Each year, from four to six travel fellowships are awarded to emerging translators to help them pay for hotel and travel expenses to this, our annual altar conference, where they are invited to present their work as the first of our Thursday evening plenum events, thus giving them an opportunity to strut their stuff, to showcase their talents to an audience of translators, authors, editors, and publishers from around the world. Funded by a combination of altar membership dues, what is this? Funded by a combination of altar membership dues and private donations, the altar travel fellowship has become increasingly competitive over the years. This year are judges who were Jeffrey Brock, are you here? Jennifer Croft, did she show? And Sydney Wade, who was unfortunately unable to join us this evening, had to read a hundred and forty five page applications and ten page writing samples. A hundred of which were very, very good. The five translators who eventually rose to the top like cream on milk are all better than me, and I'm no slouch. We're privileged, we're lucky to have them, so please join me in giving them a warm round of welcoming applause. Hello, my name is Audrey Hall, and I translate from Spanish and Russian. Thank you so much for having me here, I'm really honored. I'll be reading a few vignettes by Sara Gallardo, who is a 20th century Argentine author who, despite or maybe because of the many years she spent in Europe during the dirty war, spoke of a very deep spiritual connection to the Argentine Pampa, which she called the Land of Smoke, or El País de Alumo, which is the title of the collection from which I'll be reading. The first story is called The Man in the Ararucaria, which is a type of tree coniferous and native to South America. It looks kind of like a drawing out of a Dr. Seuss book. A man spent 20 years making himself a pair of wings. In 1924, at dawn, he tried them out for the first time. His main fear was the police. The wings worked, beating very slowly. They carried him no higher than 12 meters, the height of an Ararucaria tree in the Plaza de San Martín. The man abandoned his wife and children to spend more time up in the tree. He was employed in an insurance company, so he set himself up with a pension. Every night at midnight, he applied sewing machine oil to the wings and strode to the Plaza, carrying the wings in a cello case. His nest on top of the tree was quite comfortable. It even had pillows. At night, the life of the Plaza became extraordinarily complex, but he never bothered to find that out. He contented himself with the foliage, the dark houses, and above all, the stars, the moonlit nights were the best ones. Our fault is not accepting limits. Once on a company holiday, he spent all day in his nest. The sun emerged. There was nothing quite like the dawn flooding down between the tree tops. Very high up, a flock of birds flew by leaving the city at their feet. He watched them with a kind of giddiness, weeping. That was what he had dreamed of those 20 years he spent fashioning his wings, not the Ararucaria. He blessed them and his heart went with them. A servant in the house of an insomnias old woman opened the shutters and spied the men in his nest. The old woman called the police and the fire department. Armed with loud speakers and ladders, they surrounded him and he noticed too late. He strapped on his wings. He stood up. Cars slowed down. People gathered. They threw up in their windows. He saw children wearing the school pinniforce, his wife with her grocery bags, the servant and the old woman clutching one another. The wings slowly flapped. They skimmed the branches, but he was losing altitude. He flew as low as the monument. He leapt. He landed astride the horse's haunches and seized hold of the belt of General San Martin. He was smiling. A policeman fired a shot. One shoe dangled, still caught on the statue. But he could fly. Slowly he flew on, though he barely rose above the heads of those standing in the square and no one breathed to watch him. He flew to the tower of the English and the wind helped him southward. Now he lives among the chimneys of a factory. He is old and eats chocolate. All right. Number two is called Tachibana. And to all those in the audience who speak Chinese, I offer my profound apologies for the pronunciation of a Chinese word in this text. Tachibana. No one brought more money to the house on Sweet Pacha Street than Little Flora or Tachibana. The year was 1892. Her wondrous knowledge of feelings never failed to astonish.  One even made her an offer of marriage, as if it were a handkerchief he offered her his property, which could fit 100 Japan's. Another tall and fair-haired killed his father in a duel over her and killed himself soon after. This little flora, or Tachibana, agonized over the Changi, the great doctrine without a doctrine, in the mornings she wondered, who were you before your parents were born? The thought welled up inside her until it permeated her bedroom. And well, as we know, one day at 10 o'clock in the evening, the vice president of the republic dropped by. They toasted. The clink of their crystal cups erupted in her ear like a thousand volcanoes. She pictured herself reverberating like leaves and houses and monsters and planets and the burble of a fountain. They say she descended the stairs, her face effulgent. She laughed in the madam's face and flung open her arms. It wasn't as if she didn't go back to work. She went back and was invulnerable. And the third and last story, the trains of the dead. The express train, the Bahia Blanca, dragged a boy behind it, the son of the foreman of a railroad repair crew. The foreman had been depressed ever since his wife died. This incident drove him to drink. The son lay there for a month as if asleep. When he returned home, he wasn't the same. Crippled. But above all absent. He had a penchant for lighting small bonfires. He fed them by day and by night. And sometimes he lifted his arms to the sky and screamed. One afternoon, his father came home from the bar and burst into tears for the love of God. What was the boy doing with all of those fires? He drew the sympathy of his neighbors. At the time of the accident, the boy said, I saw the trains of the dead crossing over the earth like lightning. Some coming, some going. Others going up and going down with no direction and no destination. In the windows, he saw the faces of the dead in this world. Livid, smiling faces, crumpled up faces. Faces wrapped in suffocating fabrics, dangling hands, skins of all colors, electricians, housewives, priests, company managers. Dead in life. Cheekbones feathered with the fine bone dust, jostling each other. He saw people he knew, neighbors. On trains that shimmered like ghosts rising from the swamp, nodding off curls pressed against the glass, not asking for help and not wanting it. In the permanent night, trains with neither voices nor whistles, crossing. No signals, no order. They overlapped, pursued one another, changed places, but nobody hears or sees them as they fly everywhere in the world. The pain he had experienced was joyous compared to what he had seen on those trains. He could tell as if he had touched them how the cold air froze those passengers just as it froze those who sleep in Los Andes forever.  That was why he made the signals for the trains of the dead. Thank you. Hello, my name is Anne Griot and I'm thrilled to be here. I want to thank Ulta for this chance to be here. I'll be reading some poems by the 20th century Italian poet, Mario Luzzi. Luzzi was born in Castello near Florence in 1914 and he died in 2005. His 70-year publishing career included not just 21 volumes of poetry, but also extensive theater, criticism, essays, and translation from French and English. He taught French literature at the University of Florence and his work is grounded in his study of the French symbolists and also influenced by German writers such as Rilke and Holderlin, as well as by the Florentine Stilnovisti Dante and Cavalcanti. During the 1930s and 40s, he came to be known as one of the Florentine hermetic poets. Luzzi's early poems, which I'm focusing on the first half of his career, are largely unavailable in English, possibly because of their intensely lyric hermeticism. They offer us a richly cloaked response to the devastation of war, as well as a complex portrayal of the Tuscan landscape as both nourishing and turbulent in an unpredictable world of human conflict and perpetual change. This happiness. This happiness is promised or given to me by pain, pain without cause. The cause, if it exists, is this bribe that moves the multiple in the only one, like the liquid flowing in the sphere of glass that interprets the life of the enemy. This happiness is promised or given is grief for me, grief without cause, or the cause, if one exists, is this bribe that moves the multiple in the only one, like the liquid flowing in the sphere of glass that interprets the life of the enemy. This happiness is promised or given to me by pain, pain without cause. or the cause, if one exists, is this trembling that stirs the many in the one like the liquid churning in the fortune teller's crystal ball. Still I say, so far, so good. All around objects and images wage war against it. Over all of it falls or lifts either night or the seamless snow of memory. The next two poems are the final poems in a collection of his from 1947 called Gothic Notebook, the series of 14 poems that he described as one single poem. Images rare and wakeful in the mind, a few enigmas at last made clear by love reduced down to the truth like you they consented to the weight. From nightmare to promise bright yet still not known, still not fallen within the scope of the spirit, you hounded the future with victory's fire as strong as those restless powers whose triumph looms ever over the heart. In regions unopened even by dreams you were a mute spring gushing images of days empty of you where the ash and the rock studded the weakened winter until a figure came out in the field it was a sign of death it was you ashamed and weeping in a feeble body and when from one instant of light and delight you melted in the wind lush with flowers oh a breeze blew over your brow it was late i had to slip away into the dense shadows what stayed with you awareness or pity such peace where you were not the sky gathered the streets white offering between swirling trees a face glistened in the dark pools honey mild marrow eased the angst of passersby and beauty beamed disappeared divided down lighted roads in the windy silence not memory not image not dream the missing face was a sphere shining in the evening star and even there you were not you had fallen out of existence pure light vexed the crossroads and it wasn't nightfall it was harmless white truth at the bottom of all my turmoil unperceived the rest of the poems i'll read are from his 1954 collection to tell the truth the fishermen people come in by boat quiet folk skirt the hulls of the ships into the harbor and the hit on the dock makes them jump the breath of early summer hovers low brushes through curtains and grass tangles hair it's dawn and it's time to cast out the nets that moment that flashes from house to house in a bright shy hesitant shiver making hollows and visions that melt away when you look over trees past the bridges a time halfway between a dark place and a clear one when it seems that what's true is nowhere inside us but in some secret or some wonder about to be revealed a time that misleads men and if any hope stirs it's the hope for a miracle anxiety makes the shadows strange and distant on the wet sand along the shore where i gaze through all these masks and rigging forgive me it's part of being human to dig like this in the most obscure places for what's right next to us humble and true or else is nowhere i crane my neck and follow with worried eyes the fishermen crossing the breakwater hauling in from the sea what the sea allows him to take an offering or two from its constant seething as much as you want the north wind cracks apart the clay shrinks and hardens the farmers lands it irritates water in puddles leaves shovels idle plows a ground in the field if someone goes out looking for wood or slogs through fields or stops to rest shrunken in hoods or capes they clench their teeth what governs the street is silence the wordless voice of the snow the rain and the smoke the motionlessness of change i'm here adding pine cones to the fire i turn my ear to the shuddering peaks i am neither calm nor worried you who promised long ago to come fill the space that was left by pain don't give up on me or you forage around the land near the house look for the gray wooden door little by little the measure fills little by little by little as much as you want solitude overflows come and enter plunge in your hands it's one day in the winter of this year one day one day of our lives if you dare at all autumn wind wind of passion and dust that streaks across this land where the streets are whiter than bones this weather makes the burdened heart uncertain calls into doubt what was real not a fable not a vision in vain if news came of you what could it tell me i know you well enough to know you're troubled i'm sure you hardly dare if you dare at all to wonder what i think i think about you your passion left open to the jeweled light of early summer between foligno and terni in umbra and i wonder i know it's silly if a joy ever does become a joy forever or if somehow i've had my full share of things that i must love and lose thank you hello my name is christiana hills and i translate from the french this evening i will be reading from the novel sans venter en jour or 121 days by michael odin and i want to thank alta for giving me this opportunity to share this book with you odin is a member of the oolipo a paraspace group of experimental writers who write using formal constraints each chapter of this particular novel takes the form of a different genre i will be reading from the first chapter which is a pastiche of one of kippling's just so stories for children chapitre 1 venant false chapter one a childhood 1900s i start to write once upon a time in a remote region of a faraway land there lived a little boy and this little boy was full of an insatiable curiosity and he was always asking ever so many questions the faraway land where he lived was in africa in a country that encompassed a big river called the saloon river and the little boy filled the land around this river with all of his questions he asked his father why the blacks on the plantation were beaten with a stick and his father spanked him with his leather belt he asked his mother why she didn't read her bible by herself and his mother spanked him with her two white hands he asked the village priest why he drank the communion wine during catechism class and the priest spanked him with his cane he asked the school teacher why the same number pi was used to measure all circles both big ones and little ones and the school teacher didn't spank him i must tell you oh best beloved that some good fairies were watching over this little boy's cradle if there were a few evil fairies as well no one noticed so there will be no discussion of evil fairies at this point in the tale a fairy tale is one way to recount history the saloon river its village its plantation its parokes and its flame trees form the setting for this tale the little boy's parents his little brother the fairies the priest the school teacher a dog and a few of the villagers are its characters the little boy who lived in this exotic setting at the center of this little world was named christian the good fairies along with the school teacher who didn't spank anyone who asked questions were responsible for the fact that he really loved going to school where he was taught to read books to write fast and well to count fast and high and to ask questions as for his parents they thought that the time he spent at school was much too long because you see although his mother liked that he could read the gospels allowed to her his parents wondered why he needed to learn anymore one day while spanking him with his leather belt the boy's father said well you're not going to become a writer in any case because oh best beloved at this time on the banks of the saloon river there were public writers who would write letters for people and read them the letters they received and you see the little boy's father was working hard to make the negro sweat on the peanut plantation and he thought that the writer who spent all his days sitting in the shade of a k-pop tree right in the middle of the village was a lazy man one fine morning at the beginning of summer the school teacher came to the plantation and explained to the little boy's parents that not only could their son read and write fast and well but that he also knew how to do sums using very big numbers and that it would be good to send him to secondary school in the big city so that he might learn all that can be done with all those big numbers and all that reading and writing but you see oh best beloved at that time and in the land around the saloon river no boy had ever gone to secondary school his parents listened politely and said they would think about it yet as soon as the school teacher left they fought his mother kicked his father punched and then they both started spanking the little boy without wasting any more time they even called the priest over for help the little boy's the boy's little brother was also spanked for good measure a little later when all that was over the little boy came across a yellow dog that belonged to one of his friends and said to him my father has spanked me and my mother has spanked me and the priest has spanked me but still i want to go to secondary school in the big city and learn how to do calculations with even bigger numbers and learn more about the number pi and the little yellow dog looked the little boy's face affectionately as the boy scratched him behind the ears naturally a few days later the school teacher came back to the plantation then the mayor then the school teacher once again each time they negotiated but with no success until the day when the school teacher came back saying that he had found a scholarship and then the boy's parents agreed to let the little boy leave they all spanked him once more for luck then he went away a little swollen it was a fine morning at the time of the equinox the little boy rode down the saloon river with his little suitcase on the pierogue the chickens have been pushed out of the way to clear a comfortable place for him it was the beginning of his new life after the pierogue the little boy took a steamboat that eventually brought him to the big city the world around him had expanded at school he went straight into seventh grade he was a very good student both a quick learner and a hard worker he was eager to learn so that he could find answers to the questions that stirred his insatiable curiosity he even got caught up in german because at that time obese beloved they learned german in secondary schools in the big cities of faraway lands he also took latin and greek he really liked poetry and would often recite another poem himself which said you'll be a man my son you see he thought that this poem was speaking to him because it said you just like this story is meant for you obese beloved at school no one spanked him the teachers loved him and pampered him especially the german teacher so he was very happy yet you must know that even though he really liked german his favorite class was mathematics that was where he also excelled the most in mathematics you were allowed to ask ever so many questions and even to come up with new ones as soon as you found the answers to the old ones and he loved numbers logical reasoning and even the most complicated shapes in geometry and then he was 15 so his professors came up with the idea of having him prepare for the exam to get into the occult polytechnique which was they said the greatest school in paris and the world this couldn't be done at the secondary school in the big city in the faraway land the teachers wanted him to go to paris which was the largest and most beautiful city in france as you know so the teachers wrote to the school teacher at the edge of the saloon river the school teacher went to see the boy's parents on the peanut plantation the boy who had taken the steamboat and the parogue to spend the summer with his father his mother his brother and the yellow dog was spanked from all sides his little brother was also spanked for good measure the yellow dog licked his face affectionately his teachers found a scholarship the father put his belt back on and in the end everyone left in single file towards the banks of the saloon there the boy who was a little swollen climbed into the parogue and the chickens were pushed out of the way to clear a comfortable place for him you can't go all the way to paris just by taking a parogue down the saloon river after the parogue and the steamboat the boy still had to get on an ocean liner and then a train but this is perhaps where an evil fairy appeared and christian fell gravely ill it was an illness with fever and delirium and so he had to be taken to the big hospital in the big city he stayed there for several weeks while the boats he didn't get on left for france it looked like he was going to die but as you know children don't die in fairy tales while he was sick there were times when he had nightmares filled with demons like the one the priest in the village on the banks of the saloon used to describe in catechism class and there were also more peaceful times when he thought about geometry problems and also a little bit about his nurse in the hospitals in big cities and far away lands the nurses were actually nuns the one who was taking care of the boy wore a cornet on her head a wooden cross and all those other things nuns wear you had to call her sister but that didn't prevent christian from seeing she was just a girl and he liked her very much at that time boys and girls didn't go to the same secondary schools and so this boy had never met any girls white girls of course there were black girls on the plantation on the banks of the saloon but at that time blacks didn't count the story isn't over but the fairy tale ends here at the moment when young christian fully recovered climbed bravely up the gangway of the ocean liner while thinking about his yellow dog and the ocean liner which was called afrique carried him over the atlantic ocean and the mediterranean sea past the canary islands morocco and spain to the railroad at marseille then it was the garden lyon and the greatest city in the world with its coachmen its chancelizé its eiffel towers its numbers its polytechnical schools its theorems and all of its pretty girls who reminded him of the pretty nun who had taken care of him at the hospital thank you my name is claire eater and i want to start by thanking alta for the opportunity to be here it's already been a wonderful day so far and i am just really impressed with my first alta experience so thanks i will be reading from three different contemporary french poets um and i will start with two poems by arian drafus um she was born in 1958 she's a professor specializing in literature and she has published over a dozen volumes of poetry most recently la lampe allumé si souvent dans l'ambre she lives and teaches in paris this is a poem from her book iris c'est votre bleu marie marie mustn't move or close her eyes valérie begins her daughter's portrait now the boat feels its anchor sink down marie must stand at the edge without spilling from herself a face like water driving water higher and the rope there below rippling to work with sufficient delicacy the base of the neck not to betray its fragility by stiffening it not to wreck the eyes to meet the astonishment of living feeling tears rise valérie looks at it upside down this painting where she shudders much better than herself in the mirror this painting could be death by blunder she has to know while the brush is in her hand and keep working to give up her light to write is less scorching even when it's slow head on or from behind the words don't see anyone i take one to light another sometimes a name never a face when i write i'm in the other room valérie seeks the exact point where she would be more face to face than in reality it's a hallway straight ahead incredibly after the silence it's still someone iris but god certainly not don't put empty words in your mouths men look at iris in spite of the wall upstanding it's your blue your line think a wound quickly stitched up your embroidery it's swelling joy a few seconds of love miraculously successive here the swaying of risen velvet iris next i'll read three poems by marie claire boncar from her book opera de limite this is orpheus and hades my journey begins in the mystery of a landscape without birds inhabited by white presences born from our seeding shadows mint on wounded memory you are the men hears of a civilization which would have lost the sun and i interrogate you in the belly of the enigmas fortress alone among your faces with my guts and the warm breath of my words i offer you an odor of cats and of women knowing that to say in this mute place is already to try on death i name the death of euridice and i forgot to read the bio for marie claire boncar she lives in paris where she is the professor america of at the paris serban university her most recent book of poems is violon vie she is the recipient of numerous prizes including the pre robert ganzo and this is another one by her stretched out a woman on the carpet tells its story of grass breasts hard against earth sprawls along land meets fresh forests under her dress nakedness knows the happy truce of stones of roots the mouth on hers is quiet silence runs the length of veins reaches the heart heads down to the ocean outside of infinitive and soft tree talk harvest of sap in the earth between resin and blood the sun sweetened by leaves filters a long dream over the verbs whispered without past or future a faultless gesture to drink to live to fuse your body with pine needles lying halfway outside of yourself your the echo of a tree's contentment and i'll finish but with a poem by christian prigeant christian prigeant has lived in roam in berlin and currently resides in britney from 1969 to 1993 he directed the avant-garde literary magazine txt as well as the txt book series he is the author of some 50 books of poetry fiction and criticism on literature and art so this poem comes from a longer poem series so sort of like one long poem broken into five parts this is called palatino referring to the palatine hill in roam which is the site of the romulus and remus myth and i'll go ahead and read the french first and then the english but i have to apologize for the one italian word that he includes here which i will butcher and there's also a couple of english words included in the french version and one made up word so it's a little strange but i think it's pretty fun as well so i'll read i'll read this palatino mosh palatino firemen olive trees trucks a junkie crankshaft peacocks clucks the gear grinder is the rural i feel it grumble then there's that which thunders stanzas castruzione women blocks zones a talc'd heap that powders a meadow greats canals h2o in 3d a guarantee is that it's flat echo stones kaka tanned underneath staccato cirroco everything trademarked wind and co tempo pumps s o the moan tones that form the fount and mount to the teeth eat all me eat thank you this is gonna work okay uh oh no that isn't gonna work okay so is an incredible honor to be here among these four women who have just read a bunch of translations that are a lot better than mine um and i i do here you go i love it um all right um it is it is a real a real honor to be here and i'm so glad to be back here at alta and i want to thank the entire alta community um but especially the 2014 fellows uh last year was my first alta um and it was their example that encouraged me to apply i'm gonna read uh a short piece from um a novel called yin shen yi the invisibility cloak by the chinese author goffay this is a book that i found in 2010 um in beijing and i stayed up in a true high school style i stayed up until two for a couple of nights until i finished it um and knew that i had to do it um i warn you there will be some singing and the the main character builds amplifiers he's uh he's an artist and he builds amplifiers and he's being beaten down by almost everyone uh including his own family that evening i arrived early chang baokuo had gone to play cards at the neighbor's place and wasn't yet back my sister was at the kitchen counter chopping meat she had ground pork in the fridge she could have used but she said that the machine ground chuck had a metallic taste to it she was only two years older than i but really showing her age it was the first time in a lot of years i'd looked at her closely there was an ingratiating quality to her an expression whenever she smiled she'd always been that way but now whenever i saw her face i felt a twinge of loathing but she asked me if i had met anyone i liked recently then followed up immediately on that with the announcement that she had a colleague in the office who was divorced in her 40s had a boy of about 13 you know a nice straightforward person pretty and well proportioned uh just had a bit of a lisp when she talked did i want to meet her i told her that a couple of days ago i had run into a fortune teller and it sounded from what he'd said like i might as well forget about getting married in this life i didn't mention where i was i had met him she wouldn't want to hear the name jiang sonping you believe blind scam artist too i've introduced you to quite a few women over the years and nothing ever works for you you know what i think you haven't gotten over that hussey you fun i chuckled and replied maybe you're right to appease her i didn't feel like going on about it do you want to go in and watch some tv ba will be back soon i just stared at her blankly without speaking looking at her hair which was dyed black but still yellowing i felt a sudden grief deja vu overcame me for a space and i could have sworn the woman standing in front of me was my own mother she was just as skinny as mom had been and getting smaller as she got older a cold draft blew through this kitchen the old locus tree outside shook off a few golden leaves and i felt a stinging in my nose i felt like i'm going up and giving her a hug do you want to go outside and walk around my sister was alarmed by my absentness i got up went outside and sat down in the courtyard stooped to have a smoke the alley was filled with parked cars motor dollies and all those tricycles that those metal with those metal cabins that the handicapped use the old state my dad's old workshop was long gone replaced by an open fire peaking duck restaurant the state run barbershop and the tailor shop run by the family from july's young were long gone as well only the public toilet was still as foul as it always had been only now its facade was checkerboarded with blue and white ceramic tile and of course not one of the faces that passed down the alley was familiar to me human memory really is unreliable i clearly remember this alley being long broad submerged in green shade or sprinkled with white locust flowers and nowhere near as cramped and seedy as it looked this day the intersection in the east end always had street vendors laying their blankets there in the summers they were always the same group of old men sitting with their straw hats weaving waving the bamboo fans over their wrinkled stomachs as they watched the emerald watermelons in the winter that corner was occupied either by a guy from shendong who cooked popcorn or by others who sold caramel hawberries or cotton candy as i sat on the stoop and surveyed the cluttered street i felt vaguely alienated from it all sacred fragments of my past life stirred my sluggish memory like echoes of a dying voice i'm no nostalgic man maybe my heart was heavy because this place used to be called home the shushing of trees in the roof the moon in the branches the wine of cicadas and the crashing of rain the smell of cold dust brushed from the furnace on an early morning all used to accompany me to bed night after night but once that unique kind of loneliness settles in your chest you feel the fear of time and life extinguishing as if the best years of your life had finally been squandered completely our place abutted the eastern end of the alley jiang sung ping lived on the western half our houses were separated by a private courtyard and a large compound for factory workers and their families the clean little courtyard rarely had residents only once in a while you would find a black luxury sedan parked in front of the stone lion at its door and at night a muted light in one of the windows of the tree shaded courtyard that would that would light up and stay lit all the way until morning to this day i have no idea who it was who used to live there i often saw young jiang sung ping come kicking a filthy pigs bladder or pushing an iron hoop from the west end of the alley to the east then turn just before the intersection and go back our house was right at the turning point of his mysterious solitary root sometimes it wasn't a pigs bladder an iron hoop or a slingshot that he had with him but a date seed which he dragged along the wall as he walked he scratched white line after white line on those dirty concrete walls already plastered with fuck and bring down until he'd worn two eyes and a mouth on the pit surface to make a little face no one ever paid any attention to him he eventually got familiar with my sister and started playing games with the local girls he turned out to be very good at all kinds of them hacky sack jump rope and jacks i expect it was loneliness that motivated him to go hang out with girls there was a spell when my sister was obsessed with jacks not the new metal ones but the old ones made from sheep knuckles she would take the s-shaped talus bones from the lamb and polish them until they shone then soak them in red ink to give them color she also sewed her own neat little bean bags and filled them with that those expensive green mung beans god knows how many times mother slapped her for that i never played the game myself so i don't know much about the rules but i've heard that you need at least four bones to play those were easy to get a hold of back in that day and age but jiang son ping somehow had a magic pocket that could produce whatever it was my sister wanted whenever he presented the fruits of his labor to her dropping the greasy black objects into her hands she would laugh and ask jiang son ping your parents own a meat market or something there was a time after the heart attack caught my father when i'd go to his wireless repair shop nearly every day somehow sitting quietly at the workstation where he used to sit made me feel a little better the other two repairmen pretended not to notice me they neither engaged me nor did they care what i did not even in the days immediately following my father's death did i ever hear a single word of comfort from either of them my young heart wouldn't take it i couldn't handle that kind of indifference and reacted with hate i would stomp into the repair shop every day sit down at my father's workstation stare at the half repaired radio and the green screwdriver it was my privilege when it got dark my mother would come crying and quietly take my take me home that was how it went nearly every day until one day came when the repairman we called horse whip walked over and sat quietly beside me for a long spell he smoked two cigarettes in a row and then his expression became serious he put a large hand on my shoulder side heavily and said to me i'll make a deal okay if you can get that old semiconductor your father left to make some noise again you could take it home how's that sound i was still very young back then and the idea of having a radio of my very own was beyond my wildest dreams so i started playing around with a dust covered mess horse whip taught me some basic skills how to recoil tangled magnet wire evenly along a spool how to scrape rust off the spring poles of battery with a razor edge how to find a short circuit and reconnect it with a bead of solder how to upgrade the system for a larger battery how to install capacitors and resistors about two weeks on my father's half gutted radio finally made a sound i still remember the first song i heard out of it was the revolutionary opera night assault on the white tigers with son yuqing singing lead role if i could ever have been said to have had an idol during those long years of my childhood it would have been son yuqing he was valiant he had a posture and a presence like nothing jho and the other modern celebrities could even dream of not even wang xiao gong the movie heartthrob that yufeng's generation all fell in love with could quite match up to this day the only peaking opera that i ever learned was that part he sang that day when i first turned the radio on from overthrow the american imperialist wolves yes uh 一旦见环国静来,张耀无兆,又疯狂! Debate has cleared our comrades' hearts and minds to see beyond the enemy's evil scheme. America's hunger for power knows no bounds. To conquer the world is their undying dream. When they fail, they hide the sword and talk of peace, but soon they wave their claws in avarice. Listening to that music on a sunny afternoon, I thought at how great it would be if my father was still here. If he heard this music, if he knew that I'd learned how to fix a radio, as I fantasized, I started to cry. A gust of cold wind hit my face, my chest relaxed, and the stone that had been blocking my throat and pressing down upon my heart finally disappeared. I finally accepted the fact that my father was gone. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. You were terrific. All of you. That was great.


Very good morning to you and thanks for joining us on the run-up. My name is Nyamgul Agadji and my name is Uche Chuku Onoda Okay, today we have lined up for your enjoyment If you may call it that way some issues that are at the front burner in our country One of those issues is the flood that is ravaging the states 32 states are affected out of the 36 states So one way or the other one person is affected right now watching us And I'm sure that maybe their families back home or Themselves are affected because even in Lagos we've seen flooding ravaging The people and the places in Lagos and it's usually never a very good sight to see And we also are going to be looking at holding political Office holders accountable. This is a conversation that often comes up and The blame game usually takes a huge part of this conversation And we're going to be looking at it later on on the show So you want to stick around for that and then we also have a surprise guest that is coming yesterday We were supposed to bring him on but because we were pressed for time We couldn't bring him on but you know sometimes things just happen By divine intervention so today will be a very good day to bring him But we are not going to let the cut out of the bag And we're hoping that you're going to be there until that time that we bring him on but the show Promises to be great. Let's take a short break and when we return we begin with our first guest This year there has been unprecedented flooding in many parts of Nigeria According to Sadia Omar Farouk Nigeria's minister for humanitarian affairs and disaster management 603 persons have so far died due to the disaster caused by the floods while 2407 persons have been injured with another one million three hundred thousand persons Currently displaced the federal government further announced that 82,000 houses have been destroyed 108,000 hectares of farmland and infrastructure on 332,000 hectares of land have been damaged Every year various parts of Nigerian federation get affected by floods despite warnings by the Nigerian meteorological agency NEMET for example in August this year the National Imagency Management Agency NEMMA Wants that 233 local government areas in 32 states of the federation would experience flooding Situating that prediction on the report issued by NEMET and asking state authorities to take preventive action NEMMA also provided advisory letters and risk maps to states to help them in designing and implementing mitigation measures When the floods came as predicted however it caught states local governments and communities napping Resulting in the calamity sighted at the top of this background story While global warming undoubtedly accounts for the increased flooding and its frightening large-scale impact in Nigeria and elsewhere it must be stressed that there are other Contributory factors for example during excessive rainfall Some of the dams in this country are opened when filled beyond their limits in order to avoid them bursting And further aggravating the environmental problem caused by the downpour Communities living along the watercourse of such dams get immediately overwhelmed because persons living in these places do not evacuate It has also been observed that rivers that have shrunk over the years are rapidly filled during torrential rainfall Resulting in this rivers reoccupying their seemingly dried up riverbeds In situations where those riverbeds have been encroached upon by developers the houses built are almost instantly submerged Leading to deaths, displacement and injury to members of the affected communities The action of some communities may also invariably result in flooding For instance, when the build houses directly on dried riverbeds When they throw refuse into rivers and wetlands Or when they indiscriminately throw waste materials into canals All of such action, as these have been identified as being partly or largely responsible for flooding Or exacerbating the disaster caused by global warming Of equal importance is the action or inaction of neighboring countries who are members together with Nigeria Of the various water governing authorities such as the Niger Basin Commission established in 1963 And comprising of Bene, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea and Niger In either adhering or not adhering to the water governing protocols of the commission Any illegal construction of dams on main rivers or their tributaries As well as release of water from those dams without warning or notice to downstream countries Has often resulted in devastating flooding of riparian states While the current flooding in the middle belt of Nigeria has not been attributed to any neighboring country It is instructive to observe that the release of water from the Lakdodam in Cameroon in July and October 2012 Affected Benwe and Kogi states in Nigeria, resulting in 431 persons dead and 1.3 million displaced As in that case, water release from that dam usually flooded communities in Nigeria along the River Benwe drainage basin It should be mentioned too that the River Benwe originates from Cameroon and at 183 km is the longest tributary of the River Niger It is saddening to observe that many states and local government authorities do little or nothing to prevent encroachment on river banks Or construction of houses in low lying areas that are prone to flooding When disasters invariably occur and to mitigate the impact of such environmental calamity The Nigerian constitution provides for an ecological fund, domiciled under the exclusive legislative list And being therefore administered by the federal government Many states have benefited from the federal intervention in the disbursement of this fund But some observers worry that such financial support may not have been judiciously utilized by some beneficiary states Just as they also decried a lack of preventive measures by such states to stop the type of calamity We have witnessed so far this year as a result of flooding Glad to know you're still there watching us It's still the run up and we're moving straight to our next part of the show as it is, I don't want to spoil this segment Mr. Agro Benson is the director of the NRSC Disaster management headquarters in Abuja and we're so glad to have him join us Good morning Mr. Benson Hello Mr. Benson, are you there? Good morning sir Good morning, how are you? We're doing great, thank you so much for joining us this morning on the run up Thank you for having us Alright, so it's not news that there's been a lot of flooding ravaging the entire country for a couple of months now We would like to know what is your organization doing to help mitigate the current situation in the country Thank you so much, the Nigeria Red Cross is doing great A lot of the activities are going on since the flood started We all know what happened during from around the 13th of September when the flood started from the northern part of the country Our volunteers are everywhere We are aware that the Nigeria Red Cross is operational in all the 36th and the FCT So we have people in all the branches So when it started the first thing they did was to join the process of search and rescue A lot of the branches went to work with the state emergency management agencies and other government agencies who were involved They don't work alone And they brought up people who were all over the place Who were hanging on trees Some of them were in their houses flooded Those who have a story duty were top of the... A lot of things And we also have, we have what we call the emergency system Who made sure that those who were injured are treated Minor wounds caused here and there And those you can save from the water To prevent drowning also Okay, well we are wondering how much of these people you have been able to cover In 32 states we are hearing that are being affected So how much of these have you covered so far in your intervention? Are you still there Mr. Benson? I'm here So how many of these areas have you been able to cover? And what are the current realities of the flooding in these areas? Like I told you we are present in all these states And if my job in some states are more active We call them branches The Red Cross branches in each of these states And in the local government we also have what we call the division So a lot of these people have been treated And what we have is a special way You are here at Abuja for instance And then you have this report coming in from different parts of the country Tell you what they are doing and the actions they are taking They are helping people who are in need Alright, thank you so much Mr. Benson But I'd like to ask you this question What has been the biggest challenge that you faced In the course of doing the good work that you are doing? Well, there are so many But first and foremost was the issue of access When I say access not because of any other thing But you know the flood and how it started So a lot of issues you will have noticed Even in the media and the social media How our volunteers in Kobe were there moving from one place to another Even in water We are in a life jacket So there are some areas that are so flooded Even the record members Having betrayed are able to reach And so we had to work with some other agencies Like NEMA, like the Ministry of Interior To have all the access to go into such places And then secondly the issue of resources Yes, human capital we have there We have more than 800,000 of jobs all over the country But you are doing that to mobilize this We couldn't let us talk to Mr. Benson But I think he made the major point He pointed out and answered most of the questions I know that it is not their responsibility But I would have loved to know in this interaction with other agencies Whether they are doing something to make sure that this kind of thing doesn't happen anymore In our country Because a lot of lives have been lost Exactly And it's a natural disaster But some other things have been listed as well As things that might cause this flooding For instance like in Lagos People like to drop things inside the canals And waterways and all that So when water comes It's very easy to get into the streets And lives could be lost Maybe we should talk more about The attitude of people towards the environment And now that we are already in this situation What would be the way for these questions I would have wanted to answer about that Thank you so much to Mr. Benson For answering us in the first place The run-up will continue After this quick break Stay with us and go anyway


I wanted to talk a little bit about the gap between science and politics and I got so curious Christian, I mean what is really the biggest difference between being a policymaker and a scientist or a researcher when it comes to what you want to do practically? I think the fascinating thing is exactly turning knowledge and research into policy. That's absolutely fascinating and my example of the World Bank social safety net in return of fossil fuel subsidies I really that that work gets a boost out of good research. When you can prove that you for instance can get the same poverty impact for a quarter of the price with the social safety net then you can with a fossil fuel subsidy that's good evidence that can really that speaks to politicians you know you know in Egypt they say oh we can get the same poverty income for a quarter of the price or fifth of the price you know and then we can do good climate policy at the same time that's a good deal for us you know. So turning more science more numbers more quantitative stuff and my ministry here will know that I'm pushing constantly for research evidence numbers numbers numbers in to inform my policy. But still there's still a consideration between the voters and showing them you know these are our results and if possible faster results while you're still in the government and this is what science says that can be much slower or could be something that you need to give money to this instead of creating jobs or you need to create jobs meanwhile you're doing international aid. Is there not a challenge in between attention in between these sometimes? Oh yeah at home and abroad that other gender is there for sure and right now of course all countries in Europe are pressured on their economic challenge on employment and youth unemployment Sweden Denmark Spain much worse even but therefore we need to be able to tell a convincing story also and I think more research should be done on that on how this is an investment how our international engagement is a really good investment in reducing poverty promoting human rights peace and security but how this investment is a really good deal for Europe as well and how it comes back multi-fold in peace and insecurity in less pirates and terrorism in less instability and conflict in fewer refugees and in more jobs and growth in Europe. We have just done a new report that hasn't been published yet we're still working on it that tries to make that point how this is an investment in Europe and I believe sincerely that only with a stronger international engagement right now can we pull Europe out of the crisis in the long run because we are missing big opportunities out there. Africa fastest growing economy half of the 20 fastest growing countries in the world are in Africa you know that's where we have opportunities new possibilities for Europe and if we're not internationally engaged right now we're going to miss out big time in the long run but you more researchers should come in show us prove discuss perhaps you know it's not a positive story but then we need to turn it into one at least. We have to tell the story to find the story. Gunilla today we have said that 20 years ago 90% of the poor lived in poor countries today most of them live in middle so-called middle income countries how do you comment should we consider folk focusing on poor people rather than poor countries or how do you see it. Well I think we can do both but it's also to see that we have a division of labor I think what I've said for the Swedish development assistance is that we should address people living poor people and oppressed people living in low income countries but of course most of our investments goes to poor people in middle income countries hopefully to people in the middle income countries but we also still in our area lack some good evaluation some good results we don't have enough data we have to be much better in collecting data improve the evidence back home to our voters because we still have and I would like to touch a little bit upon this with research because sometimes I'm who are coming from a farmers family and didn't do any research in my young years I really looked into reality but the problem when doing development assistance is that you're doing it from your own prejudice back home and your voters are also from here and they are feeded by Swedish news and media so it's it's not always that the science and the evidence are trickling down and sometimes the science as I see it is not really designed for politics even though we are coming from the Nordic countries where we do believe in science that has made made a fundamental basis for our welfare state what do you mean we are realistic what do you mean that science is not made for politics no but sometimes when you have a good report you have really to translate it four times in order to make it for those people that are working with development assistance or to my friends in the Swedish parliament it's really you know because sometimes there is an academic discussion going on that is not for people that are making the decisions and here we have to have Swedish parliament with us we have to have and and sometimes I feel that there is a huge gap and sometimes that that gap is too alarming because we have doing development assistance to in many aspects interpret this not only for a Swedish audience but also to make it in conformity to the poor people because they are my other servants I have to serve I serve the Swedish taxpayers and I serve the poor people in the world but also to see that these agendas are converging and it's really that we have to really see that we work with the people based upon science and evidence and here is still a linkage to be made so how would you like it to be I'd like it to be more much more practical and I like us who are doing development assistance to really prove the evidence and the results and to show that this is a good Krona invested for our common future because that's also speaks to all our politicians because we are happy to have quite a generous aid budget but I mean it can't be taken for granted we have to win that every every year not in Sweden we have it every four year every four years exactly because now we have a parliament that really believes in it but it's not taking for granted so I think if we can't root this in a timacy for development assistance and also to show the proof and that's why we have to work a little bit more on this with science when we are deciding upon our policies but again I think we really have to address the knowledge and the awareness about people living in low and middle income countries and thereby I'm really impressed by our own history in doing research without development assistance and not only have the research from Europe on this but also to have the local capacity in many developing countries that has benefited from our development assistance to build their own capacity to do their own interpretation and to show that this is actually valuable knowledge that's interesting because the researchers or the scientists often say oh we want the politicians to listen to us we want them to take our research in consideration because we have a lot of things to tell you and you say we would like to but we need to understand it better make it realistic for us so there is a possibility yeah but it takes two to tango I think we should be you want to hang out but I think also that researchers have to realize in what conditions politic political decisions are made these days okay before I let the audience in I'm very proud to welcome Mr Steven Anna Otto Arthur he's a member of parliament in Ghana and a former minister a local minister and mayor and he is here with us today an applaud one of the thing we had talked about today is also improving effective and good governance in the developing countries and well you have listened both to the ministers today and you've listened all day yes so are we on the right track on the right in the right direction do you think yes thank you very much before I get there love me um say a big thank you to you and you wider for the invitation extended to me to be here today and to you my honorable minister says an honor for me to share the same stage with you um I must say that climate change is a reality earlier on it was just a conjecture everybody thought that oh um this is something very far away from us but since this morning and what is happening in Africa particularly Ghana it is a reality if rainfall is become erratic if temperatures are rising on the average 1.72 uh degree Celsius uh nobody will tell you that it is a reality but is it that the local people out there really appreciate that there is climate change that is a big question if I tell you you go to so many places in Ghana and being so religious they tell you that the erratic rainfall is the world of god the end is near it tells you that it's been attributed to something else you know um the end is near which end is near I don't know but that is that is something um which is which is out there it also tells you that uh most of the um response from our areas to me is becoming more of responding to international architecture uh reporting uh sort of mechanism if the look including parliament including parliament how many times do you go out there and talk on platforms podcast platforms about climate change it also tells you that we myself in parliament institutions and others need to build their capacity to even to even be able to talk about climate sensitive budgets in our parliament if in parliament people do not really appreciate it and then you go to uh decentralized department the councils uh how would they be able to actually develop uh medium-term plans that respond to climate change but again the debate which has also come up I listened to Ed here when the honorable minister uh from Denmark spoke on um tariffs for instance removing tariffs um about 15 years ago in Ghana we saw this threat of climate change and for that matter we subsidized LPG uh um localized uh petroleum gas so that a lot of people will not be continuing failing trees for food but then they will be using gas the development partners the Bretton Woods institutions are telling Ghana look if you don't remove the subsidies uh this and that you're not going to get them any longer for that matter this year uh we removed subsidies from liquefied petroleum gas you go to rural areas people have gone back to cutting down trees for food so that debate about um you know subsidies do not get to the poor something that perhaps will be with us for for some time it is true this one I heard from Caesar that aid flows have been continued to Africa and she made mention of Ghana it is true but a bad news says this from 2012 to 2022 the 10-year period development partners have signed a compact with Ghana saying that uh Ghana has suddenly become a lower-income country there's oil finding in Ghana and for that matter by 2022 aid will cease from 2012 to 2022 it'll be waning until it ceases by that time how then would you be able to mitigate some of these challenges that climate change will definitely uh bring to us that is a big question what would you like what would you like to see now from the aid donors I mean you have I think that the dialogue that Ernabel minister has made mention of is very very very important it has come to be like it is uh country owned but is it really Ghana owned or responding to what the need that was see that what USAID and others really want Ghana to do so that aspect of country owned I don't really think we own we're responding to what that our partners want us to do to a large extent but a dialogue that has come up here I think is very important if both of us sit down we agree that look this is the way the people of Sweden the people of Denmark wanted to be done this is the way Ghana wants it want to see it we meet at that level I think it will solve the problem than you know responding to perhaps you know call it the powers that be we also talk about multilateral versus bilateral most people saying that multilateral would be more effective but you are talking about sitting down with Sweden and Denmark no by electrons in Ghana are doing very well they are actually contributing to budgetary support uh in Ghana and it's going to about between eight and ten percent annually which to me is quite huge between four hundred and five hundred million uh dollars yearly which is quite huge uh so yes so you think that's working well to me it is working the area that we need to uh engage each other the more that's the area that I'm talking about it's working okay comments on that I think what what Christian also said earlier and where we also have to sit down together a little bit better is also where we see the aspiration now in Africa about uh the capacity and the thinking about how to have much more of sustainability where Europe might lose out because we are so full of ourselves so we don't see the developments on the continent with a lot of aspiring also high tech a lot of knowledgeable people thinking about how to solve a practical problem and they might be very local but then can be scaled up and also making these leapfrogging in technologies so I think that's why we not only have to leverage on aid we also have to see how our private sector can also have a platforms for further discussions some other capital flows but also innovation technology and research that should be much more extended and and and uh changed uh exchanged uh because here I sense that we we have specifically with Africa solve our problems together and we are not really organizing for that and perhaps development assistance can be a better stepping stone for it but but what do you the two you say bilateral multilateral what would be the balance well we are increasing our multilateral share of aid but I don't think that's the most important question perhaps I think the most important question is how do we form a relationship between Ghana and Denmark and and I must say um I think we've had very good results together and also by means of budget support and I'm a huge fan of budget support sorry and uh and and uh because it's it's it's it's a starting point for a contractual relationship between us first of and and that's how we have to go forward and I think that what we wrote in the paper that Channing and I wrote is uh which was a little bit provocative is that the global blame game has to be over right uh you know we global blame game when we talk about climate change you know the global blame game has to be over we cannot any longer have negotiations internationally we say it was your fault so you have to solve it before we can sue anything and if you don't solve it first and we won't do anything you know that is not taking us anywhere and what we wrote in the paper and Channing wrote it so I can quote it uh is the world comes as a package right it comes as a package and and and there okay we are responsible for climate change but we also invested in windmills it's true uh that that that we did not behave well in colonial times but we have developed a few vaccines on the other hand and the mobile phone so the world comes as a package uh and you get it all and and that's why we need to get rid of that kind of your fault my fault and let's work together but let's do it in a contractual relationship and I think budget support is brilliant to do that where we can say to Ghana we will add our bit we will come in and assist you because we believe that everybody has core human rights and we should get them in place in Ghana as well we also believe that Ghana uh have a huge opportunities in terms of renewable energy uh in terms of preserving the forest for all its values and so let's do kind of a contractual relationship and and say we'll add our part you'll add yours and that's result spaced approaches to development and they can come multilaterally global partnership for education the global fund for HIV it's kind of a relationship like that and it can come by naturally but how do you create governments that urge adaptation and mitigation to climate change because that is has really been a big topic here today that good governance is the key for promoting this but that's why I want us to move out of this kind of a dependency and that's also what we hear from Africa now we gain independence but we are still dependent on aid and we have to have a true relation that is based upon equal understanding and equal responsibility and that's why I think the governance issue is key but if we only think it can be promoted from donors doing development assistance and capacity building I think we are doing a mistake we have to really see and to hold African themselves accountable for doing the job like Ghana has done and Botswana Sweden are not any bilateral donor to Ghana we are even more than Denmark in situations of fragility and going into two very weak situations so we are hardly no middle-income countries any longer and that means that we have another view of looking of this and I think when it comes to multilateral aid or bilateral it doesn't matter it's the result that counts and where I see in the future we see that could be the trading house for figuring out where to spend the money because they already today do a lot of multi bilateral but the debate about how we govern the world has to be based on equal understanding and not because I'm a donor you are a recipient and that's why we have to start to talk about global governance and look to ourselves and look to Europe if we are trustworthy because sometimes we also have double standards and that's why I think it's really has to be rooted from local also these things with understanding the need for good governance and thereby you can manage new scientific research you have to make better budgets in the parliament you can mobilize your own resources and to be held accountable yourself but while that is taking place of course we should support good governance and and and assist in capacity building on that but that it's not the only key


Hello, ElixirConf. I'm very excited to be here. This is the first time that I get to talk to other Elixir users about Elixir. So, please, yeah, that's sort of basically switching my local loopy group. So, I'm thinking it's Ruby. Next thing you know, we're talking about Elixir. So, my name is Richard Bishop, and I'm going to talk a little bit about the first two steps. And this is really, it's going to be about my experience learning the language and really coming from an object-oriented background and learning the group. So, a little bit more about me. I'm a software developer and consultant. I set a lot of Ruby, a lot of JavaScript, a lot of things. I maintain a blog at www.scribbling.com and you can find me complaining on Twitter. So, I'm from Calgary, from Canada, and recently moved there from San Diego, so you probably wouldn't do crazy stuff. And Elixir isn't really the only thing I'm sipping. Two of my big copies. I'm really big in their coffee. This is my setup of how I make coffee. Very, very manual process. And I find coffee and software really similar. I'm not trying to keep it simple. And we end up very, very fast, right? So, this is just human age. This is what we do. I'm also a huge craft beer junkie. I track down beer from all over the world. I love beer. I'm like a serial killer for beer. I photograph it, categorize it, store it, and I drink it. So, that's that. So, let's sort of, before I get into it, why Elixir? Really, why any language? There's a lot of choices. So, there's closure, and go, and rest. There's a lot to choose from. So, the first reason really, and what Dave talked about a lot, is curiosity and learning new things, right? Dave told us we have to learn a new language every year, and we do everything that Dave tells us to do. So, things like that. We should be looking, right? Things are constantly changing. Think about when Rails was created, right? Our problem was all the boilerplate to get data out of the database and turn it into HTML. That's not really the case in. So, new solutions arise. New problems arise. And two, I think, is concurrency. Hardware is a lot different now than it was. And, you know, I've been fortunate, or unfortunate, to work on some pretty big-scale Rails applications where you kind of end up with really big Amazon EC2 builds. And that led me to get more curious about concurrency in Ruby, but we were a bit limited there, right? It wasn't really a big focus when designing the language. We just have, for the most part, operating system processes and threads, and maybe some kind of data to prevent limitations. So, that sort of led me under quest, and then eventually how I ended up discovering Erlang and Elixir in that virtual machine.  So, the third reason would be maintainability. You can't write maintainable software. What good is it anyway, no matter how fast it is? And I think Elixir gives you a unique combination of those two things. So, the talk is the first few steps, and like I said, it's going to be about my experiences with my background learning Elixir. I've seen some other people, I've heard some other people say it had similar things, so maybe you can relate, or it's just another view to how I went about it. And then, at the end, I want to wrap it up with maybe a couple suggestions or things to think about to how we can be a more inviting language, right? There are 100 titles here today, someone said it has to be 301 or 501 next year, so let's see how maybe some things we can do a little bit better. So with that, let's get into the first step. So being, primarily, a Ruby developer, you see the syntax, right? As programmers we know syntax means nothing, but we can't help it, right? It's the first thing we do when we look at a new language, okay, it looks like this, it's kind of like this, or oh, there's no way I'm going to use this language because it doesn't, you know, not only do you see the stats there. So we know it means nothing, but we can't help ourselves. And when you start using a web server, this falls apart really quickly, right? Because immediately you're starting a functional programmer in the language. So functional programming, in my experience, has been really, really hard for our about-to-web server. I tried some of the other languages without much success. And we have a really embarrassing story about functional programming, and it's embarrassing because I thought I was doing it when I wasn't. So I was writing some JavaScript, right? And I was pairing with someone, and we were using this library called Underscore, and it touts itself as functional programming for JavaScript. But in reality, it's a library that polyfoils all the missing iterators into the browser. There's not really much functional about it other than iterators and such. So because I ended up using the merits of functional programming, right? There's a lot more to it than just iterated functions and broken closures and assigning or first-class functions, right? A lot of languages have those these days, and they're not functional languages. So you can say I was doing, oh, shithole programming, right? Another way to do it. So with that, you know, again, comparing my Victorian experience, you know, you spend a lot of time learning about patterns. Patterns, patterns, patterns. Pattern books and blog posts everywhere, right? That is the solution to all your own problems with patterns. And something that was refreshing is one night I was Googling and I typed functional programming patterns in it. And the very first result is, where are all the functional programming design patterns? And it made me realize, yes, I'm home. No more patterns. And so, you know, they might be out there, but I haven't really run into too many yet. So a lot of functional programming is just by itself in a whole lot. There's a few other things that kind of go with it. And pattern matching, right? Dave talked extensively about this. This is the best feature of the language. This is a requirement for me going forward. Any language I learn, I'm going to require pattern matching. So there's pattern matching for destructuring complex data. But I'm also going to focus on pattern matching and function heads, which to me is, I look at that as a form of low-level control for it, right? So, I'm going to show a little bit of the code and we're programmers. We can't enjoy something without condemning another. So I'm going to pick on imperative programming and object-oriented programming a little bit. So, has anybody here ever worked at a zoo or built a zoo app along the domain of animals before? Okay. Pretty good for you all then. So, we have a function. It looks like it could be any imperative language. It's called talk. But the main thing I want to highlight is this if-elsef. In a paragraph language, this might be the lowest form of flow control you have or a switch. So, we look at this animal. Check out its type. It's cow. We go new. We pay. We go point point. That's it. So, object-oriented programming comes along and languages usually have a polymorphism. So, we say, okay, you know, we can push that flow control a little bit lower, right?   And then we use that common interface that makes sound method as a way of controlling the flow or application. So, it's a little bit lower than it felt, but we've also introduced two new types. Whether, you know, that's a win for you. In this case, maybe not. In other cases, it might be. So, let's look at using pattern language. We have a mixer. We have a module called animal talker. And we have a talk function with two heads. And we're matching on a map on the type key, being cow, a pig. So, in terms of flow control, we've taken it out of the body of the function completely and we pushed it up into the head of the function. And I've found so far that this has helped me write so much more easily understood in maintainable code as I've been using the mixer. So, let's look at another little ingredient that really helps us come together even more. And that's recursion. So, a lot of people will tell you recursion is just for implementing loops. But that's sounding a bit short, right? It's also for job interviews in languages that you're just going to get system stackers. Right? I don't know why. So many Ruby interviews have been on asking me to do recursion. And yeah, I know you can turn on telecall optimization at compile time, but if you have to turn a feature on at compile time to language, no one's going to use it. So, the big thing with recursion is it changes how you codify the problems that you're solving. You get to focus on what you're actually trying to solve and you can push the outliers out using data matching. So, let's pick on imperative for anything so long. So this is, when I'm using an imperative layer, this is how I tend to see how I go through writing my code. You start with what we're trying to do and then we move to the outliers. In our coding style and imperative language, we add early returns or we might start off immediately branching to an if and else. Or, you know, after that I want to have some exception or more different returns. So, it really hurts us when we have to do all this because it ends up indent our code a lot. And a lot of us look at that shape that the indentation creates and say, oh, that's, you know, we're having it in our own direction. So, what you realize is your programs, you know, imperative languages, they kind of grow wider over time, right? All this branching. So, when you're able to use recursion and pattern matching, you're able to focus and flip things, right? You can immediately start focusing on the cell problem, right? If you're building a reducer, that's, you know, looking at the head and asking it's how long it's not. And then, when you want to actually handle the case, of when you reach an empty list, which can get ugly and imperative languages, you just pattern match the empty list and you stop bringing pattern into nil. So, when you code in this style, you notice that your programs tend to grow taller over time, rather than wider. And then another key ingredient here is immutable data structures. So, anytime you read advice from sort of the SAGE programs, they all say, what differentiates an average developer from a great developer? They always say data structures, knowing how to use them. And in object-oriented languages, I find we kind of, we don't really learn how to use data structures, we hide them, right? We do things like this, lots of classes like this in object-oriented code, we have some sort of array or hash, we tuck it away inside of a class, and then we implement tons of behavior around it. We're not really using data structures any better. And then one way of immutability is, in object-oriented languages, you're going to deal with a lot of state. It's like you're doing different things based on state. And I want to share this really great quote from Rich Hickey on state, from the Simple Made Easy Talk. If you haven't watched it before, I really recommend it. But this is the definition he gives. He says, state is a specific value for an identity at a point in time. And when I heard that, I kind of went back and listened to it a few more times. Something was jumping out of me, and I couldn't quite figure out what it was. And then it hit me.  So, do you see it? Yeah. I'm talking about time, right? Whether it's time zones, or hours, minutes, and seconds, or testing time. It is absolutely pain to deal with. And that's really what state is, is you're coupling values with time. And that adds a lot of complexity, that's Rich Hickey says. So getting rid of that makes your programs a lot more reasonable. So let's recap that first step. So we came in thinking, okay, this is just Rudy on a real language machine. And that's not at all the case, because we have great support for functional programming, all the pattern matching, and recursion to really build understandable systems. So, let's get a step before I move on to the next step. Okay, so, second step. You say to yourself, okay, looks like coffee script for early. I've heard this said so many times. Who would hear? Absolutely. This is like the next progression. And that's something that looks short, or value really short, right? Because the only benefit of coffee script is that you don't have to write long script. From what I understand, there's people out there that like writing early. So, clearly, if that's all Lixar offered, there would be nobody that would switch from a language to a Lixar. So, let's take a look and see why. It's more than just that. The first thing is better tooling. Before I ended up with a Lixar, I had some quick stops at some other languages. And it's really hard to get started with those languages, because you're kind of learning how you need to set up a few other things, dependencies, or how you want to structure your projects. Or, if you're using dependencies, everybody's got a different project structure. So, Lixar has mixed. It's a fantastic tool for such a young language to already have. You can start a new project, a pretty same project structure. You have a test suite and it manages your dependencies. What more could you ask for when you're coming to a new language? It makes it so easy to focus on learning the actual language. And, of course, we have hacks. So, we already have a package manager for restricting programs and getting hands-on programs. The next thing you really notice is that Lixar takes documentation very, very seriously. If you're not writing documentation for your code, you don't know how to blame it yourself. The first time that I ran a doc test, I think I just about flew out of my seat. Like, how crazy is that? Oh, my God. An IAX session inside of a test that we can make sure it's still valid as we change our code. So, we're not mis-meaning people. One of the worst cases with documentation is when it just gets out of date. So, we have a quick way of going. And then we have different levels of documentation that gets rendered differently, right? We can document modules. We can document functions. Of course, we can document types as well. And then there's a lot of convenience for getting at the documentation. You can easily look at it in IAX. It's in the H2N. And then we have XDoc if you want a web-based version. So, there's really no reason to not be writing documentation or reading documentation. It's so simple and straightforward. There's tooling. But the language also offers a few other features. Metaprogramming, right? So, I have to admit when I first came to Alexa I wasn't excited about metaprogramming at all. I didn't touch it for the first few months because I still had a metaprogramming hangover from Ruby. So, but as you start to use it you realize it's a little bit different. Number one is that we've learned, right? We've got the macro matchup. You can use macro when you can use a function. So, we're more responsible with our use of macros. Another great benefit in Alexa is that macro expansion happens at compile time, not at runtime. So, you can easily more easily debug the reason about what's actually going on and just kind of running and seeing what happens. And another interesting thing is that Elixir itself is mostly implemented in macros. So, we have if here implemented and then we have the last implemented using if. So, that changes the language, right? In a lot of languages, there's a lot of keywords that are sacred. You can't touch those. You can't change those. In Elixir, you can if you want to. You can extend the language if you want. So, what's great about this is in Elixir you get to have one of the holy sacred things that people love, right? They really, really value what they call bottom-up program. You can have that in Elixir. You can build the language up toward your program. So, you do this with DSLs and macros and it's very intriguing. You'll see some of it out there already but maybe we'll start to see some more of it. So, let's recap that second step. So, we came in and we thought, it's because there are lines I would but we realized there's quite a bit more to it than that. We're getting actual language features. We have better tooling so you can get started and focus on the program, rather than application structure and getting test suites and things to run. And then, of course, we have a robust macro system for extending the language and building our programs differently. So, at this point, you're kind of coming around on the language a bit and you've done some punctual programming and maybe you've played with processes a little bit and that's when everything really kicks in with overdrive for you. So, you're really coming around, right? So, you might say to yourself, wow, actors are more object-oriented than objects, right? If you go off the old Dr. L. M. K. definition of, you know, he envisioned cells and communicating with message passing. All the object-oriented programs didn't really behave that way, but when you isolate your code and the processes, it's a bit more like that. So, but there's pretty bit of conceptual overhead coming to this type of model. And that's the actor model, right? It's really unfamiliar to if you haven't used Erlang or I don't really know what else it's really using. There's this implementation in other languages but it's not the same when you try to bolt on the actor model. They're cellulose where actors are backed by positive spreads so you can't really have millions of them. So, there's nothing quite like a virtual machine that's designed for actors. And I didn't really get out there until there's this really off-the-cuff video of Carl Hewitt and this Danish guy with a really great tie-eye t-shirt. It's Eric Mayer, of course, where they really explain, right? What is an actor? What can it do? What can it do in mailboxes? And you start to see how that relates to processes in Erlang, right? We have mailboxes. It's all done communicating using messages. So if you do concurrency in any other language, you'll spend a lot of your time messing with new text in this, right? Pushing something over here into a queue and popping it off over there. You don't have to worry about that in what makes it start at all, right? Erlang virtual machine takes care of that for you. The other thing with processes is this is where you finally can put some state into your programs. Whereas you didn't provide before. But it's isolated. It's not just going to change up underneath you. You have to tell actors the same messages. So when you start to play with processes you try to glue together all these wacky little abstractions for doing different things with them. Maybe only having a worker pool or something. And it's really that. It doesn't work how you think it is. Thankfully we have this, right? We like to hate it. It's also there for us, right? So OTP is why a lot of people come to Erlang when it's current. People come to Erlang. And OTP is using OTP a lot easier. There's a lot of boilerplate. It's a very high ceremony to use OTP. And then what is OTP even? I feel like on a weekly basis my definition of OTP is changing. One day I just think it's for servers and supervisors. And then, oh then you find out it's actually a package of tools, right? The Erlang interpreter, the compiler, a database and some other standard libraries. So it's confusing what it even sort of what it all is. But either way, you should be using it and learning more about it because it's going to help you a lot. Something you'll read about is people trying to implement their own version of the supervisor. But then, you don't realize all the stuff behind the scenes that OTP's doing put up, right? So we get a lot of Erlang behind the scenes, a lot of you. However, you might actually end up looking. That's fine. And messages. And then there's the whole other side of this too, more administrative for your programs, right? handling releases and hot code really. So these are the things that we like to brag about that we have for our programs. So to recap the third sip we kind of came in thinking coming around actors are more object-oriented than objects in all of language. But it changes the way you create your programs, right? You have to start thinking in supervision trees. That's really the recurring theme when you're learning like so, right? Everything is about thinking differently. And OTP is no different. But it adds a bit of clarity to your program because when things are running concurrently you can usually look at your module and sort of picture it as that particular process. So finally, your last sip is that it's a language in its own right, right? We can stop these silly parallels to other languages that we use because they just don't fully hold up. So to look at all four of them we can strike the first two out immediately. It's nothing like read. It offers way more than JavaScript or JavaScript does. And then we can start embracing the things that really make it unique and make it useful. But the one thing, though, to get to this point is it's a bit tricky because things are so conceptually different than we're used to, right? In other languages your programs are almost always split up like in a typical web application. Some things serving requests, some things doing background work. And they're probably in different processes and deployed differently. It's not like that. So I want to quickly load some ideas and talk about some things that I think we should consider to kind of make the language a little bit more entitled so we can get to three hundred and one people. The first thing is productivity that sort of you're stuck from first using a language to creating something that you find cool. Now there's, you can't get around having to learn functional programming that's just that's just part of the deal picking up a language like this. But there are some things that maybe we can do to help build things that make people feel good, right? For some reason whenever someone looks at a new language they like to be able to build web applications or just return a 200k string of a world. I don't know if actually I'm sure everybody here can close their eyes and picture the Node.js and go HTTP handler implementations, right? That is like it's just all around the internet, right? You could be laying on the beach and a jet will drive by with the implementation of an HTTP handler and go. That's just really how they get people to use the languages. People are excited to set up an HTTP handler. So maybe we should think of a way to make that easier for people to do.  And like I said there's overhead to getting into that. You have to understand a little bit about processes in the publishing program. But could we use maybe a little more as we like to say magic at first? Think about if you come here from Ruby and you don't understand a language everything feels magic. But you're still able to get stuff done. And then as time goes on you work with a language a bit more. You start to understand a language. Magic isn't around anymore, right? Because you understand what's actually going on now. The next thing is our elevators pitch.  And then all these words start fumbling out of your mouth. Fault tolerance, distributed concurrent, right? But what does that mean to someone who maybe doesn't even have those issues? Elixir is a pretty good language all on its own. It doesn't have to just be used for those types of programs. You don't want to pigeonhole ourselves. So let's look at Elixir's description. You can see that it's so Elixir is a functional meta-programming aware of language built on top of the early VN. It is a dynamic language that focuses on tooling, leverage, early capabilities to build concurrent, distributed, full-time applications with hot code upgrades. Wow. Whenever I go to look at a new language I'm more interested in why I should use it. And not so much as the what. Yeah, they're tools, but you have to figure out sort of why. And with a message like this we're kind of still sitting in our ivory burlang towers preaching about all these awesome things we have to solve your problems. Or maybe these aren't your problems. So let's contrast that with Ruby's description. See what I did there with the colors? Very programming language color theme. Talk. So Ruby, a dynamic open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. That's the why, right? If you're looking at that language you say, wow, simple and productive. I wonder how. Now you can check it out to find out how those things are true. So you're curious, we want to check the language out. So I'm a programmer. I'm not a marketer. But I'll take a stab at what I think why to be a better description for a mixer. Because if I'm going to criticize it I should at least offer up something.  So this is what I'm thinking. A dynamic functional language designed for building scalable maintainable applications. That's the why. These are important things now. Scalability and maintainability is always. So if we pick someone's interest now what and a half, we can show an early virtual machine and lock free concurrency and hot code updates. So I really enjoy working with a mixer and lock. It's a joy of a program that you should use. I think it has a really bright future. Thank you. So your products they're not so much. So would you be in favor of expanding the docs language to support more annotations like Yard has as opposed to Ruby docs first freeform? Because if you're doing both spec and docs having to return to it that does the spec for you would be really nice and you would have to do spec at the same time. I guess in general would anyone think a more feature rich doc language in xdoc would be helpful? I really like Yard and Ruby because it looks to our doc. Because it makes it more standard and more parsable. But some people are like to me type annotations. I think right now it's pretty hard to pick on documentation on what's it. From what I found it's the easiest to use so far in comparing to other languages. I didn't use Yard a whole lot so of course that can't really compare those features. Thank you.


Hey there, Chad Barnes here for High University Libraries, one of the best resources to look at when analyzing industry ratios and comparing company ratios is a database called Research Insight, also called CompUstat. This video shows you how to find ratios and compare them across multiple areas including liquidity, activity, profitability, leverage, dividends, things like that. So this video shows you how to compare up to six companies using Research Insight and looking at their ratios. So here you go. So when you first get to Research Insight, you'll be presented with this screen and so welcome to Research Insight and you have all these options here. If you ever lose this, if you ever close it, all you have to do is click on the shaking hands here and that will actually bring you back up here. So to find our ratio report, what we're going to do is click on Open Report here. And there's all kinds of options you can look through in here and there is actually, if you go under and look under Ratio Reports and Modules, there is content in there, but this will only give you reports for one single company at a time. So what we're going to do is look under the comparative reports and here is a comparative annual ratio report right here. We'll click Finish and we can run it for the current time period or change select period to change it to a period of time that we want. I'm just going to use the current time period and click OK and then here we can compare up to six companies at a time. So let's say you want to do Time Warner Cable, we want to do Direct TV, we want to do Amazon, we will do Walmart and let's say you want to do Comcast, but you don't know the ticker for Comcast. What you can do is go over here and click Lookup and then just type, start typing your company here. So we'll do Comcast, select the company there and click Paste and then click Close and you see it puts in there for us and then we just click OK and we can add a six company if we want to. We'll just click OK here and there is our comparative annual ratio report for the latest fiscal year and as you can see they organize these by liquidity, activity, performance, profitability and you scroll down some more leverage, dividends, things like that. So now what you can do if you wanted to save this to Excel, you can actually go up here and click on the big save icon. This will actually save as a text file under text options. If you leave it at Tab, you can just open it within Excel, just find and import it that way. So you'll notice there's no averages here, but you can easily go into Excel and create your own averages in a column out to the right as well. So that's how you get a comparative annual ratio report in Standard Imports Research Insight. Hope this video helps you better understand how to find ratios and look at them in Research Insight. Should you need more help, look for the contact link on the business blog, we're glad to help you anyway. Take care and best of luck with your research.