Well, hello and welcome to Jonathan from the heart. I'm Jonathan Asley of johnathanasley.com. And I'm so excited to be doing this short video for you today. Our topic, guys don't fear commitment. They fear this. Really quickly, if you're brand new to my YouTube channel, please hit the Subscribe button. Hit the bell so you can be notified of new videos. And if any time during this video the content resonates with you, please hit that Like button so I can be seen in the YouTube algorithms. Lastly, these are my weekend videos I shoot out on my balcony. Very similar to the videos I shoot in my private group called Midlife Love Mastery. This is a group where you can have direct access to me on a regular basis. And based on the questions you ask in the group, I shoot personalized videos just for you. So check out the link below to my VIP group called Midlife Love Mastery. All right, let's talk about guys and commitment and fear and all that good stuff because this is a very important topic. Because ultimately, isn't the bottom line of dating, or at least for most of you, that desire to be in a fully committed relationship, isn't that your desire? So let's explore what causes men and women to block that desire of full commitment. That's funny, I was watching a comedian the other night on his show and he was talking about phobias. And he said, a phobia is an irrational fear. And then he goes on to say, he's not commitment phobic, he just doesn't want commitment. And there are plenty of men out there that actually don't want to be in a fully committed relationship. They may want some stable ambiguity. And if you're not familiar with the term stable ambiguity, I highly recommend checking out the work of Esther Perrell. Esther Perrell, she wrote a book called Mating Incaptivity. Stable ambiguity basically is your monogamous and exclusive without any direction of where this relationship is going. And I'm a big proponent of not being ambiguous when it comes to dating, mating, or relating. And I'm a big proponent of being more forthright in the early stages of relationships.  Are we in a committed relationship? Are we boyfriend and girlfriend? And I'm like, all of this should be established early on in the relationship. And we're going to talk about why men fear this in a moment, but I want to dig into a better understanding of relationships and commitment and why there needs to be a shift in the dating perspective to actually help you avoid those men that fear what I'm about to share in a moment. Now it's interesting, I'm wearing a Star Trek T-shirt and you've got Captain Kirk right here if you're familiar with Captain Kirk, the quintessential bachelor because he was committed not to wanting a relationship, he was committed to his professional life. And there are plenty of men that are more focused in their professional endeavors than they are actually wanting to be in a fully committed relationship. So these men oftentimes are seeking that stable ambiguity or another way of calling it would be just simply a casual relationship. This is why folks, when you hear men are the leaders of the relationship, well they're going to lead at their pace. They're going to lead at their pace. And if their pace is, hey, I want to see you at my beck and call, that's not a person that seeks a relationship, that's a person that just wants you at their beck and call. And oftentimes these folks are committed in other areas of their life or worse, their life has a sense of dysfunctionality. They're going through a nasty divorce. They've got contentious issues with their children. Maybe they have health issues. Maybe they have issues in their professional life. These are men who are incapable of making full commitment with someone because ultimately, if you want to be in a full commitment with someone, it basically requires understanding that you want to eventually take care of someone. I'm going to repeat that, you eventually want to take care of someone. Now here in midlife, I got to tell you a lot of folks in their 40s, 50s, and 60s don't want to take care of another human being. I got to tell you, I get a lot of women say to me, I don't want to be his nurse or his purse, you know? And I hear this from women. I hear this from men who have gone through a contentious divorce. They've actually reached a point where they're not capable of full commitments because ultimately to be in a full commitment with someone, you have to say, I want to take care of this person. I don't mean take care of them when they're sick. I mean take care of them through thicker, through thin, through richer or poorer, through sickness and the health. All of that stuff that takes us to the full commitment level. And it doesn't have to necessarily be marriage or living together. But I would say when you're living together, that's a far more of a commitment. And when you're married, you're fully committed to that desire to want to take care of one another. And this is where a lot of people are struggling, whether they're in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, because they haven't reached that place of wanting to even take care of someone. I'm not talking about having to take care of someone, but even wanting to take care of someone. And quite frankly, do you want to take care of someone that treats you poorly? Do you want to take care of someone or do they want to take care of a woman that treats them poorly? This is where the rub is. And this is why I think it's hugely important to understand something I talk about frequently. And that's called my, oops, my little mess here I made. My relationship iceberg. And by the way, I want everyone to see this because this is critically important. Above the water line is chemistry. And below the water line is shared values, blendable lifestyles, and emotional maturity. And why this is so critically important to understand at this phase is that, listen, when two people meet in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, if there isn't strong chemistry, chances are it never turns into a second or third date. I mean, if there's mediocre chemistry. Now this excludes the men who just want to get laid. They'll chase anything, but they're gone quickly as well. So just be mindful of those that chase sex versus when there's a strong chemistry with one another. And let's face it, when there's strong chemistry, oftentimes they might be missing that shared values, blendable lifestyles, and emotional maturity. And as we age, it's harder to find people who share your values. It's harder to find people whose lifestyles are blendable with yours. And I know all of you women go into this fantasy. Well, if I love someone, I will compromise myself. Folks, let me tell you something. Men, going back to the Captain Kirk or the comedian I shared, they don't want to compromise themselves for someone else. They don't. In fact, as I lean into the fears that men struggle with when it comes to, it's not that they fear commitment. They fear these two things. Now first, I want to share with you. Commitment means, if you look up the definition of commitment in Google, it gives you two things. Committed to a common cause, committed to an activity or common cause. And number two, a restriction of freedom. A restriction of freedom. And let me give you an example of restriction of freedom. I've shared this before, so I'm going to share it again. My brother calls me up and says, his daughter is having an 18th birthday party and I want you to come. And I make a commitment. Hey, bro, I'll be there for your daughter on my niece. And then I wake up that next Saturday morning for the party and I'm like, I just don't feel like going. I don't want to go. This is the last thing I want to do. But I made a commitment. Feels like a restriction from my freedom. In other words, my desire not to do it. So just recognize that commitment is actually having to face those things you don't want to face. Now the second reason why men oftentimes, they don't fear commitment, they fear the following when it comes to relationship, because this happens frequently, is there's a fear that you're going to try to change us. There's a fear that you're going to try to change us. In other words, by the time someone reaches 40, 50, or 60, they become very set in their ways. And this fear causes men not to want to progress in their relationship form. We're going to talk about how to turn both of those things around in a moment. But that fear of being, what's the word I'm looking for? The intention that you're going to change us. And that's not the word I was looking for. So let's talk about that for a second. There's an old adage, men marry women hoping they don't change. And what I think that means is they don't change physically. And women marry men hoping that the men change. In other words, you're going to try to morph him into what you want. And this is where a lot of the relationship frustration lies, is that we're trying to fit a lot of square pegs in round holes and it's not fitting. This is why it's so critically important to really understand that shared values is critically important in relationship. That your lifestyles must be blendable or it's going to be very problematic. And lastly, emotional maturity. And I want to lean into that for a moment because the reality is, if you haven't seen my emotional maturity chart or relationship skills chart.  This is not a fact, this is an opinion. But roughly about 20% of the population has clinical issues, clinical issues. And then another 20% might be healthy enough that have the healthy skills to be in relationship. And then roughly everybody in the middle is dysfunctional when it comes to their emotional maturity because they haven't most likely done the inner work to prepare to be in a healthy, happy relationship. This is why I continually recommend the book Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. This helps men and women learn how to communicate more effectively in relationships. And one of the struggles everybody complains about is the poor communication skills and it's usually pointing the finger at the other person. Do you know, I was watching a show on a showtime called Couples Therapy.  But I was talking in the end because I shared that Scooby-Doo voice in one of my previous videos. So I was sharing about this show on showtime called Couples Therapy. And in the second season, the opening, the therapist talks about most couples go to therapy hoping to change their partner. Let me repeat that, most couples go in going, it's my partner's the problem. No, it's my partner's is the problem. No, it's my partner the problem. No, it's my partner the problem. That's the way most couples go into therapy, not actually doing the inner work for themselves that actually help them be prepared for a healthy, happy relationship. This is why folks, I wrote my book What the Heck Is Self Love Anyway? By the way, all the books I recommend is below in the description, Jonathan recommend books. This book is a journey of personal development, self-help and spiritual work to prepare you and hopefully the guy to be in that emotional state of readiness to you actually can lean into a fully committed relationship because every relationship that gets to full commitment usually has this one common denominator, one common denominator for them to lean into a fully committed relationship and that's what we're going to talk about right now. What's that common denominator? Folks, reason why chemistry is important because let's face it, if we're not attracted to someone, we're not going to want to invest in them. Number two, if they don't share our values, it's going to be very problematic to be in relationship if there's contention in each other's values and nothing demonstrate this more than what's happening here in the United States, the practical, the difference between the blue and the red and the Democrats and the Republicans, for example, I got to tell you, for those that are on the outlier extremes, those folks are not compatible with one another because their political views is also a reflection of their values and let's talk about lifestyles. The reality is it used to be 50 years ago, you only dated someone who lived around the corner from you. It was easy to develop that time it takes to get to know one another. It takes roughly 100 hours of face-to-face time just to get to level one of trust in the beginnings of a relationship and if you're not having just easy way of getting to know one another becomes more problematic and this is where long distance makes it doubly harder to actually get to know someone and then do their lifestyles match one another and ladies, I've got to keep saying this over and over again you have this fantasy that because love will solve these problems. Listen, if you two live 30 miles apart and he has his gym and you have your gym over there and you've got your family there and he has his family there, you might be together for a couple of dinners here and there but ultimately it's going to require someone making a shift in their lifestyle and usually men don't want to make shifts in their lifestyle. This is why folks, if you're gonna invest time getting to know someone from a long distance perspective you better be buying the book Eight Dates by Doctors John and Julie Gottman, Eight Dates before you ever sleep together and start talking about the deeper mechanics of a relationship because ultimately once you understand the mechanics to a healthy, happy relationship the one common denominator almost every happy couple has and I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of happy couples is they're actually friends with one another. I'm gonna repeat that they are actually friends with one another, they genuinely like each other they play together, they have social activities they have hobbies, they have mutual interests they spend time with family and friends it's not just about the physical intimacy it's about emotional intimacy that space where you can look in each other's eyes and say into me you see, into me you see because they're vulnerable, authentic and transparent with one another those are the relationships where there's a genuine friendship and I don't mean friend zone kind of friendship I'm talking that space where you can go I've had a hard day I just wanna tell my partner I've had a great day I wanna tell my partner I need some advice I wanna ask my partner when two people can reach that space of sharing their woes, sharing their successes and seeking advice from one another the way you would a friend those are the relationships that go the distance and I'm gonna tell you something most of you are in situationships you're in casual relationships because you didn't properly vet the guy or gal if you're a guy watching this you didn't properly vet each other to determine if they're actually capable of a serious relationship and if you need some support on that check out the link to a free discovery call with me to see if working with the coach is right for you my area of expertise is helping you understand true compatibility with one another and how to ask the right questions early on based on your personality and how to third vet for emotional maturity so if you need some support with that check out the link below because that's my area of expertise so let's bring this full circle listen, most men don't fear commitment they fear expecting you to change us or they fear restriction of freedom and ultimately the relationships that reach a level of saying I want to take care of a person when a person in their heart says I wanna take care of another person and when both people can reach that point that's when you're gonna reach that level of full commitment and the way to get there is to genuinely establish the friendship piece that piece of intimacy into me you see and those of the relationships have a greater chance for success than the ones that most of you are in where you're winging it, you're winging it, you're winging it and you're expecting that if you just sit in your feminine energy the man will claim you what nonsense is that first off if you don't understand human behavior you're already behind the eight ball on the dating mating or relating realm and my hope is as the contrarian here out there I'm turning you on to books and things to look for that actually shifts your perspective to lean into the dating process with a lot more consciousness and I'm a big proponent of being intentional rather than being oblivious naive or ambivalent in the process does that make sense, is that sinking in I'd like to hear your thoughts on that please post a comment below I do my best to read them all if you like my shirt, if you like my mug please let me know as always if you find value please share this with your friends I'd really appreciate it if you want to speak to me directly, check out the links to either Discovery Call or my group called Midlife Love Mastery all right we're going to wrap up this video as I always do first off give myself a big gigantic Johnathan Bear hug of self love I'm going to reach into the camera and give you a hug of love if that's okay I'm going to ask you to turn to someone a pet, a teddy bear pillow and give it or them a hug of love because hugs are a great source of love and let's face it we could all use more love in our lives thanks a bunch bye now


I work with corals and using the stable oxygen isotopes to figure out what the temperature was 200 years ago 400 years ago and even the last thousand years so to do this we come up with a time series of oxygen isotopes and convert that into temperature and rainfall and I could tell you about how climate oscillations or climate variability changed over the last thousand years. I particularly look at rainfall in the tropics and the tropical rainfall belt or the inter-tropical convergence zone. So this is part of a large global circulation and we're trying to work out how it's changed over the last 400 years and how that is likely to feed into future climate changes as well. So the corals are telling us that a rainfall has changed quite dramatically especially in the last 100 years who's in the last hundred years who's seen that rainfall especially in northern Australia and southwestern Australia has changed dramatically. Northern Australia is getting a lot more rainfall and southwestern Australia is getting a lot less rainfall and using the corals we're trying to track whether this is going to change significantly again or whether there's it's part of a natural variability. We with a number of other paleo climatologists look at a pick up lots of different coral records so there's coral records all across the globe so we have a really nice spatial vision of what the coral what coral is telling us over the last 400 years or so and we can use this to map what the temperature is doing over that period and it gives us a better baseline of natural variability in the system.


Just as we've done for all of the other sections, we are going to fill in the missing coordinates for some trapezoids. So here we have trapezoid rock, and we are told that O up here, whoops, is the point AR. Well, what that tells us is that the distance from here to here is A, and the distance up is R. Well, when I see these marks, that means they're congruent, so I know that that is A, and I can then fill in RC and K, the ordered pairs. So, let's start with R. Since R is on the y-axis, we're just going straight up. That's the point 0A, and C, we're just going straight across on the x-axis, so that is the point A0, and K, obviously, is at 0, 0. In isosceles trapezoid O, R, C, H, we're given a couple of things. O is JA, so what you have to understand is that from here to here is J, and then up is A. We are also told that C is at S, so what you have to notice here is that this short distance here is J, and the whole distance is S. Well, because this is a trapezoid that's isosceles, what we know is that this piece right here has to be congruent. I can draw a congruent triangle on this side, and I know that this distance is also J, because those have to be congruent. So, in order to figure out these other ordered pairs, first I'm going to start with the easy one, which is H, I know that's at 0, 0, and the only other one that I need to figure out is R, and so the way you're going to figure out R is using this information that I know this little piece is J. So, to get to the R, what you would do is you would start at 0, 0, and you would stop here, and then go up. Well, because we're not going all the way out to S, we're not going the total distance of S, but what we're doing is stopping where this distance from this ordered pair to this one is J units. So what we're doing is we're actually going the whole distance of S and then backing up J units. So, the way that we would write that is S minus J, and then the distance that we go up is going to be congruent to this distance, so that would be A. In isosceles trapezoid BACH, we're doing a similar thing to what we did in the last problem. So, first I'm going to notice that from 0, 0 out to here is M units because that's the point M0, and the distance from 0, 0 to the left to get to point C is K units because that ordered pair is negative K0. So, what that tells us is I can draw a congruent triangle over here and know that if this is K, then let me change my color so you can see this, then this distance is also K. So what we're doing to get point B is we're going all the way out M units, but then we're backing up K units to get to here. So what we do is we say that the X value is M minus K, and then nowhere did it tell us how far it is to go up. So that's where we're going to make up a value. So it doesn't matter what letter you use, let's just say that that is what haven't we used. Let's say it's W, and so we're going to go up W. So then for point H, because that's on the Y axis, we're just going up W units. So that's the point 0 W.


Hi, I am presenting adversarial example witchcraft or how to use alchemy to turn turtles into rifles. Let's see, I'm Heather Lawrence, I do data science at the Nebraska Applied Research Institute. You can find me on Twitter under Infosecondon. If you didn't get a chance to visit the slides online, I have them on my Twitter. And then I'm also not above bribing my audience, so I have stickers back there and cards in the event that you want them. Right back where this goon here is, waving his hand. Alright, cool. So here we see a video of Google's State of the Art Inception 3 model. And you see a printed turtle, right? It's obviously identified as a turtle. And then after making changes to the texture map, the classifier believes it's a rifle with high confidence from every angle. Ooh, look at that rifle, isn't it so pretty? So most of this research in this space has focused on manipulating image classifiers. It's easier to tell visually than an effect is occurring. And we watched this video, we saw it being identified as a rifle, so I'm going to motivate the real question of this talk, which is, what happens when an autonomous system cannot tell the difference between a turtle and a rifle in a surveillance state? I'm just kind of like marinate on that one for a second. And so I didn't write this for machine learning experts, I wrote this to be approachable. So I'm going to use something like some terminology, a classifier is like a style of machine learning algorithm that determines a class of data. I might say SVM, which stands for support vector machine, it's a type of algorithm, you don't need to know about any of the math or how it works. When I say perturbation, I mean I'm basically adding noise, and that's it. It's a very fancy word, it means adding noise. And then adversarial example is presenting a worst case example for an algorithm. And so my outline goes like this, brief history, types of attacks, what blind spots are, that's pretty important to motivate. Adversarial examples, what they are, how to defend against them as far as we know, white box versus black box techniques, a demo, and then resources are at the end. So in 2004, Dalvi et al released this paper called Adversarial Classification.  And they were trying to determine which one could fool the other. And then Hohang et al, in adversarial machine learning, they kind of define like a formal taxonomy about regarding the attacks that are possible. And in 2016, it's interesting because now we've moved beyond the theoretical. And I don't even need access to your classifier to attack it anymore, which is kind of interesting. And so we have poisoning versus evasion, poisoning happens before training. And evasion happens after training. And you'll notice here from this big EO at all paper, you have part of the MNIST data set, which if you aren't familiar, is this huge image data set of handwritten digits. And the idea is the classifier is trying to properly determine what that digit is from handwriting. And so they added some noise and you'll notice the classification error, the validation error shot up, right, after they added this noise. And so the evasion attack after training, you see a bus. We add some noise and now it's an ostrich. That looks like an ostrich, right? Yes, yeah. All right, so the types of attacks, right, we have causative, so we can manipulate the training data before training if you have that kind of access. You have data poisoning where you can especially craft attack points injected into the training data again before training. Or exploratory where you're trying to exploit the classifier, kind of figure out how it works after it's already been trained. And then a hybrid is a mixture of those attacks. All right, this is probably the important part of this. Like what is a blind spot and why do I care about it? They are regions in the model's decision space where the decision boundary isn't accurate. And basically this is areas that are not well-defined. And I like to use pandas, so let's say I have a classifier. And I'm training the classifier on what a panda looks like. I've got a whole bunch of images on what pandas look like. But I want you to think for a second about the entire sample space of what is not a panda and that I have to provide that to the classifier. I can't exhaust that space in any reasonable amount of time because the overhead on that is crazy, right? Everything that is not a panda has to be provided to the classifier. Well, if you don't provide that data, the classifier doesn't know. It has to infer, right? It has to infer what is not a panda based on what it thinks it is a panda. And so that's where these blind spots are coming in. Because we don't exhaustively provide the classifier that data. And given, right, this is an ongoing research area. So nobody has definitively proven yet why these exist. This is theoretically why they exist. So let me motivate that real quick. And so here be bugs, right? As introspection into algorithms increase, so do the flaws. Like bug bounty programs, right? If you have more eyes looking on lines of code, you're going to see more errors. If you have more AI experts looking at the algorithms, you're going to see more flaws. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it estimates there's like 105,000 information security analysts here in the US, whereas element AI estimates there's only 22,000 AI experts worldwide, right? That's a factor of five in this country alone. So do you want to get into machine learning? We need you. All right, so what are adversarial examples? They're data that presents a worst case to the classifier. It's intentionally intended to make the classifier make a wrong decision. Some of the examples, particularly for information security, is detecting domain generation algorithms used in command and control infrastructure. And then malicious portable executables that are classified as benign. There's actually a paper behind this, which is really cool. They determine the parts of the executable that could not be perturbed, could not be changed in order for it to be executed. And then they took all the other bits and they perturbed all of those. And the classifier could not detect them as being malicious. It was like, oh, this is fine. This is benign. So maybe if you're information security, you remember signature based detection and how that was a problem. Well, now we have a problem with machine learning based detection, right? We're at that next stage of the attack defense paradigm. So some real world adversarial examples are the sticker attack on the self-driving cars. If the self-driving car cannot identify that that is a stop sign. Using eyeglass frames on facial recognition systems, they cannot properly identify who the person is with a pair of glasses on. Or perturbing aural vocal sound and making it sound from it was the best of times. It was the worst of times adding some noise. And it is a truth universally acknowledged. Those aren't the same at all.  Well, now we're using salt circles to trap self-driving cars. So we are effectively using alchemy to fool AI systems now. So generating adversarial examples, right? What I've been talking about this whole time, right? We're adding noise, random perturbations to the sample. And it's optimized with something called gradient ascent. It has to do with derivatives. That part's not particularly important. But it's a method that determines the directions that move the algorithms output by the greatest degree and then directs the input by small degrees to create that output. That's a lot of words. Basically, we're just adding noise. We're adding special noise. And we're adding it to every pixel so that when the classifier looks at it, it's like right in that blind spot, I don't know whether to infer that's a panda or not. So what we can do about adversarial examples is we start facilitating robust algorithms. We know that retraining from scratch increases misclassifications. We know that retraining with disjoint data increases misclassifications. And we're starting to find out that training with adversarial examples reduces the amount of misclassifications. So if we reduce the weights or the activation given to the inputs, we can reduce the amount that that classifier is affected. We can also choose to keep a human in the loop. Do not use autonomous systems. Do not let them do whatever they want and not check them. Or you can use something called the consensus method. So now instead of having a single classifier that's trained, we now have like three classifiers that are trained. They take in the input and they come to a decision on whether that input should be trusted or not. These are all methods to try to make these classifiers more robust. And so we might see our training life cycles change. Anybody who's done machine learning in this room will notice that import data, clean data, test train, split, and then deploy. That's already part of our life cycle. But now with adversarial examples, we might have to train with them, continue to test with them, repeat this process to get that sample space reduced, and then deploy afterwards after we retrain. Unfortunately, some of the early research in this area had really bad attacker assumptions. It's like easy mode, white box assumptions where the attacker apparently has the code, the training data, everything that happens, and like, who has that kind of access? I don't have that kind of access. And they reference the information security community for trying to get more robust attacks. But I guess they think we know something, I don't know. But black box research is now here, right? They're starting to assume more constraints. And attacks can be transferred between classifiers. It's called model transferability. I'm going to get into it here in a second. The idea is that an attacker model uses the victim model as an oracle, and it queries the oracle over and over again for the decisions on how it's going to classify. It takes those decisions, trains a separate, completely separate model, generates the adversarial examples from that attacker model, and those examples still work on the victim. Right, so this is from adversarial examples in machine learning by Paperno. It was presented in USENIX and NIGMA 2017. Basically the same idea, but visually represented. You have an attacker, queries the oracle, the oracle returns what its classification decisions are. The attacker trains classifier B, and that the adversarial examples that are affected by classifier B also affect classifier A. And so this graph that you see here on the left, right, bunch of boxes, it's showing that the source machine learning technique, which ones were affected on the target. So on the vertical axis, let's look at LR, logistic regression. If my source was logistic regression and I trained it, and I used the adversarial examples on, let's say, the other logistic regression, right, the victim model was also LR. My increase in misclassifications go up to 91%. That's huge, 91%, like, look at all that huge black column. Decision trees are the worst, apparently. And this is really scary, right? How many classifiers do you know that are logistic regression? Support vector machine, these are pretty popular classifier models. So what we know is that differentiable models like logistic regression are more affected than models that aren't. So deep neural networks are less affected than logistic regression is. And they make use of something called reservoir sampling. When you have to query the oracle 10,000 times, somebody's going to notice, right? With reservoir sampling, I can get that down to 1,000 times and have less notice. But I can still have that, I can still have that randomized sampling space to where it's almost like I got the 1,000 queries and I only got 100. Notable recent research is very interesting. The space is moving very fast. Right now, we're starting to use a limited information approach and then testing it on the Google Cloud AWS classifiers to see how well they're affected. And they are affected. Some of the papers that I have in the resources, they go more into detail on this and they actually show percentages and they are in the 80s and above. So these are affected in state-of-the-art classifiers in the cloud. All right, so the demo. I know the Adversarial Patch was given yesterday. But if you have a app called TFClassify, it's a classification app that you can, the attempts to classify the things that you have in front of you one at a time and provide it to this Adversarial Patch, it looks like a toaster. Does that look like a toaster to you? Yes, yes, it looks like a toaster. Man, I don't know what you have, but I want whatever you have. All right, so let's go through this demo. We have a pair of glasses at 67%, 70%, pretty good. Yep, that's a toaster at about 40%. And then it's kind of limited on what it's been trained on. So here's my duo-servanir and that's apparently a Granny Smith Apple. Good job, guys. So I have a bunch of references for this talk that I couldn't go into in 20 minutes and that's why I provided links to the slides, right? It's written in nine font. I don't expect you to take pictures of that. And maybe you are in this talk and you're like, man, machine learning sounds cool. Here are some resources for you. There's a GitHub page with machine learning for cybersecurity, which is amazing. And of course, Andrew Ng's machine learning course is like the go-to thing for machine learning. So takeaways, you walked in. Basically, machine learning algorithms can be attacked. Algorithms like humans have blind spots. You need to red team your algorithms to increase robustness. Otherwise, somebody's going to do it for you and you may not know. And then like SQL injection, classifiers require input validation. If your classifier is taking input from an adversarial environment or a possible adversarial environment, that is users that could put in data, make sure you control that data that you accept from that user. Don't allow it to retrain your classifier or otherwise alter it to make poor decisions. Again, you can get these slides here. My name is Heather Lawrence. I work data science at Nari. Thank you for your attention.


Well, welcome everybody to today's alumni and partners online seminar. And on this occasion, we are going to talk about communication without words. My name is Maria Laura Sorrentino. I'm an alumni officer at IG Delft, and it's my pleasure to be the moderator today. Before going to present our speakers, I would like to remind you that we are in an interactive web seminar, and on the right bottom, you will find out the chat box where I would like to invite you to write your name, your country, and the organization that you are working so that to facilitate our networking. And after that, to post all the questions you would like to do to the speakers, we are going to collect them, and after in the second part of the seminar, we are going to post them, and they will address all the questions. Today we have two speakers, Leneke, Konop, and Arana Bisek. Both, they work in the water channel. They work with us in organizing these seminars that are organized by the IHE with the support of the water channel. Leneke has experience in natural resources management and communication. She has worked more than 12 years in areas of natural resources management, such as space irrigation, water supply and sanitation, and groundwater management. Over that time, she has also designed and delivered communication trainings for water sector professionals, educational institutions, and community-based organizations in the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Arana Bisek has worked as a broadcast journalist, a researcher, and a communication expert, also for over than 12 years, most recently in the field of water management. Over that time, he has produced several videos and design management, managed projects applying videos and photography as tools of research and learning. They will present the seminar of communication without words, a framework of communication for collaboration, research, and horizontal learning, and how tools like videos and infographic can help you to implement in the water management. Saying all that, I would like to give the word to Avram and Leneke for their presentation. Thank you very much, Maria, for the introduction. It's a pleasure to be here because usually we are on your seat, being the facilitator, but today we are very happy in order to say something about communication. So I'm happy to see all of you here. I see already many people that we've known from the past, so very welcome. I hope everybody can also hear us because I just received a comment that it was not so clear, but I don't see anybody complaining at this moment, so I am happy to continue. So today we're going to talk about communication, but in the context of water and agriculture. And as you have maybe read already in the announcement, we started with three facts that might be a bit unknown, and did you know that of all land that is irrigated, 20% is too salty to farm. This means that 1.6 million hectares are lost every year. Or another fact, did you know that in just over a decade, we lost groundwater equivalent to 14 million Olympic-sized swimming pools?  And seeing all of you being partners alumni from IHE and also partners from the other from the complete water sector, I'm trying to move a bit closer to the microphone. Maybe that helps in the water sector and in agricultural programs. But how to do it and what is most effective, that is something that we would like to give our view on. So what we want to share today in this webinar is some of our own experiences. As Maria already introduced us, we are Abram Abishek is sitting next to me and I am Leneke Knope. We work on the water channel and besides that, we also work in water and agriculture-related programs. And we work all over the world. We have many programs in the Horn of Africa, but we are also active in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, Turkey, Nepal and many other countries as well. So in the upcoming 40 minutes, we would like to share some experiences from programs that we are in ourselves. And we work with a wide variety of partners, but also beneficiaries. So very often our end users are farmers, but we also work a lot with academics, with other companies, with NGOs at government level. So it's this context that we are operating in and from that point of view, it's also the experience that we would like to share. So when we think about communication, we had a long discussion here. What are we exactly going to tell? So I think that most of us associate communication initially with dissemination. And thinking about dissemination, there are also many ways how to disseminate a message. You can think about how you phrase a certain message, how you bring it out, how you visualize it, etc. But also communication is much more than dissemination only. So these are the things we are going to discuss in the following minutes. First, I'll give you an example on something related to dissemination. Then we're going to show how communication can also be used as a tool for collaboration. Then how communication can be used as a research tool. And in the end, we would like to show you how communication is not a tool anymore, but becomes an end in itself. And if you have questions, please post them in the meantime in the chat box. And they will be collected, as Maria Laura already said. So dissemination, I would like to show you an example from China. What we did funded by the Dutch government, we started in 2014 a program called Piloting Artificial Recharge. We did this with a big group of Dutch partners in cooperation with the Chinese partners and government over there. The idea was to pilot artificial wetlands and there was, sorry, artificial recharge and there was an idea behind it. So the Diyang area, which is located in the southwest of China, it was struck hard by an earthquake in 2008. And since then, reconstruction has taken, so the population grew a lot. And with that, also the demand for water. And the water supply of the city could not really match the water demand that was happening over there. Then the second thing that I thought was very interesting, because it was an earthquake prone area, storing water above ground, was at a risk, because if there was an earthquake, those tanks could be broken down. So making water underground available would make more sense in areas like these. So what we did through this program, we wanted to construct a wetlands park to store clean water underground that could then be used for drinking water supply. Now in this slide, you can see a design and you can also see Google Earth images of what was actually happening. So in the above picture, you can see that there is a river. So what actually happened was the river water from Mianyuan River was pumped into the park. And in the park, it went through a purification process. So first the water entered a flocculation basin. Then it went through artificial wetlands, where the plants would filter the water. And after that, it would go into an infiltration band. Those were very large sand basins. The water would drip down through the sand, where the sand would naturally filter the water further. And then it would just recharge the groundwater to be pumped up later for the water supply company. Now having said all this, it seems like a rather technical program, but that is not why I am here in this webinar. So these are a few of the pictures while constructing the park. So what we wanted to do, because it was also quite a new technique in this area, is to also show to the people who were visiting it, because it was a beautifully laid out park, what is actually happening to water, and why is the choice made to have it stored on the ground. So we did two things. There was a visitor center. So that was a separate building made into the design. You can see it in the bottom picture. It's a yellow building very far. It was quite big. But at the same time, we also want to inform the people who were visiting the park, like what is happening at all these different components. So for example, maybe for us as water people, we know what a sedimentation basin is, but a random resident from the neighborhood probably might not. So what we did, we placed all these panels next to the components and made sure that the information was given. How the visitor center looked was like this. So inside what we did, we took the opportunity not only to explain the park components, but also to explain the hydrological circle and water management and its challenges in a city like this, in general. Hey, I see that my sound is gone. Can you hear me? Sometimes. Maybe activate your microphone. What I'll do, I'll try to activate another microphone. So now I have- I have two microphones. I don't know, I don't want to get to my computer. So now I'm using the other microphone. I hope this is helping a bit better. Just wait for somebody to fly. No, before it was better. Yeah, I'll continue and then my colleague plugs in or plugs out whatever is most convenient. I have the feeling the other one. So we'll go back to that. Okay, so we are back to the other microphone. So I'm back again using another microphone. And this is the only option that we have at the moment. So I hope that everybody hears this. I'm sorry for these technical glitches. This is what happens with light. So, everybody, we're following the China example. So in the end, what I was mentioning is that in the city center, we took the opportunity to not only talk about park components and not only talk about technical things, but also to take the opportunity to inform on a much broader scale on water management and the water cycle in Daniel. So that is what we did over there. And because we had seen it in the center, but we're also trying to implement this now in ECOS. Yeah, this is another example. We are not constructing new streets and towns, but the streets and towns is already there in Nagadagnes. So there are some difficulties with following the sound. Okay. Then what I suggest, I'll try one thing, but then I need to have a little thing for you like a one-minute patient. And I'll just like to take some other options. And I hope you will stay with me for one minute and I'll feed my video, but we'll get to you later. Maybe it should work now. Mara has been actually blocked. Oh well. Okay, I'm back again. Can you hear me? Just want to see a few people saying yes or no. Okay, great. Okay. Thank you for this. And sorry for keeping you waiting and having these microphone issues.  So what I wanted to say, maybe to sum up. So we saw that the example of China was successful and we also are now going to implement this in Nagadadi in Ethiopia. The difference with China is that we did not have to build a treatment plant or whatever because that was already existing. But in this case, what we want to do is to take the opportunity that is already there. At the Nagadadi treatment plant, school kids are visiting every week the plant and they get like an instructional talk or what is going on, but we want to exploit that further. So what has happened? There is already a building constructed. It's also meant for training purposes, but it's not in use. So what we are doing, we're going to make a visitor center in it and also like we did in China, we want to have the whole outside part as an education input as well. So each component, we are trying to make panels and explanation posters that will show the kids what is actually happening on site. Now both of these examples are very much examples of dissemination. So that might be one of the first things that you think about when you talk about communication, how to disseminate the knowledge that we have, how to share it with another audience, how to share it through the whole world. It's just one of the first things that you think about of when we are talking about communication. But another way that we have seen communication working successfully is through collaboration. I'll give you two examples of types of collaboration that we have done in the past. The first one is called the Flood-based Livelihoods Network Foundation. So this network already started in 2004. We felt the need to promote a certain topic. In this case, it was spate irrigation or other types that are flood-based systems. You can see some examples on the slides at the left side. And we wanted to promote stability and socioeconomic development in areas where all these livelihoods are depending on floods. And yeah, good to know also that these are usually among the poorest areas in the countries. And what the networks tries to do is to strengthen farmer networks, but also to include other stakeholders. And it helps not only with networking, but also with implementing real programs on exchanging good economic and social practices. Now, communication plays a very important role in that. So this is an example of how we are hosting this network. So first of all, we developed a website to give it an own identity. And together with the partners, we are creating a series of magazines, we call them practical notes. And we have captured many lectures of different people who are involved in the network. And one of the results with capturing all these lectures is that we could actually turn it with another partner into a real online course. So up to date, this network is still very active and there are many activities hanging under it. Another example of this is what we call the Roads for Water Learning Alliance. And I think many of you know what is roads for water, what we call road water harvesting or management. But this picture of Eric Neeson Peterson is one of the pictures that I personally like most. It's taken from a helicopter and you can see that a road is leading water into a hillside pond which is then later on used for domestic use but also for livestock. So we have set up this learning alliance and we do that also because we think road water harvesting is one of these topics that deserve a lot of attention but it doesn't get too much attention. So when the topic is specific and interesting enough, we developed these networks and tried to link all relevant persons, key stakeholders into it. And this is an infographic showing that okay, what are the activities that you can do under it. And again, also for this road water alliance, very important thing is communication. This is an example of infographics that we have developed around the theme. It's visually showing what the impact of road water harvesting can be, how we can link to each other and we're also collecting farmer stories. This is a part of the website where everything is put together visually. So to sum up, with collaboration, we can create networks like these and there is a wide package of communication tools that is necessary to keep these alive. It includes websites, social media and extensive use of videos. This also what we have seen happening, it stimulates co-creation and I think one of the most important things is that it has its own identity. So that means that nobody claims it and what we often see and also prefer is that everybody owns it. So having said that, we would like to continue to another example of using communication and that is where my colleague Abraham will take over. So I'll move the mic to him and he will explain something more about how to use communication as a research tool. Hello everyone. Can everybody hear me? Hear me? See me? Okay, great. So thanks, Lanaka. I will try to share some insights about using communication as a research tool. And okay. And what I mean by that is if you look at communication as a process or a set of tools that can be used for research, we will find that it is really useful. Specifically, we will look at an example of how participatory photography can be used to collect qualitative data and how it can help capture insights that we will struggle to capture through interviews and focus group discussions. Slide. Images by themselves are a valuable kind of data, visual data. We capture images as part of data collection all the time. When images are captured through a participatory process, so when the subjects of the research or the people whose responses we are trying to capture themselves produce the images, then the data acquires an additional dimension. It gains quality because through a participatory process, we get from the respondents not just the responses, but a story that they have taken some time to create themselves. So the insights we get from such stories is very layered, it's very rich, it's of a very high quality and it can inform policy and follow up actions in a very effective way. So to give you an example from Ethiopia, sorry, I'm just trying to make sure I have the order of the slides, right? Okay. To give you an example of Ethiopia, we tried to implement this methodology in a place in Ethiopia's northern Tigray province. What we were trying to do was we were trying to collect from a community, from a rural community in that region, insights about how they use roads, how, like, how good are roads? You know, what they consider are good roads, what is the operation and maintenance process of roads like and how we can get, and if there are any differentials between women and men when it comes to road usage, like when it comes to how they use roads and when it comes to the benefits that they accrue from roads. So this exercise was carried out by about 24 women, sorry, not 12 as is mentioned here. And this is how it was done. I'm sorry, just slightly lost with the slides. Okay. Okay, so it's not there in the slides, but I'll just try to walk you through the process of what something like this looks like. We formed groups of three or four to make sure that there's some discussion back and forth between the group. And then we have a short focus group discussion regarding the topic. So in this case, the topic being roads and roads access. The idea is to get participants to start thinking about the topic, its different aspects. And from there, the discussion can move on to planning what they would like to shoot. So when they do go out to shoot, they make decisions through discussions and consensus, and they use time optimally. After they come back from the shoot, they show to the larger group the pictures that they have taken, and they sort of make a presentation of the pictures explaining what they have shot, why they have shot it, and how it ties in with the larger discussion. What the facilitator can do, what the facilitator should do, is guide the discussion about the topics at hand, and maybe provide some general tips about taking pictures, how to frame, how to make good use of light, et cetera. It's important here to not get too deep into the process of photography because that'll be a distraction. Besides these days, people have smartphones, everybody has a smartphone, or many people do, and they're quite familiar with the process of taking pictures. And the picture resolution, the picture quality is not really of the highest importance here in this case. Okay, so I'll show you some pictures of what the participants in this exercise came back with. So this, for example, is one of them. This observation was specifically about internal village roads. So these are the roads on which people walk to get from A to B within the village and to walk up to the feeder road that sort of connects them to the nearest town, or to the nearest market. This picture and the presentation that a company did highlighted that rains can make roads slippery, and apart from breaking them out, right? And how that poses a very specific challenge, especially to pregnant women who could fall down and their pregnancy can be affected. And this photograph and this insight could become a basis to start a discussion with road authorities to use certain kinds of stones in the construction of such roads that become less slippery during rains. One of the biggest benefits women saw of good quality roads was that they enabled repairmen to reach them very quickly. If the local water points were not repaired and maintained regularly, for women, it means walking to another one, which is file, and it means more time spent on fetching water. This was different than the responses of men who pointed out that the primary function of roads is to provide access to the market in the city where they could buy to sell their stuff. The exercise also revealed that women and men experienced transport in different ways. Men do not think there was much wrong with the transport options available, but lots of women took pictures of taxis and buses. And while presenting those pictures, they spoke about how crowding and sexual harassment are big enough factors that they affect them greatly. Sometimes women prefer to walk 10 kilometers, which cost them up to three hours rather than take a crowded bus. And this particular picture and this insight highlighted some of the ancillary benefits of road construction process that women draw, like when the road is being constructed. At the road construction site, women make money by selling tea, coffee, lunch, and snacks. And this was a basis, this insight was a basis to suggest to the local department of road transport and agriculture, which is in charge of building rural roads to systematically engage local women as caterers. So that was an example of communication as a research tool. Yeah, that was an example of communication as a research tool. And we will now look at an example of communication as an end in itself. Now, what does that mean? So here we would like, by talking about this, we would like to make the point that sometimes communication is the core activity and the core objective. The rural communities we work with have ways of communication, of sharing knowledge, I think have been lost. Yeah, okay. So I was saying that we will not talk about using communication as an end in itself. And here we would like to make the point that sometimes communication is the core activity or the end objective. So we often work with rural communities and they have ways of sharing knowledge and information with each other. And a lot of this information has to do with water, agriculture and rural livelihoods which are points of our intervention as well. And sometimes what helps to improve water management and sometimes that helps to improve agriculture, achieve a particular change in the field of agriculture is to improve, like to support and build the capacities and processes with which these communities learn and share new information within themselves. So we talk about horizontal learning. Horizontal learning essentially is peer to peer learning within communities of practice. And in the context of agriculture and water management, they can be used to stimulate farmer to farmer sharing of innovative agricultural practices. External intervention involves helping set up these communities of practice designing learning platforms for the use of these communities and providing trading and support that they might need to utilize the platform. We will discuss this in a bit more detail in subsequent slides. So here we will talk about video-based horizontal learning which is the sum and substance of an intervention that we are trying to implement in Bangladesh as the watch channel. We are trying here through the use of smartphones, through the use of videos. And by videos we mean simple videos, the kind that we can make and share with smartphones to accelerate the process of horizontal learning which is already happening within communities. And the subsection of the community that we are trying to target are water management groups. And these water management groups are set up within the folder regions of Bangladesh. And they are in charge of the day-to-day water management, the opening of the gates and the solution to problems like salinization, sedimentation and flooding and stuff like that. So like I said, this is about stimulating the use of videos for documenting and sharing of good practices. And the focus is on easy videos. Again, what we are focusing on is not to provide the participants, the community skills that will enable them to become filmmakers, but skills that will enable them to capture and share good agricultural practices in a fast and effective way. And the focus invariably is on youth and women, especially youth, because it is the youth that has cell phone use as their second nature. So just to illustrate what I just said, this is like a schematic representation of the process that we are trying to achieve here. So there is the, I'll try and use the cool pointer over here, which I don't have. So here we have the water management, the water management groups, they're already there. And they already have some existing platforms and processes through which they share information, and they share good practices. So these could be in the form of physical events, such as meetings and fairs and harvesting festivals. This could also be in the form of virtual platforms, such as social media. And I see a question coming about internet connectivity in the particular case of Bangladesh, internet connectivity is rather good. And it is increasing year on year. What is increasing year on year is the strength of mobile internet available and the use of smartphones. So like a lot more people every year are becoming internet users, smartphone users. And in Bangladesh also, this is something specific to that country. There are like information brokers or information service providers, such as things called Union Digital Centers, which are essentially local enterprises subsidized by the local government, where a local entrepreneur sets up a shop where he offers internet-based services. For example, he offers connectivity to the internet or he offers some IT-based services, for example, printing and browsing and filling online forms and submitting applications for passport checking, the price of crops, et cetera. And of course, there is the mass media, as is the case in most countries. The mass media is there, and especially in the case of Bangladesh, the number of newspapers that are out there, the number of TV channels that cater to communities, including rural communities is rather large. So this is the community and here are the platforms with which they share information, they share insights and knowledge with each other. And the arrows are points of intervention. We have the smartphone video training that I mentioned. We have screenings of videos that the community has produced, but also videos that we have produced or videos that already exist about good practices that we know the communities will find useful. And another point of intervention is competition. We also provide, in order to, as an incentive, as a stimulant to get people to implement what they have learned in the smartphone video trainings, we organize competitions where people can submit as entries videos they have produced capturing good agricultural practices and the top three in each round of competition wins an award. So we show all these kinds of videos in the training. And what happens as a result of all this is the sharing of good practices is accelerated, it widens. And as I mentioned, Facebook is big in Bangladesh and including rural Bangladesh. So we have put together a Facebook group which is kind of the Facebook platform for this particular project. And their farmers, the videos they make, they share. And just to put some numbers to this program, what we are talking about in the case of this particular intervention is 10 trainings which covers around 250 participants and it covers around 50 water management groups, 50 video screenings, and what this intervention will generate by the end of it will 100 plus videos made by farmers. Actually, by the look of things, it will be in excess of 300 videos, 300 farmer produced videos that will capture good water management and agricultural practices in the region. And through the project and as an effect of the project after it is over, hopefully the activities, these good practices will be shared amongst WMGs even wider. And this is a screen cap that shows you what like a farmer produced videos, video could look like. We thought we could play a video for you but we don't have enough time. So looking at these examples that we have seen so far in this presentation, some from Lennox, some from me, we have seen at video and how it can be used as a research tool. We have seen video, sorry, we have seen visual communication and how it can be used as a research tool. So it could be videos or photographs. We have seen how communication can be an end in itself, strength and communication process could be the very thing we are trying to achieve as we saw in the case of the horizontal learning project from Bangladesh. And we also looked at communication as a tool of collaboration. So what have we learned from all this so far? At this point, I would like to look at Lennox who would perhaps like to take us through the rest of it. Definitely. Yeah, so we were thinking what kind of messages would we like to give to you based on our own experience. Now over the past 12 years, there are more things that we have learned, just to make you feel a bit more comfortable. But I think one of the first and biggest lessons was that audience will not magically appear and that a lot of things change over time. I remember that one of the first programs that I was working in, one of the ideas was to make a new platform. And then I was realizing we have so many platforms already. Why don't we just use things that are already there and maybe tap into certain channels? Because what often happens, and that was then also the case, we introduce the platform, maybe we spend some time at the launching event or announcing it. We dedicate a few newsletters to it and then if we don't do anything, people will not come. And that is very often underestimated. Then another thing that we learned is that communication is not for communication experts only. I mean, we have some communication backgrounds ourselves, but the majority that we did was not in communication. So we strongly believe that it would be fantastic if you can embed communication somehow in your workflow. And that is what I see ourselves doing. However, thinking that everybody will embed communication in the workflow is another utopia. So it's something that we have preached quite often, but we also realize and have to be realistic there. If you are not completely into it, you will not adopt it. But the positive note I would like to mention here is that many people can do much more than they are aware of and that they know. And that is also my last point. There are very much tools available nowadays with just a bit more of investment time in that. You can share your messages as much more platforms or wider context than you are ever doing. And we had this conversation recently in light of open databases. So often people are not aware of the fact there are so many open databases. Then I'm talking about satellite images, et cetera. That we are looking for the most difficult and expensive way to retrieve them. So a few tools that we like to use communication-wise is, for example, Compazia. It's not completely free. There is a free version, but you will have a watermark in it. What it does, it captures your screen. So if you have a presentation, just a PowerPoint presentation, you can record that with your own face next to it and you can just upload it to YouTube or the channel or wherever you would like to do it. And it has been very successful for us because that was one of the reasons why the space irrigation lectures, for example, were turned into an online course. Another thing that I like to use myself a lot is called pick-to-charge. And what this does is it makes infographics. I'm sure you all know what infographics are or you can imagine how you can visualize certain messages. You see it a lot nowadays. I think even Coca-Cola used it a year ago to explain their annual numbers. So it's just a visualization of data that could be maybe a bit boring, but if you present it more visually, it makes a lot of difference. And pick-to-charge already has a lot of templates in it. And that's why these tools are so fantastic to use. You don't need to reinvent the view or you don't need to be a Photoshop or an illustrator expert. And the open databases we just discussed. So with that message, I would like to conclude this webinar and I would like to continue to the questions if you have and give the floor back to Abra. Thank you very much. So yes, it's the time to start our questions and answers. People are posting questions. So I will start with the first one. I'll read it later. Okay, I need also to know who posted. But the first question is what is the quality and depth of internet connectivity, particularly in rural Ethiopia, from the case studies? I guess I'll take this question in the context of the two cases that I presented. So internet connectivity in Ethiopia at the moment is especially in rural Ethiopia is limited, but it is growing. If we compare how things are now, how good connectivity now is to five years ago, it has improved a lot. And in the case of Bangladesh, on the other hand, internet connectivity is already very good and growing. Have people lost, okay, I guess you can still hear me. So I'll go on. So yeah, so in case of Bangladesh, rural internet connectivity is much better. Thank you, Temba, for your question. And we will pass to the second one that comes from, I suppose, Doshis is the name. And the question is, can religious leaders and worship centers play a role in sharing these good practices? Yeah, maybe I can answer. I think churches, worship centers are very important key points also in sharing information. And we have seen it especially in Kenya, but I think also in Bangladesh, I'm looking to everyone now, that we use the places also to announce things like concepts, et cetera, to share the message or to even invite participants to take place, participate in the training. Yeah, I mean, religious leaders already play a very important role in water management in rural communities. I mean, rural communities are built around activities that are essentially agriculture slash water management. And the religious organizations are there, churches, mosques, and they already play an important role, including related to the promotion of good practices. We have seen this both in Bangladesh and in Ethiopia. And if we design, if we approach them properly, we can actually leverage the outreach to already have a good community. That comes from India, from Dr... Oh, you escape it? Well, I continue with the fourth and you return to that one. Fourth question, and we'll go back to the third one. Give me the fourth, otherwise. Okay, oh, it's really big, sorry. Okay, it's from Simon that would like to thank all the presentations that you have done. And he says, it seems about that a lot of capturing and sharing information, how about information demanding the field? Can you say the horizontal learning is an example of live sender receiver? Can you comment on that, please, Leneke and Abram? So I'll take that. In terms of demand for information in the field, yeah, we have to essentially inform ourselves, educate ourselves as to what the demands are. And we do that by involving local communities in the process, including at the stage of program design. So what we are, as I mentioned, what we are trying to do is not to set the agenda. We are not trying to identify the good practices ourselves, but we are giving rural communities, in the case of Bangladesh, water management groups that already exist and they already have their own priorities and agenda. We are giving them tools that they can use to boost the processes through which they are already sharing good practices. So where they were using Facebook before and they were mostly using text and words, now they are also using videos to share good practices on Facebook. So they're still using Facebook, but in a boosted way. So to answer the question, the way to take that, to take into account the local demands for information is to make sure that the point of intervention is restricted to like introduction of tools and in terms of program design and in terms of setting the agenda, it is the local communities that take charge. There may be one thing to add because I think the whole horizontal learning as a strategy follows actually some of the experiences that we had before. So of course, there are things going on already like a farm of field schools, exchange visits, one Rua visiting the other one. And we saw that those things are really working out very well and to have it strategized, if I can say it that way, we can- Thank you very much. We are going to go to India. Is Dr. Bija Jakumar that made the next question, very practical one. Were the water management groups really enthusiastic, voluntary? Is there any system to break them in? So I don't know who of you would like to start? Yeah. So this is about the example from Bangladesh, I suppose. So I will take that. Were the water management groups really enthusiastic? Well, when we initiated the conversation with them, there was a healthy amount of skepticism amongst them about how useful this training was for them, how relevant this was to their context, to what extent was there something that they would be able to apply in their work. And based on this interaction, we made a selection of participants in the program and we decided to focus a bit more on the youth that were already using smartphones, that were already using smartphones to make and share videos. They were already doing this as second nature. So there was an emphasis on youth and after in the early days of the program or in the early stages of the interaction, there was more skepticism, less enthusiasm, but as the conversation went on, and especially after the training, enthusiasm increased and skepticism decreased. So this is what happened. I guess to answer your question, we just need to talk to the communities, we need to pitch this idea to the communities and we need to make really good arguments. I think you need to like to comment. This is something very relevant to them. I think it depends a lot also on which community or where and what is the topic. So I usually experience a lot of enthusiasm, but what I noticed that sometimes the expectations are a bit different. So then in the beginning, for example, especially when you focus on communication, people already think about communication only as a separate thing next to the content that we are working on. So for example, I was few weeks ago, I was in Kenya and the training, it was similar to what everyone did in Bangladesh, but then a smaller size, so to say. And then people expect that you are going to learn everything about video and that is not the case. So then once they can see the connection and that they can shoot their own images from their own farm and then explain it to neighboring farmers, then that they can call it. Perfect. We have still two questions and we are doing very good with the time. So this question is for Muathas and what criteria should we follow to choose suitable factors if needed? He asked or she asked. I don't know. I think he refers to photo voice. That's what I think, but I'm not sure if that's the case Muathas. To choose a suitable facilitator. Well, there are several things that would make someone the right facilitator in the context of a horizontal learning exercise, in the context of a participatory photography, an exercise. But one thing that I would like to emphasize upon and that cannot be emphasized upon enough is if the facilitator, the best case scenario is if the facilitator is one of them. Farmers are most convinced if it is a farmer like them who is giving them new information, who is saying that this way of doing things is good or who is sort of teaching them basics of photography or teaching them the basics of how to make videos using smartphone. So what really helps if it is somebody who is connected enough who has a certain degree of connection to the local context who either comes from the community or is like from that general area so he can communicate well with the community. That really helps. In Bangladesh, it helps that the facilitators we use are Bengali. It helps that I can speak some Bangla. So often that can be a critical thought. And so we are going to arrive to the last question. Nothing's right. Sorry. And it's from Mika. And he or she asked, if you have collected also written contents or you only work with videos and pictures or photos? I can answer that question. So what we try to stimulate our colleagues is to write blogs when we are abroad. So when we are talking about implementing programs or training, we mostly focus on videos and photos. But for the team itself, we are stimulating a lot to also write and to share experiences with photos and with written text. And also we have, for example, last year there was a big group here in the Netherlands all related to the flood-based farming livelihood network and they wanted to become leaders in the topic and then, for example, we organized these how to write blogs, what we call power writing. So yeah, we do really value the impact that also text has and we work with that. But we have an extra question of one of my colleagues, I cannot say no, but you had to be brief. And the question of Nadine is, what were the best practices for you and why? Do you have some dos and don'ts tips for making communication successful? And this will be our last question. We can dedicate the whole webinar to this. One point I could make in response to this question is like this very general point of making sure that like the choice of the two, we can make sure, we have to make sure that the choice of the tool is based upon the need, rather than like the choice of implementation of a tool informed by the fact that we own that tool. I don't know if that's very clear, but like for example, participatory photography, like when we decide to do participatory photography somewhere, it should be, that decision should be taken on the basis of some insight that participatory photography is appropriate to the objectives of that project or in that particular context. Because what we often do is we have done participatory photography before. So let's do it also, because we have done it before. And the question as to how suited it is to the project or the context that you're trying. Thank you very much. And Ty has a right to close this seminar, but I would like to tell you that you will be able to find this video in a few hours from now in the Water Channel website, as well as the website of IHE Delft in the session of alumni and in the YouTube website of IHE Delft. And also I would like to invite you in both three addresses that to find out the other previous seminars of this series of alumni and partners on that seminar, as well as another interviews and information that could be really interesting for you. So this series, we have done it with IHE, with the collaboration of the Water Channel. I would like to send the speakers of today's Lenike and Abram for their presentation, as well as for all the work they have done during the year with us and all the IHE colleagues that work with me and that are behind the screens, Nadine Sander, Raquel Dos Santos and Binglas. And last but not least, this is the last seminar, but I would like to welcome you for the next year series that we are willing to start in February. And on that opportunity, we will have possibly an alumnus and partner person that no doubt he will have a very interesting topic to share with all of you. So, nothing else to say. Thank you very much for your participation, very active, nice question and see you next year in the next seminar. Thank you very much. Good morning. Thank you very much.