have probably heard of the phenomenon of tonal languages. Languages where you need to say things with just the right tone, otherwise you'll end up saying something completely different. The most famous tonal language is Chinese, but this category also includes plenty of other languages, especially in Southeast Asia and Africa. In these languages, controlling the pitch of your voice while you're saying something is just as important as getting the consonants and vowels right. For instance, in Chinese, ma means horse, while ma means mother. Compare that to English, where horse, horse, horse, horse, all of these just mean horse. So there you go. If a language uses pitch, it's tonal, and if it doesn't, it's not. Super simple. Until you start to think about it for even like a couple minutes, at which point everything breaks. Because here's the thing, tone might not change the meaning of this particular word, but we do use tone to communicate meaning. In fact, I can think of at least three different ways to communicate different things in English using tone. Firstly, you can use pitch to emphasize certain words. He didn't steal the money, he didn't steal the money, and he didn't steal the money. These three senses communicate completely different ideas, and the only difference between them is the tone I set them in. Secondly, you can use tone to signify questions. Compare you stole the book to you stole the book. The first might not technically be a question, but at the very least, it does make it sound like I'm expecting an answer, whereas the second one doesn't. Lastly, it seems like defenses in tone is the main way we figure out which syllable the stress of a word falls on, and we use stress to distinguish between different words. Permit is a noun, while permit is a verb, and you can actually experimentally show that the main way we tell the difference is by looking at which syllable has the higher pitch. Situations like these are rare in English, but there are more, like incline versus incline, or intern versus in turn. If you're anything like me, you might easily look at all of this and get the impression that English is actually a tonal language, or at least that this whole thing is a lot more complicated than people generally let on. Well, I'm here to tell you that it's the second one, but people don't usually like to go into the details because it gets really confusing and difficult to talk about really quickly. So, on that note, let's dive in! Buckle up, everyone, because we are about to get technical. Let's start by defining some terms, because I've been using the word tone kinda sloppily this whole video. On a piano, which key you press determines the pitch of a sound, while how hard you push it controls the volume. Pitch is basically the frequency of the sound wave while volume is the amplitude. Now, you might notice you can play a note on a piano and then play the same note at the same volume on a violin, but they'll still sound different. This is because of timbre, which for our purposes is basically the texture of the sound. Pause the screen now if you want to get into the physics of it, but for the rest of you, we can just move on. Now, almost all of the time in language, it's the timbre of the sound that's communicating the information, which is why you can take an audio recording and raise the pitch or make it louder or quieter, and most of the time it'll mean exactly the same thing as it did before. But as we noted earlier, with these three things, pitch also sometimes communicates information. So if your definition of a tonal language is just a language that incorporates pitch somehow, then yes, English would be a tonal language, along with probably every language ever. But usually when linguists say that a language is tonal, they mean that it uses pitch to communicate lexical information. All that means is that pitch is used to distinguish one word from another. Pink and fluffy might mean something different from pink and fluffy, but those differences are post-lexical, above the level of the word. The pitch changes things like which word is more important and whether the phrase as a whole is a question or not. It doesn't change what words there are or what order they're in, which lets us deal with these two, but there's still a case to be made that English is tonal because of accent. What I mean by accent is that within a word, some syllables feel more prominent or important than others. In permit, the accent is on the first syllable, while in permit, it's on the second one. It looks a lot like the main way we tell which syllable has the accent is the fact that the accented syllable has a higher pitch, so English uses pitch to distinguish between words, so that must make it tonal. However, there are two huge differences between what English does and what true tonal languages do. The first is that pitch isn't always the main way we tell where the accent is in a word. Thing is, in English, when a word is the focus of a whole sentence, we usually give the accented syllable of that word higher pitch, and when we say permit and permit, all on their own like that, we're kind of saying them as if they're making up a whole sentence all on their own, so of course they're going to have the focus, so of course we're going to make the accented syllable higher pitched. But listen to the way I say them in context when they don't have the sentence's focus. I didn't permit that. I didn't give them the permit. And if we cut those words out of the surrounding recording and play them back, permit, permit, suddenly it doesn't sound like pitch is the main thing we're using to tell them apart. In this context, you can show that it's actually the relative length of the two syllables, or which of them you spent more time pronouncing, that's doing most of the work of getting across which syllable has the accent. That length difference is there whether or not the word is the focus of the sentence, which makes it seem like it's actually the main signifier of stress and not pitch. The second reason English accent doesn't count as tone is that English accent is syntigmatic rather than paradigmatic.  All right, let me try to explain. If English really had tones, then it would be natural to ask, okay, how many tones does it have? And the answer would seem to be two, one for when a syllable is accented and one for when it's unaccented. But that would imply that a two-syllable word could have one of four different tone patterns, one where the first one's accented, one where the second one's accented, one where both are and one where neither are. But that's not allowed. Each word needs to have exactly one accented syllable, no more, no less. Permit and permit are both valid words, but permit and permit aren't. This makes it look like English accent isn't really an innate quality of the syllable, but rather which syllable is accented is a property of the word. If the accentedness of each syllable varied independently, then we could call English accent paradigmatic, but the fact that they can't and that each word has exactly one accent means that it's syntigmatic. With this in mind, we can say that a tonal language is a language that makes paradigmatic, lexical distinctions based primarily on pitch. And English pretty clearly fails that definition. In fact, there are cases of languages that are even closer to being tonal, but still don't meet this bar. Japanese has a syntigmatic accent like English, but unlike English, this accent is primarily distinguished using pitch. Languages like these are called pitch accent languages, because, well, they mark accents with pitch. So I hope that clears up why English isn't tonal, but for me at least, all this kind of raises more questions than it answers. Like, if English uses pitch to communicate post-lexical information, like which word is most important or whether the sentence is a question, then can tonal languages not do that? Like, if Chinese is already using pitch so much to distinguish between different words, it sounds like they wouldn't be able to use pitch to emphasize words or mark questions like English speakers do. But that's not actually true. It works differently than in English, but Chinese uses pitch to communicate both lexical and post-lexical information. One way that linguists used to think about this was basically in terms of adding functions. You start with a function for the overall pitch of the whole sentence, which communicates post-lexical information, and then you get another function that describes the tone of each word, and then you just add the two functions together to get the way pitch will vary over the course of a sentence. This is called the overlay model, because you're sort of overlaying different things that affect pitch. And it's pretty similar to the way a lot of people subjectively experience how pitch works in tonal languages. I think it's also a good way to introduce someone to the idea that in tonal languages, you can use pitch both to distinguish between words and to communicate all the stuff the rest of us use it for. Only problem is, it's kind of wrong. Thing is, if you actually use the overlay model to make predictions about how the pitch of someone's voice will change over the course of a sentence, and then you go out and test it, the results aren't great. It took linguists a long time to figure that out, in large part, because it hasn't been very long since the equipment necessary to measure this kind of thing objectively was invented. But once it was invented, it wasn't long before there were a lot of tech companies who wanted to make computers that could communicate with humans with normal spoken language. And these tech companies suddenly got extremely interested in getting this kind of thing right. So all of a sudden, there was both the means and the pressure to do some actual science to this area of linguistics. And the main result of that was the auto-segmental metrical theory. Whereas the overlay model makes it sound like the speech centers of our brains are generating two or more functions than adding them together to produce the pitch we want to make, the AN theory says that it's much more useful to think of a chunk of speech as containing a linear string of tonal events. Each language will have a limited number of possible tone events, rules for how tone events are actually realized on the pitch of someone's voice, and rules for which tone events happen when, depending on what words we're saying, the syntactic structure that they're in, and whatever post-flexical information we want to communicate. These rules might be very complicated, and they're going to be different in different languages, but this basic model has proven to be very useful for modeling how different languages deal with pitch differently. For instance, with Mandarin Chinese, some words in a sentence will be more important than others, and a lot of the time this is marked by an exaggeration of the tone it would have otherwise. Low tones get lower and high tones get higher. This can be described within the AM framework reasonably easily. You can just say that the string of tone events is different depending on what lexical tones there are, and also depending on which word has the focus, and that when the tone events mark a word as having the focus, it winds up getting realized as an exaggerated form of the normal tone. I'm not entirely sure how one would explain this with an overlay model. There's a lot more I could get into. Each language has its own unique system for combining lexical and post-lexical information to create variations in pitch and volume and timing, but I hope now the idea of tonal languages at least makes a bit more sense to you. See you soon for more linguistics videos!


Line from Orlando, Florida, extracting a signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Pentaho World 2015. Now your host, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. Welcome back to Orlando. This is theCUBE. This is our first year at Pentaho World 2015. This is the second Pentaho World Pentaho. Of course, it was just acquired by Hitachi. Company does a, well, you know what Hitachi does, Pentaho builds a platform for blending data and operationalizing analytics. Mike Weis is here. He's with NASDAQ, a Pentaho user. Michael, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So you keynoted last year. Yep. So we'll talk about that a little bit, kind of what's changed. But before we do, what's your role at NASDAQ? I am a senior manager overseeing the team that is in charge of the data warehouse and NASDAQ billing systems. We do more bacheloretic stuff and we're going to be looking to do some streaming stuff in the near future.  I mean, they used to, not just NASDAQ, but others. The industry would chase chips until we come up with a new chip. Oh, great, grab that. Ingesting data. The data was exploding. Trying to shove it all through the thin pipe into a box and manage it. Very challenging environment. How has that changed? I think the emergence of AWS has really helped solve the challenge, at least for us. It makes it easier to manage provision, scale up, scale down and really use what we need and not anymore, not any less. We're big in the red shifts. We have cut costs to be used in red shifts significantly from storing it internally. And we're actually looking to do even further cost reductions by moving to our new NASDAQ data platform, which is going to be built on top of S3, EMR and Presto to maintain longer data history. The biggest thing we have right now is we have a lot of SQL servers running around NASDAQ that have data from 2000, 2001, all these previous years and we haven't empowered the analysts to easily take that data and then look at it and see historical trends and things like that and that's where we're trying to focus at now. Okay, so what's changed in your conversations? You gave a keynote last year. Maybe you could touch on some of those themes, but what's changed in the past 12 months? So last year when we keynoteed, we discussed how that you can do complex analytics with a relatively small team. Even though NASDAQ is a pretty big company, we are maintaining all that data with a team of six developers and we have four dedicated business analysts constantly looking at that data. Last year it was half those numbers. So even with the theme of last year's keynote was that you can do a lot of good things with big data with relatively few people. The biggest changes that we have more people looking at it we're now empowering more data scientists like people at NASDAQ, our Economic Research Department and those folks to really start diving into other interesting facets of data that we haven't yet touched. So you could do big things with a small team, but you got to have the right team, right? I mean, this stuff is pretty complicated for a lot of companies. So NASDAQ maybe is a unique case. What are you seeing in the marketplace? Is sort of Hadoop big data analytics, is it simplifying enough for the average bear to be able to consume it?  I think it is becoming simpler. I think if you look at it over the past 12 months of what has come in the Hadoop ecosystem, the Prestos, the Sparks and those of the world, I think they are going to end up revolutionizing space because it's going to make it really easy to leverage the Hadoop ecosystem. And they're all relatively new and I just see that growing and making things a lot easier. I don't think it's going to take very specialized skill sets in the near future to really do it. They're going to empower a lot of other users. And then they have tools like Pentaho who are also now building it in that space. And with their PDI tool, they're enabling your everyday ETL developers to now leverage some of that ecosystem as well without having to be that knowledgeable. This is like the holy grail of big data, putting insights, analytics in the hands of users. And to the extent that that occurs, that's a game changer. But so I want to make it back up. Talk about your infrastructure and the applications that you're supporting. And then I want to get into sort of where Pentaho fits and what the data pipeline looks like. Okay. So we currently have an in-house workflow engine that is constantly just pulling data all day from our various markets. Edge systems, as we refer to them, like reference data, membership data, for security data, all that other data that enriches our data. We're constantly pulling that data in S3 all day. And then at night, we dump it into Redshift. Once we do that dump of the Redshift, that's where we start leveraging PDI to then clean that data, combine it, and spit it back out into a more usable fashion for our analysts to really get into it and look into it. And it's at a high level kind of the ecosystem now. As I mentioned earlier, we're looking to move to more streaming, more real-time stuff in the next 12 months as well. The Kafka's, the sparks, the storms of the world. And I think that's going to be the next revolutionary step in our process. And what about Kinesis? Does that fit into your plans at all? It's a possibility. We're going to have to take a look at the gamut, right? You don't want to make a decision without looking at all the options. And I think that's critical. So I mean the trade-off there is it's all integrated into Amazon versus some of the other momentum that you're seeing in the industry. So that's a TBD. Yep, so we are very early in that process and we haven't ruled anything out in that terms of technology. I'm curious if we just step up one level. You talked about this sort of batch-oriented billing pipeline. What would you be able to do if you were on a really low-latency pipeline and you're using streaming analytics or just streaming data to feed the pipeline? Yeah, so a couple different things. Surveillance is a big one. Entriday Surveillance right now, a T-plus-one surveillance shop. So if we had more of a streaming, more low-latency system, we can do Entriday Surveillance and notice patterns, detect patterns earlier in the market and prevent fraud and people from doing bad things, right? Economic research and sales can also see trading behavior of our member firms and make determinations of like maybe they have to reach out to a firm and see what's going on. Maybe there's a pattern of a firm trading one stock versus another that we want to take advantage of and look at. So I think the lower latency, the Entriday stuff and those are the real use cases we're going to have for them. Is that just to be clear, when you talk about economic research and sales, in other words, if you see a firm that's made that would not be recommended by your economic, your macro work, you would then go to the, you would sort of go to the client and say, hey, you know, base models we think you should be doing something different. Right, so, and this is all going to be in terms of based on pricing and tiering how we charge firms, but if we notice a firm's trading in a certain type of liquidity, Entriday, we can recommend them change their trading behavior to meet certain thresholds to get better pricing, right? So our sales people can reach out and say, hey, you know, you're great, you're adding this type, you're adding this type of liquidity to the market, but if you do a little X amount more today, you can get to the next threshold, you can get these added bonuses. And if we had that capability Entriday, I think it would be a good insight for sales and drive more flow to the market to be quite honest. So, did you see the FINRA keynote this morning? I did. Okay, is it a similar situation where you're ingesting all these different data types? You bring it in, you blend it with Pentaho, and then you're using S3 as sort of an infinite data store, and then I guess the difference is you're pushing it to red at night. Talk about the process of operationalizing that and getting into the hands of users. Sure, it's been a little bit of an experience to get it to the end of the users. Users don't always know what they want, so you kind of have to lead them a little bit. So the way we operationalize and the way we work is we do a very iterative approach to how we design data. So we'll get some set of initial requirements from our BAs, work with them, design the initial process, and then let them play with the model and go back and forth in that manner. Obviously, there's also making sure the whole environment's up and running, and so we have an operations team that's constantly monitoring 24-7, making sure the system's up, data's always available. We're meeting all our SLAs. Yeah, so we've got teams watching that system 24-7 to make sure it doesn't go down and everything's up and running for a BAs to get in there and do their work. So what about that secret sauce of embedding that analytics into the operational procedures so that a business user can actually take advantage, because traditionally we were talking about the BI, EDW world, you get these insights and two or three people would have them when they became a bottleneck, and or they didn't have the context, and or it was too late.  How does that all work? Well, I think NASDAQ has always had a culture of being on top of data. We're a very data-driven business in general. If you don't know your market, you're not going to succeed in the exchange world. So we've always been more data-driven and I think that's really helped drive where we're at now, because to your point, having those one or two people or three people be very specialized and be able to access the data is a bottleneck. By taking this and making it more general, cleansing the data and exposing it in an easier manner to be queried, where someone doesn't necessarily have to know SQL to go in and really get information out of it, you're now empowering other level of users. You're more of your executives, you're higher up BAs, the people who may not be down in the early details. And I think Pentaho has really helped speed up that process and allowed a new set of users who've always wanted that data, but had to wait for that other person to generate the aggregates and send it to them. This now lets them get in there and do it for themselves. How much of this is the reporting for systems of record versus operationalizing something that's going to affect the business? I mean, you touched on this with surveillance pattern recognition and the economic research and sales. Sort of where are you in terms of rolling out traditional reporting versus prescriptive reporting? Traditional reporting, we are rolled out all over. I mean, traditional reporting was the first thing we actually accomplished when we did the initial move to the red shift in Pentaho, mainly because that stuff was already in place, so we couldn't just turn it off and not have any type of reporting. So we had to replace that, make it better and make it more efficient. And that's where we focused initially, and now we're going back and kind of saying, what else can we do with this technology to really enrich our users' experience, letting them ask different questions that can't be explained in a canned report? And that's where the Pentaho data refinery thing is going to play a key role in that. The ability for people to go in there, really design their own workflows, materialize data only when they need it, for how long they need it, and then being able to get rid of it, and we're not taking that hit of storing that large data set for long periods of time.  I mean, even when they're presented with a cube and they can slice and dice, so what data are you presenting to them? How much refining have you done? It depends on the level of the user, for the people that we targeted, mainly for the billing systems, we've done a decent amount of refining the data. We've really removed some of the, a lot of the white noise around the data, orders that didn't execute, we've removed cancellations, we've gotten rid of bad data points, so sometimes you get weird characters in our data streams, so we clean that up, we make them actually presentable data, because to your point, if you just dumped everything on the plate of your typical business person, they're just going to look at it and be like, there's way too much here, I don't even know where to start, they get overwhelmed and then they're discouraged. So we try to not do that for the current users we are targeting by doing a decent amount of cleansing on that data set. So it's not just cleansing, but you're trying to make a business judgment as to what dimensions they really want to look at. Right, yeah, so as I brought up earlier, what we'll typically do is try to get a handful of data points that the business person wants to look at and then we expand upon that, so they're looking at it little by little, so we're not just dumping a model of like 50 attributes on them at once. Right, not to overwhelm them. Right, we'll give them like 10 to start with, let them play, what works, what doesn't work, what else do you need, and we just build up from there. And that process has actually really worked because now they can be focused on a couple of attributes and making sure they actually do what they're expecting. So how is this different, how does this whole pipeline look differently from when you were doing data warehouse and all the data was carefully curated and you had the ETL tool and the visualization tool. What's it look like, or why is it different now? Prior to where we're at now, we actually didn't do much in terms of ETL. We kind of dumped the raw data into a data warehouse and let people sit and say, here, go figure it out, right? I mean, and to the average business person that's not an acceptable answer, they're not developers, they're not DBAs, but that is the approach we had taken at that point. Mainly because at the time, there wasn't many tools that could handle the large quantities of data we had, especially around equity data. So with Pentaho and some of the newer toys in AWS, we were now able to handle those larger datas, do proper ETL, do proper curation, really clean it and really button it up so that when the end user has to come and get it, it's just there. They don't have to worry about relationships, they don't have to worry about going back and figuring out what message relates to what message and how they relate. We removed that from that process. So in other words, because it's all in one tool, the ETL is linked to the governance, it's linked to the analytics and that can be embedded in another app if necessary. So this is the case for end-to-end as simplification. Right. Okay. So and all this happens in the cloud, in the AWS, correct? What are you doing on-prem? On-prem, so in general, NASDAQ on-prem, all our trading platforms are on-prem. But for us, we talk to all our internal stuff on-prem and then ship it to the cloud. So we have essentially a gateway between us, between the cloud and NASDAQ and that gateway is what we run on-prem, to pull that data, send it up, S3 and then tell other systems in the cloud to operate on it. So it's not a ridiculous amount of data, is that fair or is it? We do about 18 to 20 billion records per day of data. Right. Up to the cloud. So I mean, it depends on what's your...   I mean, it's very manageable to pass it up to the cloud and then process it. And you pretty much, so that process that you just described, given the volume of data, do you see that running out of gas or is it not a huge amount of data, I'm presuming? No, I mean, you can look at it, a company like Finner, who takes a very similar approach to what we do, and they're at scales of five to 10 of what we do, because they're dealing with all exchanges, all ATSs, all broker-dealers and all that. So they're getting larger quantities of data and they're doing the exact same thing. So I don't see that running out of gas. I mean, we high-watermarked back in August a new, I think we got to 20, 25 billion, roughly messages on one day in August and no one even batted an eye because we didn't even know. So being with us is not the gate. Right. Compute and storage, which you got plenty of, infinite. That's pretty much, that's why we're in AWS because we can scale what we need. So it's people in process, it's really. Now, we heard Mike Olson talk about sort of the evolution of a dupe, 10th birthday, so sort of HDFS and MapReduce and HBase, and now we see all kinds of tools coming in, but Spark is obviously getting a lot of attention. It's something that you're looking at.  I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. We've Pentaho in, I'm interested in where they fit.  I think it's now become really more viable for most people to use, and that's why we're now looking to get more into it. I think if you went there before, you were maybe a little ahead of the curve and I don't think it was operationally ready is the way I would phrase it. It was nice as a side project, but I think for an enterprise, it wasn't quite there. And I think as it has evolved over the past 12 months, we have now been able to take the next step in our evolution and say, all right, look, Redshift is great, but how do we cut our costs even further and store even more data? And with the tools being offered now, with EMR and Presto and Parquet, we can now evolve our architecture to handle those larger data sets. I mean, the key there is agility. I mean, I'm saying a year. You couldn't do that in a year in the old days. It would take five years and you'd never get there. Everything would change so much, but I mean, you're able to respond much, much more quickly. Yep. But just to elaborate on that comment about the Hadoop ecosystem became viable in the last 12 to 18 months, and then you went on to say Presto, Parquet, Redshift, is it that those services complemented things that were too difficult? Yes. Okay, so you needed those. Right, to make that stuff possible. I think the tool, the Hadoop, I was in the analysts round table earlier and the question is, why is Hadoop so complicated? I think it depends on who you ask, why Hadoop is so complicated. And I think these tools and the tools that are coming out, the sparks and the Prestos and those type of tools that are going to make Hadoop more available for everyone. Because I see that rapidly converging on a simple use of Hadoop. And I think Pentaho's now lining themselves up with that as well. Well, of course, the other thing is Hadoop is not just Hadoop. Yeah, well fair enough. I mean, pick your tool, right? And so you have to have expertise. You know, we know from the, we have a tool with CrowdChat and it's complicated to get that up and running. I mean, I think there's 10 new Apache projects every day, I feel like, all around the Hadoop ecosystem.  So how do you deal with that, you know, complex? And adding on that, the fact that now vendors, it's no longer they're all supporting the core sets of tools, we're seeing fragmentation. So it's no longer second source just because it's open source. Right, yeah. I think that I was described earlier as you need a heat shield to guard yourself from all the new technology coming out. I mean, it's not, as obvious as not just a problem for us, it's a problem for everyone, right? And I think good evaluations of tools, not always being eager to just jump on everything that's new is how you really ultimately protect yourself from that. I think too often as developers, like we always want to get our hands in the shiny new toy, right? But you got to take a step back and really focus on what the business needs are. And I think if you focus on the business needs, you could figure out what tools that meet will fit your needs. Right, right, at the same time, you can't ignore these trends because it could be game changing for your business. Yep, you want to keep a careful eye on new technology and make sure you're always looking for the next big thing, but you don't always want to jump in head first without proper evaluations. We're almost out of time, but go ahead, George. One question on the sort of viability and maturity over the last 12 to 18 months. Do you see and do some of your peers at your company or elsewhere see the native cloud services like at Amazon or Azure or Google as potential competitors to doing the Hadoop kind of ecosystem approach? I don't think so. I actually think they're complementary. I think if you go back to five, 10 years ago when the cloud was first becoming a thing, people were going private cloud. And I think if you look at the public cloud offerings now, they're way more viable than private clouds from a cost perspective. And I think you're actually seeing a trend go the opposite direction, whereas I think five, 10 years ago, people were like, hey, private cloud, private cloud, private cloud. Now more people are taking a step back and saying, wait a second, this is what these guys do. Let's really take a look at this. And then they look at the cost savings you get from going public. And I think they can compliment each other in the long run. You mean like running a Hadoop cluster or clusters locally and having something in the cloud. We couldn't agree more. I mean, we've been on this bandwagon for a while. Amazon, I guess, throwing Google and Microsoft as well, their cost of provisioning infrastructure is tracking software economics. So at volume, their cost of doing that goes down to zero. You can't do that on premises. And it's funny, every time I think they can't go any lower at the prices, they seem to. The pace of innovation is phenomenal. It's interesting times, hard times and hardware, but from a practitioner standpoint, it's nirvana. So Michael, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Really great to have you. Thank you for having me. All right, keep right there, everybody will be back. Right after this word, this is theCUBE we're live from Pentaho World 2015 in Orlando. Right back.


Well, hello there! I'm Philip Magnus, back with some more of the Banner Saga. This time, it's finally time to play through Chapter 11, which sees the return, not of our lovely ginger heroine, but of our rather barbarous Val. Yes, you know the name. I don't remember it, but you should do. And the name is... um... give me a cutscene. Come on. Oh, straight to the fiend depths with this unending snowstorm. Wait, did you hear that?  Oh god. I'm bush! Hey, we've got great morale. Ah, Bolverg, that was the name. I'm an Egypt. An absolute Egypt. No matter, though. Will make quick work of these. Oh, forgot his special ability. He hits twice. So really, all I needed was a single star. Oh my! Hello, little ones. Are you looking for a spear in your head? Alright, let's do this. Those fellows can always use good stabbing. So I did not expect that we would start with a battle right off. Other than complaining, of course, I need to stretch my strategy muscles. That's what I want to do. So basically, we already have managed to take in a fiend number of them down to size, which let me show you. It's perfect for me. Our spearwoman I honestly don't remember. It's been so long since I actually played any of this. It's kind of sad, honestly. Let's take two swings at you and remove you. Ah, dammit. So I was right in what I did the first time I attacked with Bolverg.  Oh, I haven't got an achievement. Shieldmaiden, that's excellent. It's absolutely fantastic. Yeah. Whistle swing. Good. That's good enough for me. Now I do believe it's time to send one of our vile, or maybe even both of them, towards these here slingers, which I'll show you are annoying and unpleasant. And this thing just became invisible, which worries me in many ways, many, many, many different ways to show we move by using stars. Yeah, one star. We're going to save the other three and turn. This one I'm not even going to waste Bolverg's turn on him. Instead, I'm just going to move. Ah, what the? Call the weak or bear rage. Counter attacks plus lower Zaman, causes fear in adjacent enemies. Oh, that's useful. See, I do believe I just care this little bug off. What is this thing anyway? I honestly don't know. What are their names? They look like a mixture between something very delicious that is supposed to live in the seas and something very unpleasant that they actually are. Yay, breaking armor, fun times. I like Bolverg's team. They are interesting in the fact that, well, there's less of them for one. And they seem to be, all of them at least, very, very capable. Yeah, let's take a swing with this axe. Now, that's just rude. Shall I wait a second? Maybe I shall. Yeah, I will take the skull car out and I even got more renown, which serves me perfectly well. Ah, time to end these two now. I've been looking forward to killing slingers all week. Seriously, that was unnecessary. Really, very unnecessary. Yeah, let's just take this skull car out now. See, easy. Really, his class is probably the most interesting in the game and probably the most lethal as well. I mean, Bolverg's, of course. The berserkers are insanely powerful, maybe even OP a bit, but again, he doesn't have as high stats as the rest of the Val. That's the name, sorry. It eluded me for a moment. Oi, stop swinging that damn sling with me. He feels insulted, which I have no idea what that effect does exactly, but I'm willing to bet that it is not very pleasant. I could have just as well killed this one with Bolverg. I don't know why I had to move. Never mind, though. Oh, promotion, excellent. Sigbjorn is actually very useful, and now it's time to end this. Good job, everyone. Good job. This was probably the most... Whoa, why did I hit Sigbjorn with victory? Yay. The shield maiden and the Wanderer achievements are mine. All mine. Bolverg is also ready for promotion, which is excellent. Sigbjorn, good lad, good lad. A very fine battle, if I do say so myself, and a very nice way to open up. You grab a raven running by you. I want every one of our fighters ready to move now, set a post inside these gates for them to wait for me. Yes, that's the voice I'm going with. The fighter Nolzen takes off to find everyone. Where's the feign Valka? Maybe up on the wall? The feign Valka is here. Valkazefr, I've never heard you speak like that. The silent appearance of the two menders surprises you. You were outside the walls. What did you see? Dredged scouts. I'll wager me access. There's an army of them coming this way. The young menders sighs a good while as he stares at Klo and Fang. And if that's... Oh, sorry. That's Valk. And if that's true, they'll level this place. The storm must have hidden their approach. Or kept them busy, that way. But where are they here? Why, no. I don't care. We're heading for the mountains. But the ravens could take on all these dredges, especially with Valka's help. Like that time in River Rake when you held Valka Fjorin. I'd forgotten about that. Nikol Zah is light up. It was you, Fjorin, in the handle of ravens, tracking down the bandit who called himself the droger of the Angler. The lever. A war-hauling blaze across the town. The army of Dredges suspected is real. Nikolz, find Gudmunder. Have his guards try to calm the people. But bring him to meet us at the barn with the cart. The young mender follows orders without question. Not a bad quality. The cart's not your business. I disagree. A dead Valka gives you a cart to hide in the deepest recesses of a river, and suddenly an army of Dredge appears. If you haven't already tried, I doubt you'd be able to open the cart. If it's woven shut as I suspect, I'm the only one here who can open it. I suspect? No. I'm thinking that maybe it's the body of Bellover, the foreign dredge from the first game. But nah. We told you. Jinnah's not dead. We're just travelling with her. Let me tell you something that compromises my position as Valka. Did you know who I knew? Who the entire council knew? Was put to death by us. The council. Oh, interesting.  It's a very rare sentence, reserved only for the worst fences. Altering people's minds, their thoughts, is one such a fence. Valka gets quiet and looks at you, saying nothing. Zeifer notices the silent exchange but does not question you. Regardless, Jinnah was put to death and I think was imprisoned. In his grief, he escaped and stole away with Jinnah's body. But for what purpose is anyone's guess? So no. You'll not be paid by the council for a job issued by Valka, whose life we ended. Your irritation is rising when another war horn sounds, and two horns means a large force approaches. See, I'm not sure that I can take Zeifer's word. Collect what you need and hurry to the barn. It's time to discover why you're really here. Yeah, I don't trust Zeifer. Not one bit. Then again, I don't trust Junu either, but I've been with her for a longer time, and she has actually saved my life. The last dredge falls and you pause, taking heavy breaths. The snow is finally abating, the storm is moving south. Let's get inside the gate, you say. All right, let's do that. Barn market. Let's see what's in the market. Clubs of kin. This is very useful. Very, very useful. Do I have supplies? Enough supplies. One more day, never hurts. Maybe I should buy a few more. But first, let's see, can we train, train, train, train? Yes, I would do, no. That's the market, right here. Okay, so I suspect we cannot train, unless we go to the barn first. Yeah, let's go to the barn. The smell of hay and the oxygen is heavy as you enter the stout wooden barn. Zephyr and Nichols are talking in hushed tones to the guard captain Gudmundr, who glances at the large cart nervously. Everyone knows why we're here, she says. I do not believe in coincidences, but I cannot begin to imagine what would draw an army of dredge to spindle besides the contents of this cart. She moves her spear in intricate motions, occasionally shaking her head and starting over. Finally, she looks at you to open it. Yes, I knew it, I called it. I'm good, I'm very good. The sound of the thunder bellower's body in the cart silences everyone but you. You how the memory of a dream tears through your mind, it drops you to a knee. The strange tower of white sound, lightning, fear, confusion, distrust. There is a wrongness about it all. Over, hey!  Everyone is watching. Another dream, she asks.   What are you talking about? Zephyr asks, pulling away from the cart. Her tone is full of concerns. I saw a tower, lightning, I, I don't know what I saw. The Valco poses briefly before struggling. This is unexpected, Zephyr says. The Valco looks in a custom to surprises. Good munder, continue your task. Nichols takes some fighters and open the mine, keep that path clear at all costs. As both men begin to leave, she points to the cart and shouts, not a word of this. They nod on their way out. She turns to you and folka. Interesting, that is very interesting and it's even more interesting that I called it. This cart. I'm not sure why they are attacking but if the Dredge recaptures Peloer, he's dead. You guess if they take him. She cannot die. His immortality is more than a rumor. Dredge lives have no natural end but they can be killed. All except the immortal Sunder Peloer. They live forever. Zephyr nods but looks lost in thought. What happens if the Dredge recapture him? Without doubt they would wake him. He would have an army already fielded and his wrath would be unmatched. You thought your thoughts turned to the destruction of the Battle of Borsgard. The storm to the south and Dredge army to the north leaves us with one way out. The mines. Wait! Our way out is to sit in a hole in the ground. The Valkyrie give pathways there that will grant us escape. With all of these people it will be difficult. Why should I trust anything you say? How would you lie serve me in this moment? If the situation was not there why would I reveal secrets guarded by the council? She does seem more open than any Valkyrie or Mender you have ever met. If we go with you what is required? One we only have a couple of hours to move food and people to the mine. I'll be a door opening preparing preparing the way. Help load cars near the gates or warn the families and the houses of our immediate departure. Without waiting for a response Zephyr hurries away. You know we could always take Beloer's cart and make a break into the mountains. The of you re-sealed Beloer's cart. Of course the town in chaos is tempting. Makes you wonder what we might find in the Great Hall. We stick with the Valkyrie for now. Okay but a couple of hours won't let us do everything. Time to pick our poison. Two of us head to the ravens post. Okay Great Hall houses. Shall we go to the Great Hall? Oh yes definitely. You choose a few ravens of the half that are around to join you on your investigation of the Great Hall. The front door might be the easiest Valkyrie says but we could lift someone onto the roof and hit being under a knee without a trouble. You give it some thought. We don't sneak around like crats. Front door. The large doors to the Great Hall barely accommodate your frame as you and the others enter quietly. Half hall baskets of cups and plates, hay-potted crates with armor and weapons and rows of furs. And tapestries are everywhere. Just when you think no one is around you hear voices upstairs. Signal for the others to stop and listen. The room gets quiet and the voices become clear. Goodmander is talking to some of your ravens. I knew you would have problems with your kind. He says a raven response. Valkyrie, if you're dying as of. Rescue our fighters. Chatting up the stairs you find Goodmander and quite a few guards with blades at the backs of a half dozen tied up ravens. The guard captain is shocked and says are you here to steal too? We were making sure everyone was heading to the mine. The guard captain eyes you suspiciously but says you have done more good up at the houses but these thieves are the only other ones here. Valkyrie looks disgusted in them. Idiots. She says stealing from the very people we're trying to help. Why aren't we trying to do the same though? Goodmander watches you for a moment and says glad I got here before they had a chance to get away with anything. They're all yours now but we should all get to the mine. You grant an agreement and lead the ravens out of the door calling them all sorts of names. Once at the mine entrance one of the men nudges you with a smile he hands over a pilfer trinkets. That was funny. That was kind of very funny. Well that's a big big clan I have now under my banner. The mine shaft is cramped in more than once your broken horns knock against the rough ceiling or a timber. You follow Valkyrie Zephyr at the head of the caravan. She is lightning one of many bracketed torches along the way when shafts from the mouth of the mine reach you. The gates in the town did nothing to hold their advance. Goodmander and his men will slow them but it may not be enough. They have orders to collapse the opening if they're overwhelmed. Will you keep them from being overwhelmed? We're mercenaries not volunteers. No prize will cover the cost of us all dying in this mine shaft she says. I'll head back there if you want but if I die up there she looks at you. The torches will burn out the food will run out and then the real horror will start. We'll do it but we'll keep price later. Yes we will. She says we need to talk about many things you turn and shout. Ravens back to the top! Heading up the mine shaft is like swimming against the current. Frightened villages push forward and you barely have room to get past the yawks in the cart. Goodmander and his grim manner looks pleased to see you. No real plan. He says just kill as many as you can. The ravens around you smile at his words and begin to chant. I must admit I kind of like he's starting to groan me Goodman there is. Oh my oh yes let's level up shall we? Yes I will. Interesting whoa that's that's some heavy shield breaking let's take it. Oh and I have items how lovely what did they do? Knock back on strength attack of three plus two will kill plus one strength or this. No I'm taking Gormar statue. All right now that we have this guy we need this guy as well. Echil this one is absolutely insane. I I'm going to go with Zephyr. Fokker anyone else I want? What do you even do mate? Axe Trevor I don't need you thank you very much. Nicos no let's take Krumr I do believe he had a gigantic shield? No I'm mistaking him. How about Bersi weak source? Anyone I need to level? Zygbjorn yes please. Forge ahead sundering impact I'm going to go with sundering impact. Good job a very good job indeed oh look robust interesting or artillery strike. I think I'm going to go for the soft spots. That's cool let's go with this and we're going to take another point in shields because shields are important you need them cool. Now I don't believe we are ready to go. Let's see then uh oh those are dangerous. The gloomy things standing what gloomy thing? This one gloom warden well that's unpleasant. These are actually pretty damn tough. Let's get the gigantic Viking woman on the field oh my this is going to be so much fun. Allow me to greet you into the mines by slashing at you in the most wonderful ways possible. Whoa I did not expect that. I did not want that to happen either surprisingly enough. We're going to take a big swing out of yowls. Not this certainly not this. Three adjacent enemies yes please. Good very good that was as massive an attack as they come. Uh oh he's summoning friends I believe but I will not let him do whatever he's trying to do. No no no I think we're going to take care of the special little armor stats of yowls. Both of you doing the same thing don't you think that's kind of unpleasant taking shields and names as well. Gee that was rude and painful no worries I can do plenty of damage oh that was very good. Only what I don't like so far is that my fellows are oh runigale. Randomly creates runes of power in a central diameter area. Restore and analyze armor yeah I'm going to go with this actually. Let's see restores armor up to half of mendiscount willpower. All right let's do that. Nice that was that's an awesome ability. Time to take care of you dear boy. This is the end the end is near the end might make you tiny bit too queer. Is that offensive no let's take another swing at you. This fellow is big and I don't like him so I'm going to swing on him as much as possible. And now both of the unpleasant summoners are out. Just absolutely done with. Let's see this is not a bad swing but I'm going to kill him next turn. Seeing without armor he is nothing good day sir. Can I take some more of your armor away. It would appear that I can see I don't like this Vulcan is she's not nearly as useful as Juno.    Yeah I think I will I'm going to move here. Oh not enough will power well we're going to change that very soon see done. Perfect and two extra renown for yours truly I feel like this is going to end pretty soon. Honestly when we first began this battle I expected that it would take on a very very but start but it was actually easy very very easy to my surprise not that I'm complaining of course let's take off your armor and then just completely murder you can I arrest yep. All right see you big guy what was your name gloom warden well you sure are gloomy.  Yet berserker boberg keeps surprising me and not in the best ways.


Hello everybody, Andrea Myeski here with Dentalel. So what toothbrush is the best toothbrush? What toothbrush does your dental hygienists or dentists recommend? My answer is a little bit different. So what I first tell patients is I'm going to recommend what toothbrush you want to use because I could recommend a manual toothbrush. I could recommend an electric toothbrush, but if you don't like an electric toothbrush because it's too noisy for you, it's moving too much, then you would probably do better with a manual toothbrush. Or if I tell you a manual toothbrush is better and you really just wanna use an electric toothbrush because that's the only way to get you to brush, then I tell you to do that. But from a dental hygiene perspective, so from my perspective, after I see a patient, after I clean their teeth, I can truly give them the proper recommendation on what toothbrush is best for them. If I see a patient as an example who has a lot of plaque, you know, thick plaque, there's a lot of stain, and they tell me that they brush twice a day every day, I'm going to ask them what toothbrush they're currently using because if they're brushing twice a day and they still have plaque, they're either not brushing well or they need to be shown a better way how to brush or they need a different toothbrush. Believe it or not, I have had patients using an electric toothbrush, which everybody thinks is better. And I actually tell them to switch to a manual brush because they're not doing a good enough job with their electric brush. I would never tell a patient they're not doing a good job, but I will say to them, you know, you still have more plaque in certain areas. I think a manual toothbrush, you will like that better because you can actually get in there better in some cases. But the rule of thumb overall, I do tell patients to use a soft toothbrush or an extra soft toothbrush. Never use a medium toothbrush or a hard toothbrush and I'll tell you why. Because medium or hard toothbrushes, the toothbrush bristles on those are just simply too hard. So you have to push harder to get in there to clean the teeth. If you're pushing too hard, that's what causes the teeth to be cold-sensitive because you are actually taking away that gum that's covering the tooth a little bit. That gum can start to wear away. The gum is supposed to be covering the tooth a little bit. If it's not, that's what's called gingival recession. I'm not gonna get into that too much because I talk about that in another video, but if you're brushing too hard with a medium or a hard toothbrush, that can actually cause more damage and you don't want that. So the rule of thumb is to use a soft toothbrush, either a manual toothbrush or an electric, whichever you prefer. I use a combination of both if you want to know. I like my electric toothbrush, but I also love my manual toothbrush. So I use a little bit of both. I do the same thing with shampoo and conditioner. I like to mix it up. I get bored using the same thing. So I use a little bit of both and that works for me. So you could do the same thing. Believe it or not, electric toothbrushes are not always better. It depends on you and it depends on kind of what you like to use and what works for your mouth. So ask your dental hygienist, he or she will let you know. And if you guys have any questions, let me know. And feel free to comment below. I want to know what you prefer. Do you prefer the manual brush? Do you prefer the electric brush? Or are you like me where you use a little bit of both? So thank you guys for watching. Let me know if you need anything and I'll see you guys in the next video.