it. And that's what the green line represents. So in basic terms, this visualization is basically circles moving in. So circles moving from A to B in some path. And that's the way we started to develop this visualization. We used SVG, we got a lot of circles and we started moving them around. The first problem was that after the circle gets to its destination, you have no way to know that something happened from A to B. So we moved to instead of just drawing one circle, just draw one circle, move in the path, draw another circle, move in the path. And doing this, you know that there's something happening from A to B. And after it happens, you know that it happened, it's still there. When we tried to do this with SVG, the animation was like three seconds. And then it was just like a resource hog on the web browser. And the main reason is that all of these circles are objects. And by the way, in this case, SVG is on the left. The canvas version is on the right. And here I'm just drawing ten lines, very short lines. The visualization, we were drawing thousands. So there's probably, there were probably gonna be millions of circles being drawn on the screen. And with canvas, again, we're just drawing and forgetting about the circle. So we're just saying I want this pixel to be in this color. And in this case, this was very helpful for us because we didn't care about the circles that we created them. We didn't care if you clicked on them. We were not gonna remove them. We were not gonna change its color. So for us, it was just drawing and forget. And this was a very good case on why to use canvas. Instead of SVG. And I have to mention, though, that the visualization wasn't as smooth as the video show. Even with canvas, we had to fast forward it. Because it was a bit slow. There was a lot of data moving in. And again, in this case, we had a visualization with a very large number of elements. They were just circles, not complex at all. There was no interaction. We were just drawing and moving on. And it was an animation. That was what basically is an animation that we used to complement a blog post and a story that we share in our stories website. We didn't care about browser support. We just used it internally. We have an internal showcase of visualization. So we just advise employees to use modern browsers anyway. And we use processing JS. It allows us to do animations very simply on canvas. And with this, canvas was very helpful. We were drawing a lot of elements. We had animations. But we didn't care about interaction. We didn't care about other things that we care on the first example, like attaching data to every element and so on. So the third and last example that we did on Twitter was a visualization of tweets about Neil Armstrong after he passed away last August. So again, as with the earthquake, when important things happen, we can see them on Twitter. We can see how people start talking about them. And this case was special because there were a lot of people sharing quotes and images and stories about Neil Armstrong. And we wanted to somehow get all these tweets and do some kind of tribute that wasn't a tribute by Twitter but by Twitter users. So the first thing we did was to grab all the tweets. And that's where the first problem showed up. We had 1.4 million tweets about Neil Armstrong the day he died. And there was a problem because we needed to do something fast. And we didn't know if we wanted to aggregate this or summarize the data by country or by keywords or so on. So Nicolas Belmont from the data visualization team on Twitter had this idea of using WebGL. I just tried to render all the tweets. Even though we probably didn't have enough resolution to show all 1.4 million tweets, he just wanted to see what happened when he put the tweets there and tried to visualize them. So he used WebGL. It takes a little bit to load. And the whole idea was to take every tweet that wasn't and just represent it with kind of like a light of a candle in earth. And you can see how the earth is just moving around. And the main idea was to see to get the earth zooming out while the tweets were going on until you get to the point where you can see the surface of the moon. So it was a nice, thank Nicolas who did this, not me. But anyway, it was a nice, I mean, it's not insightful as any map where you're drawing things that mostly focus in the metropolitan areas. There are just maps of things happening. But in this case, we thought it was special because those points represent someone saying something about Niel Armstrong. So even though I show you this as an animation, this is actually an interactive visualization. You can zoom in the map, you can move it around, and you can even change the stage of the animation. So in this case, I can show you daylight when it's like eight or nine on the east coast and so on. And this is all happening while we're loading a million tweets. And again, we're not rendering all the million tweets, because we probably don't have enough resolution. But the data set is the raw number of tweets that we have for that day. And in this visualization, we're not only visualizing the tweets, but there's a lot of information, you know, the air, the sphere of the air with the terrain and the water, and the whole sense of space with the moon on the background. And for this case, I think the only way to go was to use WebGL, especially because of the 3D component of the visualization. So moving on on this large number of elements, the complexity of the elements is high, because even the points that we're using to represent the tweets, they are not just circles. They're circles with a halo. So they gave the effect of being like a light or a candle. And it's an interactive visualization, even though we share it as a video, again, as part of a larger story. And it was interactive with animation. Browser supporters don't even think about it if you don't have WebGL. And in this case, one of the problems that I personally have with WebGL is that it's very hard to get something simple done. And for this, there are a couple of libraries. There's 3GS. And there's 5GS, which was done by Nicolas for this visualization, by the way. And they help you to have simple shaders that you don't have to write and other common things that you don't have to do yourself, which is very good. So again, WebGL was really good for very large number of elements, three-dimensional visualization and even visualization with interaction. I showed you three tables with some attributes on the visualizations, even though I had mentioned most of those points. Because I think those questions are probably the place you should start if you are developing a data visualization for the web and you have a specific use case and you probably have your data already. So first ask yourself how many elements the visualization have. Do you have a visualization with like 50 or 100 elements like the elections map visualization? Or do you need to draw thousands of potentially millions of elements in the screen? How complex are these elements? Sometimes you just need to draw circles or even if something looks complex, but you're basically drawing circles or lines or text. In other cases, you need to draw complex shapes like when you're drawing maps, for example. Do you need interaction? And as I showed you in the first example, SVG is a really good way of if you don't have millions of elements to have interaction in your visualization in an easy way because you can attach data to the elements. You can handle events and so on. Will you have animations or transformations? Like I showed you on the Japan earthquake example, we tried to use SVG where we were appending circles all the time in an animation that was tried to run in a couple of frames per second. And it's very hard. If you have a lot of elements and you need to query them later, it's very hard. Using Canvas, on the other hand, you just have a set of pixels and you're just drawing on them and it's easier. Do you need to support legacy web browsers? As I showed you in the beginning, this is an important question because if you have to, you need to think about your strategy for falling back. In our case, it was just an image. In some cases, that worked. In some cases, if you have an animation, then you probably want to show a video. You probably want to show an animated gif or so on, which, believe it or not, has worked for us, at this internally. And I think this most important question is are there related open source resources that you can use to build your visualization in the web? And I'm actually going to answer this. The answer is going to be yes. Whatever you're trying to do, you're not going to have to start from scratch. There are libraries. There are frameworks. There are a lot of example code. And there are a lot of resources online, stack overflows, answers, Google groups, threads, with a lot of information and insight. So instead of starting from scratch, you'll start by doing some search. And I'm trying to get some examples that can guide you whenever you are building a data visualization in the web. So I want to show you a last example. This example wasn't done by Twitter, but used Twitter data. It was actually done by Santiago, who's going to be speaking here tomorrow. This really nice, beautiful example is a nicely done graph of conversations between Twitter employees. And I chose this example because it has elements or characteristics of some of the samples that I show you. And it has characteristics of many of them. It doesn't have characteristics of the canvas or of the SVG one. So for example, you have elements with interactivity. And the elements have data on them. So you can hover on the different elements and see, trying to find myself, but I cannot find myself now. Anyway, no, anyway. But you can move it around whenever you hover on an element, not only you get data about the node, but you get the edges color of, the edges represent the conversation between employees, by the way. And it's very smooth. You can even click on something, and it will move the animation around, which is very nice. And again, there's a large number of elements on the screen. There's at least 1,000 nodes and at least 10,000 edges. But on the other hand, there's a lot of interaction going on. And this visualization was actually done in Canvas. Which shows that even though, yeah, I mentioned some of the guidelines that if you want interactivity, the SVG is a very good way to get that. That doesn't mean that you cannot do it in Canvas. Actually, this is probably a good example of Canvas, because you have a lot of elements, and you need to query all of them whenever you hover on them, whenever you click on them. So the animation is very smooth. And I showed you that example to give you my last point on this presentation. And that point is that at the beginning, when you start working on data visualization in the web, it's good to follow these guidelines to start from the basics, to learn how things work under the hood, to learn libraries, to use them, and so on. But then you're going to get to a point in which you're probably going to get used or very comfortable with one of these technologies or a couple of them. And at that point, you're going to see yourself just not using these guidelines at all. And that's perfectly fine. I think the most important part of building data visualization in the web, and not just in the web, but data visualization in general, is just to be creative, and not let frameworks, standards, or some guidelines, just limit whatever you're building. Just have fun and be creative. Actually, it has, yeah. That's it. Finally, I just open-sourced this talk. You can go to my GitHub profile. It's on my areas. And just see the code examples. They are there. If I got something wrong, or you think something can be better, just open an issue. Or better yet, if you think there's something you can contribute to it, just submit a pull request. I'd be happy to have it be useful not only for you, but for anyone who wants to start working on data visualization in the web. Great. So I have. Thanks. You have time for questions? Yeah. All right. So there's an exploration phase. And I think the first step is to usually go to our data centers and get the data, in this case, from our analytics data store, which is where we dump all the production data. So I don't go to the Twitter. For example, if I want to work with tweets, I don't go to the production databases and try to run a query there. We have a whole system that dump all this data into Hadoop, in our case, or Vertica. And then we can just go and query them there. So I think the first step is just to get some aggregations from Hadoop using PIG, using Scaldin, or any other map-reduced abstraction. And just reduce the data enough that we can load it in something like R. And then in R, we just explore and see what's interesting. For the elections example, we had a lot of parameters about users. And we tried to look at different ones. We look at mobile clients versus desktop clients, for example. And the ones that looked interesting was when we tried to do, we did a tile or a grid of maps with color by state, like the same ones I showed you, but where you had one tweet or all the tweets, and yes, all the tweets in a grid showing the map. And then we saw, and at that point, we looked at it and said, this looks completely different. There's some tweets that have higher engagement in different places. There's some topics that are predominant in some states and not in others. And then after that, we moved to the data as aggregator already. And we kind of cleaned it up a little bit. And we just get just the right amount of data to load in the browsers. Sometimes we have some extra parameters and so on. We just get rid of them. And then in the browser, we just started iterating on the visualization. So it goes from Hadoop to something that fits in memory to the minimal amount of data that we can use to show the visualization in the web browser. Sorry, the question is how, yeah, what the frameworks do we use to visualize the data before we made the final version? So yeah, we visualize it in R. We look at it in R, mostly because it's very flexible. You have just five lines of code and you get a grid of like 100 visualizations that you can look at really quickly and then identify the layers or change the parameters that you want to call a buyer or so on. Or sometimes we use something like Tableau, for example, where you can just drag and drop fields and change filters and things like that. With these ones, none, which is sad. And the elections might work in mobile, but I don't think it's very useful. The map is more you want to click in a state that is more you're probably clicking in a different state, or tapping in a different state. But yeah, it's a very interesting topic and you have less pixels and not just double less space in which you can interact with. So yeah, in these examples, we didn't even think about mobile at all. Top. Yeah, that's a hard question. It's hard for me because before I started working at Twitter, I was in that position, too. I did a lot of data visualization based on Twitter and I had to remember one spring break where I had my laptop just running the streaming API and getting every tweet that I could for like a week. So I can get 100,000 tweets or so to visualize. And I don't know. What we usually advise, and this is usually for students, not for everyone, obviously, is students usually just come and do an internship, spend like two, three months. And whenever they come to the company, they have access to the data sets and they usually have some research that is based on Twitter data and they can just expand it there by using the entire data set and by using all the signals that we didn't share. And there's a couple reasons. I think the main one is right now it's on privacy. And it's not, I mean, tweets are public anyway. But there's a lot of problems when you just get a big dump of data and you throw it out there. So people start getting analytics that may be misguided about the business, for example. If your particular dump of data has tweets per day declining 10% every day and your sample wasn't evenly distributed by day, then you probably are concluding that Twitter is going down or something like that. And that's not good. All the things, as I mentioned, in privacy, people delete tweets. So if we release officially a dump of data with a lot of tweets and then someone want to delete those tweets, how do we go to each person or researcher and say, hey, you need to delete these tweets from your dump? So it's very hard. Yeah. Yeah, no, I agree. And it's something that is not in my hands, sadly. But there are tools that, for example, I know Node Excel, that is an Excel plugin that you can get Twitter data out of it. But again, it's constrained by the API too. So I don't have much. I have full answer for that. No. I mean, at least in my example. This is where we spend like 5% of our time. And when we usually release something publicly, it's something that we do real quick that we can use for different purpose. Like the elections map, for example, we released like a week before the elections. And we built it in like a week or so. So now even in the product, we're getting more about accessibility, trying to make the clients more accessible. I think if we try to release something publicly, like a data visualization publicly in the future, it's something we're probably going to be thinking of. All right, thank you.


We are here to look at the rail seats, the fantastic yellow wall, and to just see how the atmosphere is different in Germany, and to see what we can learn going forward, and how do the team at the very very top, the team's atmosphere is renowned. I would say throughout Bioro how what they do different than we do in England. I hope you'll really, really get to training in England. The yellow wall, or where the yellow wall is. I am in the rail seating part. For anybody who doesn't know or hasn't seen rail seating, this is it. This is the mechanism. The seats here, this is what the seats are. They're bolted up for league games, for Bundesliga games. And fans can stand here. And supporters can stand in front. Here at Borussia Dortmund, they have a one to two ratio. One seat to two standing places. For when Tottenham arrive here on the 5th of March, the Champions League games, these seats have to be down. And therefore this is your block. This is your seat where you will sit. These barriers in front remain at all times. So in standing area, you can't go anywhere because literally there's two people wide. And that's it. So you're not going to get a sway forward because there's only two of you here. And this is how the rail seating is set up.  That can't happen now with rail seating because of the design of them. For Everton, if they were to do a one to 1.5 ratio, it would work out. If two of us were stood here, then one person would stand in between our shoulders here. So two heads and me. I just wanted to show you this bit because this is the old fashion terrace. This would never ever be brought back in a ring whenever the way this is. So don't look at this and think of it. Don't want to say standard. What happens with this is the Champions League games, these here, these bolts, they bring in a row of seats and they clip the seats onto those bolts for the Champions League game because standing isn't allowed at the Champions League games. All of these here, the barriers have all taken out before every game. They're all moved out and the rows are seats are put in and that's how this converts back into an all-seater stadium because you simply do not allow the standard. The biggest thing that influences the atmosphere in these German grounds is the orchestration by the ulcers of people who were stood close together and getting the ground early and the reason they come is to support their team. I think it's not only important that you stand, it's also important that you can stand close to your neighbour, that you feel more of the atmosphere, there's no atmosphere when you have a meter space through another one. If you go there with the intention of having a party, you have a good day out whether the game is a good game or a bad game. So that's the biggest difference and I just think fans ought to be able to have the choice. Those that want to stand up and have a party, let them stand up and have a party, those that want to sit down and watch every move intricately and analyse all the tactics, let them do that on the halfway line in the grandstand. If you stand in with your friends, with your guys, can have a bratwurst, a beer, you can sing songs, so that makes the atmosphere, that makes the atmosphere and it can automatically out of the people. An incredible experience, it was being on the yellow wall but you don't want to have just one, three, two, it's by a lever case and the game had everything, the atmosphere had everything but the main thing is is that even when they went behind the fans never stopped singing, when they conceded a second wall of fans never stopped singing, in fact the fans never stopped singing, it's absolutely incredible. The atmosphere unbelievable for two hours before, all the way through the game, just one, three, two, the three points clear at the top for unbelievable for a game or an experience. Listen, just even just from the rail seating that we're here to where it was right now, you're not giving a seat, so you've got to come in and get your spec and it means you've got to get here early, you want to experience the yellow wall, you've got to be in your spec, they'll just down the front get everyone going but you know what, it's not like every single person sings, the core group at the bottom gets singing and the atmosphere just wiggles backwards and then it wiggles all round the ground, there's no reason why other clubs can't view the similar thing, the stand-ins wanting but it's the culture and that's what we've got to get and evident but also in the Premier League, the culture of fans coming, spend the money on food and drink and everything else and doing it for the flat on the pitch, that's the most important thing because you've seen it here tonight, I guarantee that I don't want to have got beat these people here would still have left with a sense of identity and happiness and that's all you can say, if you're going to be in on it, all on it for your football club, then do it all the time, not just when you're winning but when you're not winning because that's what it's most important, isn't it? It's amazing, the back end you've received, it's amazing, isn't it? It's on the leave-a-cues and fans, it's no matter what the score was, they're still singing so. Have you seen them at the start, they had flares out, they got flares out almost as in to say you're going to do that, we've only got a small section but this is what we're going to do and I thoroughly enjoyed it and I think there's so many lessons to be laid from Everton and its fans moving forward so let's do it!


HBCU Dutchess Radio welcome back to our presidential series conversations with distinguished presidents and chancellors from historically black colleges and universities. Today our distinguished guest is a friend of the show Edward Waters College president Dr. A. Zachary Faizon with big personal news today an extension a contract extension those that's always a happy day in our sector when you consider the alternative somebody getting kicked out so we you know we love somebody somebody hanging around for a bit so you are on paper in Jacksonville till 2023 and this announcement comes as you are welcoming back students to the campus for the fall semester first can you give us just your thoughts on the extension you know the time that you're having there and what is it like to get this kind of really really good news when you are you know not to not to be you know pessimistic or anything but you're in a really tight spot in terms of hey we're bringing these these students back and we're excited about a new semester but we're in the middle of a pandemic and we want to see how it's going yeah well first year thanks for for letting me let me come on and share good news about Edward Waters College but certainly just I mean very excited about the board's confidence in our work and our leadership and again we were we actually were on paper to 2023 an extension now carries through July 2025 so two more years a real vote of confidence from our board and our board leadership and you know again it's been it's been exciting and and I think for us it's a it's a a trying time right now of course in the middle of the pandemic for all of us and so you know I think that it I certainly don't want to speak for our board but but I can speak for myself and that I wanted to ensure our board that I was here for the long haul and that I was going to see us through whatever challenges that may come and I was just pleased that the board felt that that we had demonstrated enough in our prior two years here at the institution for them to have that kind of vote of confidence in our leadership as we're going forward so let's talk about that um EWC you know obviously the flagship of Jacksonville the oldest in the state of Florida but there are some things that you have done that have really really not only stood out Edward Waters from you know the private HBCU sector but in some ways the sector at large because you know you've had opportunities to get state funding for right for capital projects you've got investments from state legislature which is historic and unprecedented for you guys uh you're continuing to get you know support from the city of Jacksonville um that's correct you know you're giving is up enrollment is going on up you've enhanced research how do you what what is the system that you have to have in place now obviously people can walk and chew gum at the same time but it right rare when you see growth in a lot of different directions at one time it's at least from the outside signals there's a lot of buying down there would you agree with that yeah and what do you think the secret sauce is for getting that accomplished well i think you hit the nail in the head i mean it's all about collective buy-in from the top down and i will say it really starts similarly with the relationship and the synergy between the board and and the president and i'm blessed to have that kind of synergy to have that kind of leadership um from our board our board has really empowered me um and been a partner with me in this administration to really move the institution forward and so i would say i really cite that as probably the most uh imperative and critical thing uh that that that that is really really propelled the work that we've been doing forward i mean you mentioned some of the things that um we've been able to accomplish um from you know the the historic about 3.5 million uh dollars in recurring funding um that we're going to be receiving from the state of florida i will tell you um that certainly my board was engaged and involved in helping us to advocate and lobby towards that again it it has to be a symbiotic partnership between the board um and and the institutional administrative leadership and again i've just been blessed to have that kind of synergy here at ewc one of the things that really stands out um and this is important given where we are and the financial implications of being in a global pandemic you guys and your team helped to knock down uh a cash deficit um and end it with a surplus for the last the close of the last fiscal year now yeah i i will yeah for folks who don't for late people who don't understand what that is what what does that mean and how do you do it if you can disclose it i'm gonna put it in i'm gonna put it in in in in terms that i folks can understand if rob and peter the paypal okay we're literally you you're ending each of your uh fiscal years with accounts payable from the prior year and you've got to use uh the tuition and revenues from your incoming year to pay off your account payables from prior years so you never catch up right and so you know that was that was something that you know we really had been suffering under the yoke uh for over a decade um and and i will say that it was probably one of my first and and probably i think my most prodigious challenge was i say we the institution can't persist this way we've got to we can't we literally are not gonna make it if we don't we don't do something very differently so we were fortunate um the institution has been had been of course making a number of efforts over the years um in trying to court uh different financial institutions um looking at how they could cut costs looking at how they could raise revenues um and certainly a lot of a lot of effort went into that we were we were blessed to be able to establish a partnership with the reinvestment fund um which are out of out of atlanta they also have uh matter of fact i think they have a headquarters up in baltimore um in your neck of the world um and they've done some prior work with fifth they've done some prior work with talladega um and they came down and sat with me sat with our leadership team sat members of our board and and and and fortunately they bought into of our vision um of course they wanted to see our data they wanted to see our financials and essentially what they did was they partnered with us um i think it was actually a a a a significant factor in their partnering with us was was our place in the community um ewc sits in a in northwest jacksonville it's a urban community like most of our our historic private hdc youth often sit in the heart of the african-american community a community that often now has been neglected um and i think that the fact that we are an anchor for that community as matter of fact i know um and have a an economic impact or 50 million dollars in that community certainly was instrumental in in the re-investment fund partnering with us to to to to do a refinancing deal when again so many financial institutions wouldn't touch us but but they believed in in our vision they believed in where we were going and and we had some positive indications in terms of enrollment um in terms of our retention in terms of our graduation rates and just what the vision was and they could see that we were taking demonstrable steps uh towards making that vision a reality so um you know we were able to to do a refinancing deal with them uh that actually yielded us enough upfront cash to refinance to pay out all of our accounts payable and generate a a a seven figure uh net cash a surplus for the institution so um and and like you mentioned i mean it couldn't have come at a better time with with with kind of you know not knowing how ominous you know the future may be given that we're in the middle of a pandemic so it couldn't have happened at a better time for ewc now let's talk about that that the the covid-19 element here because even though this is a scary scary time for almost every hbcu it is also it been a positive time in the sense that young people have expressed more uh interest in attending black colleges they're they're applying more they're getting deposits absolutely and they're coming has that has that been the case in in Jacksonville at ewc and what are some of the numbers looking like for you we are absolutely seeing that i mean i've been sharing with everyone we are cautiously optimistic i mean some of the numbers that we're seeing in terms of interest so i'll give an example we've got over 5300 applications for ewc and our enrollments right around 900 students so 5300 applications for us is significant that's about a 54 increase in overall applications our deposits are up i've gotten nearly at last check about 400 deposits in terms of new students that you know freshmen uh transfers um new students that's up about 52 percent for us now we're right literally right in the middle today of welcoming back our returning students and our this week our new students are are coming in as well so you know we're we're we're cautiously optimistic of course i will share with you you know until i see the wife of their eyes you know i can't i can't make any any any any bold declarations but absolutely we have seen a tremendous tremendous tremendous uptick in terms of interest and deposits and so we're hopeful that that will bode well for us uh over the coming weeks how do you and your team navigate the reality that this is a virus that disproportionately impacts and negatively impacts black folks and you're in a state that is i guess the nation the nation's hot spot and when you consider yourself because you're you're a georgia boy so you you know you you're from a state that's a hot spot you're working in a state that's a hot spot when you look out over your campus you look out over your city you look out over your hometown how do you navigate and say how do we what optimism do you draw to say this is going to be okay yeah i will say that that it has been not without great consternation i mean it this is it was probably the most difficult decision that that i've had to make as president was to decide you know what's the pathway forward for us in the middle of this pandemic and of course we we decided to um resume on campus operations will be operating with a hybrid hyphelix and virtual instructional environment um and and and and we're still navigating it um of course we have you know developed uh pretty comprehensive about a 35 40 page uh uh covid 19 resumption of campus operations manual uh which you know some of the highlights are you know for example this year we're doing only single occupancy in all of our residence halls um so we've got students that are in hotels because again in this environment you know you know dorm rooms are relatively small anyway which we use with fact two or three even up to three in a room you can't do that in this environment um so we've done single occupancy in all of our residence halls and ppe kits mask for everyone physical distancing in all of our classrooms we're encouraging as many students as possible uh to to attend virtually um even even even if they come back to campus you know let's let's you know stay in our rooms and and and utilize our learning management system uh to to to get the instruction uh virtually so i mean it's it is certainly um not something that i think any of us have all figured out but i think we're navigating it as very best we can um wanting to have always ensure the safety uh of our students and our faculty and staff and our entire community is certainly the priority uh but balancing that also with with the needs of our students you know and i one of the things that i've shared with a lot of people is that hbcu's are not a monolith you know you can't say it because institution a made this is well all hbc's will know my demographic is different you know i'll share this real quickly when we moved online back in the spring there were some institutions that shut everything down and sent everywhere everyone home and and they were lauded for that and why right they should have been for for that campus well for my campus if i did that i have about 300 students that literally have nowhere to go so so shutting my campus down literally means that i would have had homeless students right right and so you know again you know so that's the reason why i say we shouldn't you know make these kind of broad you know judgments every campus is different you know every every every situation is different and so i think that we just have to really trust the leadership and that the leadership you know has the ear and the sense and the pulse of their campus community and that they're going to make the best decision as possible thinking about the faculty staff and students that that that that they serve what are some of the goals not because you've accomplished a great deal in a short period how do you set new goals for the campus and and what are those conversations like with the board and the alumni of the students yeah how do you how do you fashion what you know next looks like well let me say this we are in no way a finished product i mean i'm certainly we're proud of of of the things that we've been able to accomplish but we have a a long way to go and and the good thing is that again i think we're well on our way to being able to do the things that our board wants that our entire academic community wants so you know kind of you know probably from the horizon probably is is really the fact that we were able to achieve the additional state funding is going to really propel us forward in terms of being able to begin to add some of our new academic programs um so our academic leadership teams a matter of fact is writing right now uh prospectus is in proposals to send into SAC COC for three new academic programs one is in computer and information science the other one is social work um in other words in forensic science we're also looking at nursing um and the last one is that we are going to be submitting um the uh attended information uh for us to be able to bring on the first graduate degree program at dwc um and so all this is going to happen within the next six to twelve months i'm pushing everyone really hard um to be able to do that so we're going to be you know transitioning not going wood you know obviously there's a process with sacks and them getting uh our prospectus and approving it and coming to campus and and all of those attended factors but uh we're going to be shifting dwc to dwc prayerfully been an x12 to 18 month um that was part of that we're doing some things yeah yeah that's part of the announcement absolutely um that first graduate degree program we're looking at at a master's degree in business administration and we're it's going to be online we're going to we really also want to begin to own on the online space in a much more robust way we think that that's an opportunity for a space for dwc um to really be able to to extend its wings and and showcase its brand um you know we're you know again building upon the fact that sacks has approved uh our first ever fully online degree program which is a bachelor's degree in business and organizational management um and we also earn the approval to offer all of our academic degree programs fully online so we are really going to be very very intentional uh about moving forward um in that space and then the final question i'll ask man and this is on a personal tip so it's you're one of the the few presidents um that is super active on social media and what i think distinguishes you is that you're showing um in a lot of ways the way to keep work-life balance uh you're still taking your wife out on dates yeah you and i have something similar we both hopped on a peloton bike during a during a moment during a pandemic you gotta do it so how do you how do you work so hard and push so hard but manage to to keep time for family for for self uh to be able to recharge for that hard work that that that is ahead when you come back into the office i'll tell you i think that for me at least initially it really was a challenge believe it or not i i you know i i had put on weight but on 30 or 40 pounds i've gotten that off of me you know because these jobs are they're difficult they weigh on you especially if you're doing them the right way you know uh so um you know but i think it's important for uh our students our faculty and staff to see that that that you do have work-life balance that you you know you go hard in the paint for ewc but that you do have a family you do have a wife you do have kids you do have you know other things outside of that i think that that makes you more palatable makes you more human makes you more touchable um particularly for students um and so you know it's just kind of part of my leadership ethos it's who i am and and i think that you know any leader you have to be authentically used um it's you know especially students they know the real from the faith so you know you have to be authentically you and and really um you know work to keep that balance because if you if you if you don't next thing you know you'll you'll find yourself getting out of balance and then that that impacts the quality of your work so it's something that that's important but i think it's something that you know i know at least for me i continue to try to refine and and and strike that right balance as best i can