Gentlemen, welcome here to the little studio in the Fine Arts building. My name is Blair Thomas, I'm the director of the Puppet Festival, and we're so glad to be here for our second book talk with Paulette Richards and her book. And Marissa Finley is going to be the moderator. Marissa is a professor down at the University of Chicago, also a puppet scholar herself. We have a top secret archive on our website that nobody knows about, that I'm now telling for the first time that we're making documentation of each of our festivals, and we have scholars who write essays about critical essays about each performance. And Marissa is one of those scholars, Paulette as well, but Marissa is also one, so if you dig around in our archive, it's a kind of interesting, we've got some nice little juicy stuff we put there. But anyway, without further ado, I'd like to introduce Marissa and we'll begin. Hello, hello. I am very excited to introduce Paulette Richards, who is an independent researcher and has taught at Georgetown University, Tulane University in Georgia Tech. During her time as a 2013-2014 Fulbright scholar in Senegal, she began to focus her multidisciplinary interest in African diasporan cultural studies on puppets, masks, and performing objects. Dr. Paulette Richards is also the co-curator of the Living Objects African American Puppetry exhibit at the University of Connecticut's Ballard Institute and Museum with Dr. John Bell. Dr. Richards has also curated a traveling exhibit on the Wonderland Puppet Theater, and her book that we are celebrating here today, Object Performance in the Black Atlantic, the United States, was recently selected as a UNIMA USA Nancy Staube Award winner for excellence in writing and the art of puppetry. And Paulette and I actually met at the Schomburg Center in New York while Paulette was researching this book. We were working on the same archive, sort of passing back and forth documents, so it's really special to now see that work in published form. And I'm going to pass it now to Paulette to say a little introduction. Okay. Thank you, Marissa. Thank you, Blair. And thank all of you for coming out. Unfortunately, we were not able to get copies of the book here for you to buy at the festival. However, although I'm not Oprah and I can't put a car under each of your seats, if you look on your seat, you have a premium, which is a church fan puppet that you can make. And on the back is the QR code where you can go to order a copy of the book. So now that we have that out of the way, I'll see what Marissa wants to ask me about the book. I have so many things to ask you. Okay. So my first question is sort of about the methodology of this project, which is super unique. And you sort of tell us in your intro that instead of looking for historical moments when an African performance tradition was suppressed under slavery, which I imagine would entail sort of looking at the history told from the perspective of the slave owner, or at least from sort of sites of racial conflict to sort of where history making happens, you instead look at pre-existing performance traditions in Africa and search for evidence of their reemergence within the Black Atlantic. And so I was just wondering if you could talk a little more about this methodology. Would it allow you to see that you would have missed otherwise and sort of what challenges arose in this sort of particular pursuit? Okay. Thank you. I'm having trouble getting into the full screen view of PowerPoint, so I'll just leave this up for now. This project actually started around 2017 when I started working with Dr. John Bell on the Living Objects African American Puppetry exhibit. One of our main questions was, is there a distinctive African American puppetry tradition? And if so, is there any persistence of African object performance in African American puppetry? And we immediately hit a brick wall because the material record did not exist in the period of enslavement. Enslave people for a variety of reasons were not able or not permitted to make the kinds of figurative objects they had made in Africa. And so I'm missing objects. What can I say about object performance? And so what I decided instead was to look at the whole complex in which the objects would have been performed. And I made this Venn diagram. So in the center, we would see a public ceremony like the Gelede mask spectacle, which encompasses all of these forms. So I saw that the primary function of object performance in Africa, as I understood it, were three, rituals for spiritual observance, storytelling, primarily for moral education of the youth, and masquerade, which was a phenomenal community building activity. So I figured, and those of you who are visual artists will know the concept of negative space. So in order to define the thing that I was looking for that was missing, I thought if I can define the negative space around it, then it will come into view. Yeah, well, I guess my next question does sort of, I guess, look at what comes into view when we look at this. And your collection of objects in the study are extremely eclectic, and we often don't think of many of them as puppets traditionally. So we have musical instruments, church fans, as we have under our seats, story quilts to name only a few. And when you include these, you also make a really strong intervention into sort of current studies of puppetry, and you propose that attending to the relationships between African object performance and African-American puppetry traditions, we sort of disrupt our Eurocentric definitions of puppetry. And I'm sort of curious, what new definition would you offer us, puppetry scholars, given this important reframing? Or also, what should we notice that we've been overlooking? What do we learn by sort of looking at these other objects as puppets? Okay, great. So I'm thankful to Frank Proshan, who back in the 80s came up with the term performing object. And then that's kind of capacious enough to include many things that are not figures manipulated on a stage in a theatrical performance. He was trained as an anthropologist and was also into semiotic theory. So he was looking at how objects mean, and particularly how objects could create meaning in performance. So I'm like, good, I'll take that, and then I'll start stretching this word puppet and see what I can stuff in there, since I don't have the objects that were lost in the period of enslavement. So what that offers, I think, to puppetry studies or object performance studies overall is that there are other, hmm, how can I put this, performance traditions around the world that also do not center performance in a theater on a stage. And so that gives us an opportunity to talk about what kinds of objects are people manipulating in those performance contexts. Yeah, I mean, can you actually, I think, at least for me, like the musical instrument and the fan, they both have animacy. Like we sort of see how they are both in performance contexts in certain ways, or at least get sort of moved. Can you talk about the story quilt? This one seems like maybe, like, how do you see performance in the story quilt? Okay, good. I'm glad you said that word animacy, because I didn't finish what I should have said for the definition. When we were developing the Living Objects exhibit, we had a discussion, the advisory board, about what is a puppet, what are we going to count as a puppet. And we decided it functions as a character in a narrative that has agency to affect the outcome. And so the quilt, well, the musical instruments, I shoehorned in there because my mentor Kalamuya Salam in New Orleans has argued that because Africans were mixed up from many different regions and not allowed to speak their original languages, that the mother tongue of Black America is music. Therefore, when we look at a tradition like the blues, which is a testimonial, and we look at musicians like BB King, I said, okay, I can argue that they are using the instrument itself as a character in a narrative with agency to affect the outcome. Lucille is a character, and therefore I can call that a performing object. So I took that ball and ran with it. As far as the quilts go, quilts are repositories of stories because they often have stories stitched onto them or into them, but in the tradition of making quilts, that was also an occasion for people to gather together and tell stories. So they were repositories of stories in that way. And then each piece of fabric, at least for the people immediately connected to that quilt would be a story itself. That was your grandfather's shirt that he wore when he was out plowing the fields. This is a fragment of the dress that your aunt was wearing when she met your uncle. And many families have those kinds of stories in objects like quilts that are handed down. But what has happened in my study of contemporary African-American puppeteers is that many of them are using quilts in much the same way that Brett and Puppet does with Conta Storia. And so they use the quilt to tell a narrative. And that way, I figured that fits into my definition too. I'll just stick that in there. Yes. Yeah, I mean, also I think you write about there use on the Underground Railroad as well, which seems like in terms of impacting the outcome of certain kinds of journeys as well, but that's that you're animating in that way as well. Yeah, so I have to give a caveat there because this is still controversial. There is some scholarship that asserts that the patterns that people stitched into quilts, and any of you who are quilters, you know, things like log cabin, frying geese, et cetera, that those were used as signals on the Underground Railroad so that people might hang a quilt outside of a safe house and anybody passing by who was trying to escape could see, oh, this is a place where I can stop and be taken care of. Or I can't stop here, but the geese are pointing in this direction, so I need to take this fork in the road and keep going. So that's the argument. We don't have the hard documentation on that, and so it's still kind of controversial, but it's plausible, I would say. And maybe since we have church fans, and since we've now talked about just a few of the different kinds of objects, will you just talk a little bit about church fans as puppets, like how do we frame those that way? OK, so I developed the church fans argument in the chapter on African-American puppet ministry, and so I don't know, some people may belong to congregations where there is a puppet ministry, and that's often a youth ministry, and so the young people will come out with their puppets during the service in the sanctuary, ooh, OK, and they might perform a little song or a little skit with the puppets. That became popular in the 1970s after the Muppets blew up, but, and as far as I could tell in my research, that was a crossover from white churches into black churches, but I was invited to look at what kind of performing objects were in black church services before the Muppets and all of that, and one thing was the fan. Fans had a lot of different ceremonial functions in Africa, and so this is an object that people had the embodied knowledge of how to make it, how to weave it from different kinds of grass, and it was also an object that people actually were allowed to make. I can't make a mask like we would have danced, but I can make a fan, and so the fans were in church even before the technology of chromolithography made it cheap to print them, and so fans exist in American culture as an advertising promo, first and foremost, and there are some really, if you look in the archives, some really disturbing blackface fans, but at the same time, in black churches, there were also black businesses donating fans to their local church, and those would be printed with positive images of black people, so you would see a well-dressed black family attending church or a hero of the civil rights movement like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and I argue that those, we can look at them as rod puppets because during the service, okay, the first thing that a puppet does is breathe, so the fan is moving breath all through the church. We might have an Aretha Franklin fan, and the choir is singing an Aretha Franklin song, and people are gesturing with their fans during the song, and so it's almost like many Aretha's throughout the congregation are singing, and then if you were a little kid like me, and the service is long and boring, and you have your hand on one of these fans, you could be off on all kinds of adventures with this character, right, so that was how I stretched that definition and shoehorned the fans into puppets.  Okay, so another question I had is it's another sort of terminology that you offer us that I find really generative, where you distinguish between scripts and stories, and I just am curious if you could just kind of explain like what is the distinction between these two words and how might it relate to contemporary puppet theater and thinking about contemporary puppeteers, like how might we as a part of the puppet community today distinguish between scripts and stories in here within our own work? Okay, yeah, that's a good question, because when I was making that distinction, I wasn't looking so much at puppet theater, so I had my diagram and I was filling in things in African-American performance that fit into the different places, and then I got over here to the intersection between ritual and masquerade, and I was like, how can that exist without a narrative, without a story? And then I had a really bad moment because this was around, I think this came to me in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd had been murdered, and I realized that drawing on conclusions I had come to in the living object process of researching the living objects exhibit that one function of African-American object performance is primary one, the one that you will find in all African-American puppeteers work, and they are a very diverse group, they use all different kinds of puppets, etc., is resistance to the objectification of black bodies. So if I have the power to manipulate this object and tell my story and give it agency, then I am not an object myself, even though the larger society is continually trying to force black bodies into that object status. So then I read some scholars who were parsing the phenomenon of lynching as a spectacle drama. Lynchings very often took place in public squares, and they were kind of a festive event for the white community that attended them. And one scholar, I think Kirk Wayne Foss, even drew a metaphor of the black body, the lynched black body as a marionette. So I saw all of that in this place where ritual and masquerade meet without a narrative, because what happens when this script gets activated is that the people participating in it surrender their agency to change the outcome of the story. And so the book opens, in the introduction, I talk about a biracial police officer. He was Nigerian on his father's side, and Caucasian on his mother's side. He joined the Minneapolis police force, because he thought that his biracial status would enable him to be a bridge between the police and his community. So he joined with the best of intentions. Derek Chauvin was his supervisor during his training. And the day of the murder, he helped pin George Floyd to the ground while Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck and choked him to death. And so he surrendered his agency to change the outcome of that script. So that's where the idea of scripts come from. Yeah, and how does stories offer us a different way of thinking about narrative? Yeah, can you just talk a little bit about the story part? So in a story, and this is once again extremely important to African-American artists, because there's been so little space for us to tell our stories. And even though we have told them and kept them alive in the oral tradition, there hasn't been much space for them to be recorded or disseminated either. So the idea of empowerment through a narrative in which you present your experience, the experience of your community as people who have agency, who are not objects, is extremely important. Yeah, so it seems like in this instance, you're thinking about how scripts and stories actually are a lot about the agency of the person telling them through either objects themselves or objectified people. And that you're sort of actually recasting where we understand the agency to sort of lie. It's now in the actual narrative process. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, this actually, I think this leads well into my next question, which is a bit of a big one. So, I mean, you attend really carefully to the differences between sort of stereotypical objectified representations of Black people in different kinds of performing cultures, and then performing objects that represent Black people with beauty and agency, as sort of you were just describing. And the providence of these objects are often unknown, as you've also sort of mentioned. And so you do a lot of really careful parsing to sort of distinguish those objects that stem from a harmful tradition, from a liberatory one, given that even just within artistic practice, both these sort of scripts and stories are very present. And I'm just wondering if you can talk about the methodology you use when sort of actually identifying these two traditions from one another, especially because the performance repertoires are often lost. And then how do you attend to moments where they intersect and overlap and come into conflict as there's multiple instances in the book where they do. Okay, I'll tackle that.  And I want to ask everybody to take, let's take three deep breaths together so you can find your center. When we deal with blackface and racial issues, up to, you know, recent times, if we deal with it at all, it's been at an intellectual level. And we're not going to move the way that people think and the way that they respond and act unless people tap into the emotional level. So when we look at these images, I'm going to ask you to let the emotions rise, but I don't want anybody to get overwhelmed. So we're going to take three deep breaths, you can find your center first, and then we're going to go in. Okay, ready? And okay, so this is a puppet by Ralph Chasse from a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. And the character is Topsy. So if you're familiar with the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Topsy is an enslaved girl who has no parents, and is kind of feral in a way she just grew is the way she explains herself. So on the one hand, we can look at this object and see that it matches closely. The kind of stereotypical imagery that was common in I think this show was from like 1933. In the 1930s, so it has the exaggerated big lips and the broad flat nose and the bugged eyes, etc. But Ralph Chasse was from a mixed race Creole family in New Orleans. And in the not his father, but his grandfather had kind of made an arrangement with the census taker to classify the family as white. However, when his sister became engaged, someone sent a postcard to her fiance, showing her with a black pic in any child. So outed the family. And they all moved to San Francisco, where Ralph was already living to get away from the persecution that they would have felt if they had continued to live in New Orleans as people so New Orleans is complicated to because in its French and Spanish colonial history, the racial categorization was three part.  So they moved to San Francisco, and they did this show. And by a stroke of luck, I found in the Center for puppetry arts, the play bill for this show, which I meant to put in the slideshow, but I forgot. So I looked closely at that. And I noticed that even though this is a family that is passing for white, and has suffered a tremendous consequence for being outed as not white, when they put this show on, the Chester family members took the roles of the black characters.  And so then I have to look at this image a little differently, knowing their family background and knowing the rest of Chasse's opus. So let's look here at the image I got for the cover of the book. And I think that what Chasse is doing is referencing both the stereotypical blackface imagery of African Americans, his own lived experience in a multiracial community and African masks in order to create these stylized faces. So then if I go back down here, you can see the planes and angles that are often in the kind of stylized masks that Africans had created. And also we look at Topsy's demeanor. Topsy was often played as a comical character in theatrical productions of Uncle Tom's Cabin. And she was meant to be laughed at. There's nothing laughable about this Topsy. It's full of pathos. And when you see her, you feel her pain.  Let's get away from that image because it's disturbing. Okay, there's another one. But yes, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, we have a little, I think we have time to sort of dwell a little longer with this question as well. If you want to look at one more example of where this collision happens, because I find it really fascinating how you do this kind of tracking. Okay, so I have juxtaposed here to images is another way that I know what I'm looking at. So in the living objects, the criteria we established for counting this puppets as black puppetry is it was built or performed by an African American artist. And so on the right, we have a jig doll, which I don't think anyone would choose to represent themselves like that. And on the left, we have two jigmen by Garland Farwell, who deliberately nailed their feet to the platform. And explicitly, in his description says they don't dance. They refuse to dance. It is their resistance to this long tradition of minstrel representation of black characters. And then I have some more, you know, juxtaposing how the African American artists choose to represent themselves compared to how they were represented. So this, these are two of the figures that John W. Cooper, our ventriloquist friend, used in his performances. Now, both of these, he didn't make them, but he had them custom made for him. According to his instructions. And so to the same dollmaker as Charlie McCarthy, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. And the the there's a letter in the archive where the the fabricator says, Oh, I can make you a beautiful black boy. And that's what he has produced at Cooper's behest. And then on the other side, this is a dig doll by a master carver at master African American carver from North Carolina named George surveillance. And it is in the lineage of African American tap dancers, elegant tap dancers of the 30s, like John Bubbles, who was the original sport in life in poor game best. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is incredibly fascinating to I mean, just like the richness of these objects are also it's really wonderful to see. Oh, yes, of course, I've seen Sam perform with Yes. So then one more shout out for local Chicago artists. This is Sam Lewis, who was leading the catapult last weekend. And he got hold of a menstrual puppet that was sold as Jambo the driver and developed a show which is very unsettling to watch it first because Jambo the driver cave with a record. And the record is a white artist approximating jive talk. And so he comes out manipulating Jambo. Well, he calls this character just hand bone to the recording. And then he gets rid of the recording. And just hand bone gets into a rap battle and a dance battle with a tap dancer. And it completely changes how we understand the character. So this is a very fine line to walk. But some African American performers are willing to take that risk in order to reclaim this imagery that has been extremely harmful in the past. Yeah, so I think now would be a good time to transition to my last question, which is also a very exciting one, which is that you are also puppeteer and filmmaker. And you write a little bit about your own practice in the book. But I am curious to just hear a little more about how your own artistic practice has influenced, of course, the book project, but also your perspectives on puppetry writ large. Okay, so yeah, I gotta be fast because I want to show this and I want there to be time for questions. Basically, I wrote the book because I wanted to know what tradition am I in. And I wanted to be able to give that to the artists that were in the exhibit, and also that I talk about in the book. And I'll give one example for why this is important. There is a wonderful artist named Marjuan Kennedy, who lives in Washington, DC area. She has a whole she has a basically a media company. So she did a stage production of one of her children's books, which is a retelling of some rare rabbit stories. And there they are kind of Muppet style puppets. But you can see the the performers are kind of carrying them around on the stage and the legs are just dangling. And according to traditional Muppet performance technique, that's not good. You know, what first thing we learned in puppetry besides breath floor focus breath. So having the puppets legs just dangling, that would look like poor technique. But Kennedy's family is from Trinidad. And she's rooted in the carnival tradition.  And so being able to articulate that in the book, then when she's applying for grants and other things, you can say, This is what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing. So that's, that's the inspiration. Yeah. Amazing. Are we going to see some of your work with your indulgence? I'm going to take five minutes to show. And once again, this has a trigger warning on it. But this is a piece of my work. And then we'll have time for questions. Is that your voice, Paulette? Yes. Yeah, that was beautiful. Okay, I think we need our three breaths again. Okay. Okay, floor is open. I can bring the mic around. And Taylor, do we have any from online? Okay, great. Oh, I'm just trying to find the title card. But first of all, thank you, having had the privilege of hearing a little about your process and the recording, the track for Blacks and Bays. Thank you for putting yourself through that, frankly, so that we could, you know, see this beautifully realized work, your vocals really wrecked us all. But then the actual question is, you were you spoke a little bit about the use of church fans initially as advertising promo. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to the use of, like, horrible, the appropriate kind of the white gaze when it comes to those awful racist characters such as like Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima. And because I recall you saying something about Aunt Jemima as puppet, and I love to hear you say more about that. Okay. Thank you. So thank you for that question, because it lets me tie in with the first author talk in which Colette Searls spoke about this concept of material characters, which we're building on top of Dacia Posner's essay about material performance. And Dacia was the moderator for the second artist panel. So things are coming together. This is great. So there was supposed to be a chapter in the book called Healing Our Brands that was a deep dive into this history of blackface material characters. And it went from the literal branding of flesh to show that this person belongs to the person who claims to own them to these characters that were created like Aunt Jemima, sometimes performed by live actors, very often spread through the culture in mass media as either performing objects because you could get dolls and all kinds of other toys, or as illustrations in advertisements, or as even animated characters. So that chapter was supposed to be in the book. And the outside reader had some objections, and I had the evidence that I needed to respond to those objections. But I was already 5,000 words over what the publisher was giving me. And I needed at least two or 3,000 more to respond to the outside reader. So I just said, I'll take that out. But in the chapter on mechanical negroes, which is specifically about the Limberjack puppets or jig dolls, I was able to address some of that. So maybe there'll be a future edition of the book where I can put that chapter back in or I will publish it somewhere else. But thank you for the question. Yes, Jackie. Thank you. Beautiful, beautiful work. Question. Can you talk about activism and puppetry and white gaze? And who has the right to present activism about a culture versus another group? Okay, that makes any sense. I think so. So Jacqueline Wade is one of the artists I profile in the book, and she's in the chapter on African American puppetry and social activism. So as the creator of a giant parade puppet that represents Mumia Abu Jamal, a political prisoner, who's been incarcerated for over 40 years now, 42 years. Jackie is one of the prime examples of how African Americans are using this art form to advance political protests to be heard in a way that was not possible without this giant puppet who has the right to perform those objects. That was a huge discussion that we had when we were developing the living objects exhibit and during the living objects symposium, which happened in February of 2019 while the exhibit was up. And I think that, you know, that question is not entirely settled at the moment. For myself, I see racism as an economic system above all. And so my question is always who is profiting from the performance? And is this performance keeping the people who developed this culture from profiting? Is that a satisfying answer? Yeah, so I'm not mad at the person in a community where there are very few African Americans who decides to introduce the Anansi stories to their community and tours the libraries doing that show, unless they are blocking someone who's directly connected to that lineage from doing those shows. More questions? No, I have many more questions. I'm just fascinated by the use of objects and storytelling traditions. And that there's such a distinctive tradition of African American culture in a variety of different ways. And if there's if there's any evidence you found of the doll functioning in storytelling, like this whole notion of the storyteller is its own tradition and own line, you know, and it exists, etc. And just and it makes me think, I think about that because there's the in Japan, it was several hundred year period between the storyteller and the in their emergence of the Banraku doll, right, the Ningyojori, it be several hundred years before they finally came together and became and then became a highly refined form. But for many years, it was they were separate. And then eventually, so it must I was wondering if you found any evidence of that. Yay, my favorite subject dolls. So I come to puppetry from dolls. I'm a Barbie girl. But the things that I was doing with Barbie are not what people usually imagine that little girls do with Barbie. So and I always wanted her to come alive. And that's why I started making little videos with dolls. And then I realized that I was doing puppetry because stop motion is just impossible amount of labor. And so I started finding ways to manipulate the figures with my hands out of the frame. And that's puppetry. So in the historical record, when we hit this brick wall, looking for objects that were performed, I put puppet, I put Marionette into the Library of Congress has digitized all of the WPA interviews that were done with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s. And so I typed that into the index to see what I would get nothing. So that doesn't mean that people didn't have puppets, but nobody asked about it. So that's lost. But when I came back and I typed in doll, Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing, us had dolls is what people said. Some of the dolls were made by parents and given to their children. Some of the dolls were made by the white mistress and given as Christmas presents, or sometimes they even purchase dolls to give to the enslaved children as Christmas presents. So people had access to dolls. And the other thing about dolls is that you could keep them and assign your own meaning to the doll. And it would not be visible to the outside society that might feel a certain kind of way about the dolls. And so the dolls were very important for carrying particularly spiritual meanings. I'm currently part of this exhibit, the calling the transformative power of African American doll and puppet making, which is at the City Lore Museum Gallery in New York City until March 3rd. And it's it's a really phenomenal show looking at how African American doll makers have used dolls to tell stories, and also as a spiritual practice. So your question is right on Blair. This is the figure that I have in the show Madame Caffour. And I have fortunately in this day and age, the latitude to be open about spiritual practices that had to be hidden in the past. So Madame Caffour is a Gede figure in the Haitian Vodun Pantheon. Gede is the keeper of the well he's actually a spirit of death. And the transition between the spirit and the material world. So it's made of recycled materials, you can see the water jug as the face. The dress is made of energy drink cans, which my partner will not recycle. And so I was trying to keep some of them out of the waste stream, and by turning them into this dress, and then they are strung together on cords that are I cut plastic bags into strips, and braid them.  I have actually a quick follow up question just about you talked about your doll into puppet. And just thinking about the film you showed and your decision to have your presence in the film just be the voice and to not show your hands. And just given your focus on the puppeteer's relationship to the object as being a really crucial part for you. I'm just curious about that choice. It was a really powerful one. I'm just curious to hear you just yeah about why not show the puppeteer. Okay, yeah, that's that's a fair question. And it's one that I've been playing with. I have not had as much time to make videos as I would have liked in the last like five years, because I've been researching all of this stuff. But I have asked myself, will the audience accept it my medically if they can see my hands in the frame manipulating the dolls, which would be easier and faster to shoot? Or do I need to maintain the fiction that the dolls are moving independently? So that's a good question. And as far as the I did have one hand in there, which is the white child.  Thank you so much, Paulette. Mine is not a question, but it's just a follow up because when we're talking about dolls, there's a tribe in Kenya, which is called Turkana, which they have dolls which are given to young girls, they're called fertility dolls. And they give them to the girls so that they take care of them so that they are able to bear kids. I don't know if you also followed upon that story, because that is something that has been there for for many years. Yes. So I had a wonderful book about dolls in Africa. In the United States, we're more familiar with the Ghanaian aquaba dolls, which serve the same function. But what I got from my reading on dolls in Africa is that they have served both as play things and as ritual objects. And those ones in particular, they kind of occupy both spaces. And so that helped me think about, okay, people in the Americas were able to own dolls. And so what were they doing with them? And how would they see them coming from these African traditions? So that's really helpful. I think we have time for one last quick question. If there's one more question out there. Yes. It's kind of a comment too. But I just, it's so interesting to me, you know, we'll see movies or they portray in real life slavery. And we've all seen movies like that for some reason with the puppets, it's kind of more disturbing. And I thought, why is that? Because it's a secondary. It's not the primary sort of an actor. It's a puppet. But for some reason, it really feels not good. And I don't know if it's because I don't know. Do you know why that would be? Do you see that too? Or no? So I'm in dialogue with a number of African American artists who are using performing objects to delve into these really difficult, painful stories. And one in particular, Nefri Amini, has said that she prefers to take the weight of trauma off the black body and put it into the puppet. And so as a performer, I did 17 takes of that song before I got what I could use. I cried on every one of them. And I could not have done that piece on stage because I would have broken down. So to go into that space, to ask an actor to hold that kind of trauma in their body for an audience is really, really difficult and painful. But also, because we see so much violence in film and television, it's really easy for people to turn it off when it's an actor. But because it's a puppet, we know, okay, this is awful, but it's not real. And that actually enables you to sit with it and experience the emotions in a way that you probably wouldn't if it was a live performance. Okay, thank you for that question. I think that we've come to the end of our, I'll continue, but we're done with the live stream. Yes, because, because, because we have a set window for that. But yes, I'll take one more and people can trickle out if they need to. No, thank you so much for it for for that wonderful, wonderful talk and, and fascinating. I was thinking about the fact that you mentioned how difficult it is for the African American puppeteers to find the space to tell their stories. And I think we face a kind of like a similar situation also in Africa, because it's always been, if you've been enslaved or colonized, then part of that narrative was taken away from you.  And I was wondering, now, is there any attempt to reclaim that narrative? And what what is being done? Are there African American puppet festivals, you know, where people can come together and, and share some of these stories? We wish. We had one at the University of Connecticut, during the run of the Living Objects exhibit, we had a festival and symposium in February of 2019, Black History Month. And for that, we have to be thankful to the Black students who occupied the student, you know, the administration buildings at UConn, I think in 1968, and demanded that the university start including their culture in the curriculum and the campus life. And so it was the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Studies Center at UConn. And that was how we had funding to do the exhibit and the festival and symposium.  It's just important to stand up and do it. If anybody knows of anyone that would like to sponsor an African American puppetry festival, we would love to put it on. And we would love to have this is called object performance in the Black Atlantic, the book. I could only talk about the United States in the amount of space that they given me. But really, this is Europe, it's Africa, it's the Caribbean and Latin America, and North America as well. And someday I would like to see a festival encompassing all of the Black Atlantic. Thank you so much, Paula. This was such a great talk.


Whatever that is, man. I even tell people, it's kind of, well, whatever.   But yeah. What I wanna ask, then, is the end game a neurochemical response, like releasing endorphins? So, yeah, yeah, I don't speak in that language, but I'm not against that. So I don't speak in that language. The reason why is because I've done myself, so this is totally, totally from myself.   Like I was just talking to Mary Lee at breakfast. Wow, that's the last, no, that isn't the last time I ate. We were talking about eating sugar.  So, sugar in my body right now, and that could even be like an narcotic or drug. But anyway, those things in my life, right, are gonna change how I feel. They're also the equivalent to bad behavior, which is up for you to determine.  So I need the first principle, if we were to talk about principles that link to fighting and seduction, is abstinence of bad behavior. And then the second one is surrender.  And that's an ever going process. Remember, there's no real end, end goal in this. The end goal is death. As long as we're alive, we're always moving. What else we got? This is cool, I got a question about meditation. Normally it's like, okay, so how do I open with that, man?  Quinn! What's up? So from everything you just said then, what happens when you left with things of temptation? Yeah, you can either, you have the choice. What is seduction, man? Seduction is a power, man. Seduction is the template for life. Or there's so many things, man.  Do we misuse it?  But there's plenty of times where I've had opportunities to have sex with people that I may not have wanted to.  And believe me, I believe if you wanna have sex, have sex, like totally do it. Just know that it's like this intense form of communication. But do it and realize if you like it and be wise enough to determine if it's an experience that you want, all right? The problem is, see, I'm not saying like, Steve would never tell, here I am talking to the third person, don't you love that?  Now, but the thing is, is that I'm never gonna tell you not to take action. I always think people should take action. I think people should experience, man. I totally think they should. So when it comes to things that you want, go for them. But know that in the long run, analyze yourself afterwards. You know, perfect example for myself is a pickup artist in the seduction business, whatever you wanna call it.  Let me tell you, I did it. I bet you there's endorphins that make you do that. But the thing is, is I'm obsessing and thinking about this end result and not my purpose. And if you get into the whole sexual life thing, there's facade, identity, experience versus actions, purpose versus results.  So you can experience whatever you want, dive into whatever temptation.  No, it has nothing to do with it, man. It has nothing to do with it. Is it empowering my purpose? And when I can detach from that, then I can start making the decisions.  You do something that I don't like, that I interpret as bad.  Red, red car. So, but do something like that. And all of a sudden, I'm in that moment, right? And I realize through other people talking to me or whatever, I realize it's wrong. I go, okay, it's wrong.  And I have to deal with the legal ramifications of that. I might not want to. But as a man as a human being, as I would say as a sexual being, I need to be able to make right on a personal level and a be social level and say, hey, look dude, what can I do to make that better? And then I can bring things back to balance, okay? So that's giving into temptation of anger or whatever, or frustration in doing something. There's no real like scale to weigh, yeah, the law has it, but in a personal level of my growth, which I'm in my body all the time, hopefully, unless I'm like Shirley McLean or something. But nobody got that. But anyway, the thing is, is like I have to be responsible for myself. Yeah, there might be a separate thing where everybody might shun me and become unpopular and yada yada, but that doesn't have to do with it. It has to do with how I deal with me. And again, this is actually interesting to quote a conversation I had with Ross Jeffries. He said, seduction is this intimate experience where everybody's naked and you're a naked man.   All right, I can listen to you now. Anyway, cool? Yeah, all right, this man, will I sip on some water? Thanks, Steve. Yes, sir. Great speech. It was meant to take notes, but I got to engage. Yeah. So that's my bad. Yeah. My questions in regard to how important has your diet been in expressing the best you, I guess?    And, okay, so I've been, 2009, they started talking about paleo stuff at this convention, and I've been pretty involved, right?  But it was a long time ago. I actually won an eating competition in Texas, in Waco, man, but this was like nine years ago. But I'm like, no, man, I'm gonna eat and da, da, da, da. And it changed everything, okay? So one of the biggest changes that I noticed, and again, it's so black and white. Actually, I'll tell you too, is the first one was when I cut that stuff out, and I remember it, man, I did an interview with Keith Norris, did a podcast with him, and I'm like, man, I got really sick, so I started juicing, and he's like, well, you know, juicing, you know, you can do it, but try cutting out the flour and sugar. And my diet was actually kind of tight, but every night I'd eat maybe a slice of pizza, and I was working out like a motherfucker, man, like biking 40 miles a day, and then doing two hours of jujitsu, and then like two hours of kickboxing and shit, and like, once or twice a week I would do that, but it was just like crazy, man, I was going through so many calories, so I'm like, but I crave these things. And anyway, I cut it out after that, and immediately, like, wait, I couldn't lose. So I mean, that active, right, that active, and weighed about 180 pounds. Funny story, when I got laid the most in pickup, I was very close to 200 pounds. So I was about 180 pounds. Maybe if I like starved myself, I'd be like 175 in the morning. As soon as I cut that out, it was just like within weeks, and everybody's different, and I don't want to say that this diet works for everybody, and I think that's kind of the anthem of what I hear from a lot of real paleo guys that I respect, is that do what works for you, and I don't follow an absolute paleo diet at this point. I do the Steve Mayeda diet, and you can all buy it for $19.95. But the thing is, is that I cut that out. First thing I noticed, I could sit and write and not have anxiety. Huge thing, it actually couldn't meditate for years, and all of a sudden, you know, can start to find some clarity. Unbelievable. So then, at the 21 convention in August, in Austin, I saw a couple things. So I got really healthy, man. Everything in my life changed, man. I had more energy, now I'm 35, so I would need more sleep, and I couldn't sustain energy for like 10 hours.  But it was like, basically I just had more energy when I had it. Now, I heard a couple people speak, and I had high blood pressure all my life, like from the time I was a kid. I'm like, this hasn't changed. You know, I truly do not want to be on medication because it dulls my, like I don't care. For me personally, you know, this isn't sending a message not to take your medication, but I just felt that it had too much of a side effect, and I wanted options, and I wanted to try them. So Doug McGuff, and it was really cool. He talked to me, you know, at length. After giving a speech, or maybe before Dave Asprey, bulletproof executive told me a few things to try. And Doug actually emailed Exchange back and forth as I gave him the readings.  I'm like, really? Okay, so I'll try it. The thing was I actually got really, I got down to 150, okay? So really small, and it was actually kind of cool. But I just couldn't sustain energy as much anymore, and you know, I don't want to say that I was doing it right or wrong, but I was like, all right, I can't take this anymore. And there were some changes, but the biggest change with the whole blood pressure thing was like rest, not working out so hard and sleep. And to be honest, like if I do one thing off, it will, like probably right now it's quite high just because I've had so much stress. But I ate a cupcake for my birthday.   But because I'm not used to it, you realize like, oh, geez, okay, why am I thinking about this? Like I'm gonna cross the street. This is a true story, man.  No, I can't sit down. Like, why am I crossing the street? Yeah, I'm just start running about all this anxiety.  What's going on? You know, like, why does this suck?  Who are these people?  You know what, why am I doing this? Da-da-da, and it just starts accessing all this stuff. And it's good, actually, when you kick up emotions because it shows what you need to work on. But it took me a while to click. I'm like, man, I wonder if it had to do with that cupcake. So, of course, like an awesome person.  So, those are two real, like, big signs to me that it changed a lot of, you know, my mental capabilities, again, a chemical thing. So, it's a big deal, you know, and how I think and how I feel.  And whoever achieves the most in that, that's what we're going for. And again, mentality, it's like, I'm not gonna tell you what to do, but I need to see it in your posts and your interactions and all that sort of stuff. And actually, I don't even vote on it. It's my alumni votes on it. So, cool? Yeah. Cheese.


If you've studied Bunch and Communication or really any academic field, you know that we love models, right? We love ways that conveniently explain how something works and even better if it has a fancy acronym to go along with it. Public relations is no different. There are lots of different models that explain how the public relations process works, race, and ropes. And those are all great. And the one, though, that I want to focus on as we try and discover how the communication process works through public relations and how the campaign process works is what's called RPIE. So I want to take a look at the RPIE model in public relations. And again, this is just a way that, you know, method of explaining what does that process look like? What does the full process of a public relations strategic communication campaign look like? So the RPIE model, just to give you an overview here, is very simple to research, planning, implementation, and evaluation. That's the RPIE research, planning, implementation, and evaluation. We're going to walk through each of these, although they all really are interconnected. They work together extensively. We're going to divide them out a little bit so that we can understand the different component parts of the RPIE model in public relations. Let me say, too, that this is not inherently superior, I don't think, to ropes or race or any of the other acronyms. It's just the one I choose to use in looking at the public relations process. So let's jump into the RPIE model of public relations. So we start with research, had a whole separate video and unit on research. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. I'll just remind you that there are two basic forms of research. First, you have secondary research, which involves things like examining the organizational background of whatever group you're working with or individual you're working with. Second, you're doing a communication analysis, an issue analysis, identifying target publics and public opinion, and a SWAT analysis as well. And then there are also what we call primary research. So secondary research is research you're just gathering. Other people have already done that.  So you have quantitative research that you can do through things like surveys and data analysis. And then qualitative research that you can do through examination and observation. So again, there's a whole separate thing on research that we did. I'll link those in the area below so that you can have access to those. But it is a crucial foundational element of any public relations effort. You've got to know all of this. You've got to have all the information you can before you wade into all this stuff. It's no good to jump in just straight into trial and error through the implementation. If you don't have any idea who you're working with or what their goals are or what the layout of the land is, what the environment is, you'll be working in. So research is a critical first step. So I don't want to just gloss over it and make it seem like it's not important. It is. That's why it has its own separate thing for us in research. So do go check that out if you're not familiar with the research aspect. This is a critical first step in any public relations effort. So once you got a handle on the research, you've done all this, you've done the work, you've got your background, you know everything you need to know. Then we can start thinking about, OK, let's do some planning. What are our goals in this particular situation? We need to identify just in general where we had it here. It doesn't do its excuse me, much good to have this whole effort planned out and laid out and work so hard at it if we don't know where we're going. So we break planning down into a couple of different steps and part of this process. We like processes, right? So first we look at what are our objectives here? We have our general goals, but then what are our objectives within that? What specifically are we moving toward and how we know when we get there? We need to lay out these smart goals with these objectives in very specific and very detailed ways, not only for our own sake and to know how to effectively plan and implement and evaluate this effort. But so that we have an understanding with the organization we're working with of what are we going to do and how can public relations be a part of that? So we lay out these objectives. Once we have our objectives, then we can start thinking about our strategies, okay? How are we going to accomplish these objectives? What, you know, in what respect are we going to move within public relations to accomplish these objectives? And we're going to talk a little more about what that means here in just a moment, but just know that, you know, from objectives we move into strategies. And then finally we start to think about tactics. These are the specific detail-oriented things. This is where we get into real detailed planning about what's our timeline, what's our budget, those types of things, and specifically what kind of events or what kind of efforts are we going to have. We're going to use that within the tactics. So again, all of these feed into one another and from one another. We need to know what our objectives are before we can identify strategies and tactics to go along with that. And then up through that, tactics and strategies should be connected to specific objectives and specific goals that we're trying to accomplish. So when we think about objectives, there are really kind of a couple of different classifications of objectives, categories of objectives. When we're thinking about this with clients, with organizations that we're working with or whatever party it is we're working with, we can think about objectives in a couple of different ways. First we have what we call informational objectives, right? Informational objectives are objectives that create awareness by sharing information and attributes. So they're just trying to get the message out there really. Just trying to share information with people, make people aware of a product or an effort or an idea or a stance that an organization is taking. We're just sharing information, really trying to get the message out. We can also look at motivational objectives. That's another classification that we can look at. We're working through public relations to change the attitudes and influencing behaviors of our target audience. We're trying to get them to do something in other words. We're trying to get them to take action. We're trying to get them to change something about themselves or to change a behavior that they're engaging in toward the way we would want them to do. So we can do that. So instead of just sharing information, now we're working in more persuasive territory, trying to get them to do something with that information, to take action on that information. And then finally, we have what we call reputational objectives. And here we're just rebuilding or enhancing trust and confidence around a corporate event or crisis or an organizational event or crisis. Think about the BP oil spill. They had to do some serious reputational public relations outreach in managing their reputation and in restoring their reputation as a good corporate citizen of the world. So things like that are important for organizations as well to consider. So we first need to identify what kind of objective do we have here? Is it informational? Is it motivational? Is it reputational? Within those goals, where does this fall? And we can then identify appropriate strategies and tactics from there. So speaking of which, as we continue on with the planning, we can look at some different programming aspects of planning and programming. It starts with coming back to our research, we have to identify a specific target audience. Not just what's the target audience of this organization, but what's the target audience for what we're trying to accomplish with this specific campaign or effort? What's our target audience for this specific outreach in this specific endeavor? So we have to identify as part of the planning stages before we ever start rolling out events and rolling out communication plans and things like that. We need to identify who we're trying to reach with this. And that's going to then obviously influence the way we go about things. So we've got to plan around who's our specific target audience. Then we start to strategize. We start to come up with specific ideas of what's the best way for us to meet these people? What's the best way for us to reach them? What's the best way for us to engage in this? Should it be an in-person event? Should it just be a media campaign? Should it be more emphasis on social media? Should it be getting out and pressing the flesh, meeting people, being in the community, volunteering, doing things? So I mean, there are all kinds of ways that we can do that. So we need to identify, OK, what are some of our strategies here? Thinking about, OK, is this informational? Is it motivational? Is it reputational? And then that will help inform how specifically are we going to do this? What are the X's and O's we're going to use as we strategize this? Then we need to think about what are our key messages. You know, the old saying in speaking and writing, things that if you speak to everyone, you speak to no one. So if we broaden our message too much and we're just trying to, you know, collect everybody and reach everybody in the world, then we're probably not going to reach anybody because it's going to be so broad that it's not going to connect with any particular audience. So again, once we identify our target audience, we've got to identify, OK, within that, what are our key messages here and can we stick to those? Politicians encounter this a lot. They want to speak on every topic or they want to reach every particular voting constituency. But really the best campaigns understand that they've got to pick a few areas where they can really stand out and hammer those messages home. You have to do that with public relations oftentimes, too. You can't reach everybody with every message. So you've got to identify who's your audience and what is it that you want them to know? Identify those key messages within that. Then we started thinking specific tactics. Now, here we're getting down into the nitty gritty, right? How do we enact all of these things? You know, what are the moves on the chess board that we need to have to reach these audiences and get into the details and the specific, again, the nitty gritty of this, the nuts and bolts of all this? So we started thinking about things as well, like the timetable. This is detailed information. What's our timetable? What's our ultimate goal for achieving this? And then within that, we work backwards or I tend to work backwards and say, OK, if this is my goal to be at this place by this time, then, you know, where do I need to go? What kind of sub-tactics or sub-objectives do I need to have in here that will lead to that, right? That will lead us to that and help us accomplish what we need to in that effort and that endeavor? So we started thinking about our timetable. We started thinking about things like, like, what's the budget for this if there is one? A lot of times in public relations, you get to find that they want you to do it for free. But so what if any budget do we have for this? And so how do we want to use that? What's the best way we can use that money in stewardship and serving this effort? So all kinds of things that happen in the planning stage, we need to start looking, you know, again, funneling things down, narrowing things down to what's going to be the best use of our resources here as we seek out that specific target audience with the specific key message. How can we best go about that? And you're going to find that the planning stage and the next stage of implementation are so critically interlinked. So everything that we just did in the planning stage, in the implementation stage, we start to look at those tactics that we just developed, right? What's our timetable? What's our budget? What's our strategy? What are our key messages? We take all those tactics from the planning stage and then we start to put them into action. That's what implementation is. Okay, we've got this plan. We know what we want to do with this and how we're going to try and accomplish this. Now we go out and put it into action. We follow that timetable. We follow that budget. We pursue those tactics and we start, you know, putting rubber to the road and meeting these goals and working toward that through the specific implementation of those things that we develop in the planning process. Okay, so we started with our research, having a full understanding of who that organization is, what the environment is you're working in, and all of those things identifying your key audiences. Then we're working in the planning stages to see how all that matches up with specifically what our objectives are and how we can then continue to pursue that through different strategies and tactics. Now it's time to put all of that to work, right? So put those tactics, bring them into action, bring them to life. Okay, so once we've done that then, you know, we sort of just see what happens. You do the best you can and you see what works and what doesn't and go from there. And that's really leads us into the final stage of RPIE, which is evaluation, right? Evaluation just says, okay, now it's time to look at this. How did it go? What went well? What worked? What didn't work? What didn't go well? You've got to be able to be honest with these things and have an honest evaluation. This will be made much easier if you've developed appropriate smart goals, meaning they're specific, they're measurable, there are things we can identify specifically, you know, have we, have we done this effectively? And remember that this is all part of a singular process as we look at RPIE. The research, planning, implementation, evaluation, this is going to then lead back into research, okay? Effective public relations is cyclical. It involves that evaluation leading back into these other stages. And then we go back into, okay, knowing what we know now. Let's take, let's step back to our research again and see what we know now that we didn't know before, then we can adjust. If necessary, our plan, we can look at implementation. So evaluation, you know, again, starts with those ideas, starts with that tactic, starts with implementing those things and putting them to work. And then basically asking, does it work? Did this go the way we thought it would? Did it go better? Did it go worse? Did some things work and some didn't? So we need to identify, does it work? And if so, what works? And so if it does, if the answer is yes, it's a very simple diagram, right, if the answer is yes, then we need to ask ourselves things like, what can we repeat here? Should we just keep it going? Should we roll it back? And should we, should we run it back? Should we just keep doing what we're doing? Is that the best strategy for taking advantage of this? We found something that works. Do we just keep doing that? Or do we use this as an opportunity to grow? We use this as, you know, we've got the seedling here. We've got an idea that we think works. There are things we can do better and improve upon that so we can help this effort grow and really expand from that. Use this as our foundation, as our, as our sort of a tilled soil. We can grow something even better out of that. And then, you know, just taking away, what are some ideas that we have? And what have we learned in essence from this? It worked great. Again, if we may keep repeating some stuff, we may use it to grow. Most importantly, though, what do we learn here? What can we identify as takeaways and significant lessons here? So if it worked, we want to go through that process. And then again, feedback into the research process and go from there. Or if we come out on the other end of that and did it work? No, it didn't work. We don't. Well, why not?  Let's try something different. If that didn't work, we can hold on to any pieces that did, but let's go back and and see what we can do better. So again, this is all very much cyclical, very much cyclical. It all feeds into one another as much as anything we need to remember that that there are steps to this. It's not. There's we've talked about before. There's no shortcuts, really. And as Beverly Sills said, there's no there are no shortcuts to any place worth going. If it's worth going there, you're going to have to put in the work and there's work here and it's continuous and it's cyclical and it's but it's exciting and it's fun. And and so be sure that you are giving proper focus and attention to all four of these stages, research, planning, implementation and evaluation, and then that they feed back in to one another. If you have questions about the RPIE model or anything related to public relations and the implementation of those things, please feel free to email me. Joy to hear enjoy hearing from you there. And I would love to communicate with you that way. So feel free to send me an email with anything related to this. In the meantime, I hope you do have a better understanding of the nature of the public relations process in the model. Some of the models that we can use specifically the RPIE model here in implementing and then, you know, going through that whole process. It's not just jump ahead to implementing research, planning, implementation, evaluation and then back around through that route again and again and again for effective public relations.


In today's lecture, we are going to study modes of transportation, bridges and tunnels. Learning outcomes of this video. At the end of this video, the viewers will able to explain the importance of bridges and tunnels and the classification. Importance of bridges. Bridges can connect the difficult ways. It make the transportation easy and good. It reduces the travelling time. It mostly convenient use in military. It has importance regarding political and economical aspect and it gives the less emission due to displacement. Introduction. A bridge is a structure built to span physically obstacles such as a body of water, valley or road. For the purpose of providing passage over the obstacles without closing the gap below. Normally, we will construct the bridges over rivers or at the hilly areas to provide the efficient transportation system without disturbing the natural obstacles. So in this figure, you can see it is the river valley and over this river valley, the bridges constructed. So it provides the good transportation and it provides the less time to transport from one place to another place, any goods or passengers. It is constructed for the purpose of providing passage over the obstacles usually sometimes that can be detrimental to cross otherwise. So these are the common elements of the bridge structure. The bridge is divided in two parts that is substructure and superstructure. The substructure consists of foundation, piers and abetment etc. And the superstructure consists of deck slab, girder, truss etc. As we know in building also we have two structures means one building is divided in two components that is substructure and superstructure. Substructure is mainly consists of foundation below the ground level and the superstructure is constructed whatever building or portion of the building above the ground level. So in bridge also it will have two components that is substructure and superstructure. If you see this figure, in this figure this line shows the original ground level or it may be a water level. So in substructure foundation is there, abetment is there, foundation means it is the main part of the bridge which carry the overall load of the superstructure and it will transfer to the natural soil or the ground below it. So this abetment is also constructed with the help of natural materials or rock pitching. This abetment is provided for the stability at the ends of the bridge. The main purpose of abetment is to provide the stability to the overall bridge structure at the ends or the road connect. Piers are nothing but the columns of the bridge. So it is also comes in substructure. Here you can see the effective span of bridge means it is the centre to centre distance between the two piers. These bearings are provided to reduce the vibrations due to the vehicle traffic and to reduce the damages which are creating or to reduce the stresses which are creating on this deck slab. Deck slab is nothing but the road surface of the bridge. Here this HFL is called as high flood level means whenever it is a river or it will indicate as HFL means this is the maximum level of the water which can increase during the flood level. So it is used for the precautions in rainy seasons to avoid the flood situations. Now these are called as longitudinal girders which are provided throughout the span and these cross girders are provided throughout the width of the bridge. Width of the bridge is nothing but the width of the road pavement which constructed over the bridge. So here again handrails are provided, parapet wall is also provided, handrails and parapet walls are provided for the purpose of safety. These expansion joints are constructed to avoid the expansion or contraction of the material which is used in the construction of the deck slab. Means here you are constructing the deck slab with the concrete. The concrete is consist of cement, sand and aggregate. These materials are having their own properties like shrinkage and expansion due to change in weather conditions. So these expansion joints are provided to reduce the stresses and effects of the stresses due to the temperature effects. Means if temperature changes or now if you observe in summer there is expansion of the material due to the heat. So in that case if this material is trying to expand so this cap will help without damaging the overall structure of the bridge and in winter season these materials or the cement will have the property of shrinkage. So due to that property it will try to contract or compressed. So it will reduce again the effects of the temperature. So expansion joints are provided at each span of the, so these are the normal and common elements of the bridge. Now these are the various types of bridges. Bridges are classified based on material, based on structural use, based on design and based on span. Again this based on material is classified as timber bridge, concrete bridge and steel bridge. The structural use is classified cantilever bridge, suspension bridge, belly bridge and movable bridge. Again based on design it is classified as plate girder bridge, lattice girder bridge and busting bridge. Based on span it is classified as major bridge, minor bridge, other bridges and culverts. So this is the overall classification of the bridges. Based on material it is divided in timber, concrete and steel. It is the material which is used for the construction of the bridge. Normally timber bridges are used for decorating purpose. So we can observe this timber bridges in gardens, restaurants and for the main use of bridge. It is used as concrete and steel bridge. Based on structural bridge means by use of structure of bridge means what purpose you are using, using the bridge. It is cantilever bridge, suspension bridge, belly bridge and movable bridge. These suspension bridges and movable bridges are mostly used where you have to cross the river and those rivers or seas are used for the water transportation by ships or large boats. So in that case you can, without disturbing the construction of bridge you can make the way to pass the boats below that bridge. Again based on design it is plate girder bridge, lattice bridge and busting bridge. These are the types of girders means whatever, whatever beam, girder is nothing but the beam you can see. So these are the types of beams used in the construction. Again based on span it is classified as major bridge, minor bridge, other bridge and culverts. So major bridge is constructed where the span is more than 45 meters, minor bridges are constructed when span is 30 to 45 meters then other types of bridges and where you are having other types of bridges are constructed for the span less than 30 meters and culverts are constructed when you are having span very less or you can say it is more than 6 meters. So it is the overall classification of the bridges. Now tunnels, tunnels are also very important to make the possible way of transportation. So this permits the transportation of passengers and freight or it may be for the transportation of utilities like water, sewage or gas etc. So this figure shows the typical cross section or typical image of the tunnel. So it is the typical cross section of the tunnel. In this cross section you can observe various parts of the tunnel. So first you have to make a drill into the hill or where you have to construct the tunnel and again you have to provide the all facilities for drainage, electricity and you have to provide the stability to the tunneling by providing the lining PCC means PCC means it is plain cement concrete. So it is the typical cross section of the tunnel. Again these tunnels are classified as based on purpose, based on surrounding material and submerged tunnels. Based on purpose means for road and railway utilities, based on surrounding materials means whatever material is actually present at that site and submerged tunnels are mostly used in underground situation. So it is the typical cross section of the construction of the tunnel. Now again we are having the tunnels in different shapes means the tunnel is constructed in circular, egg shaped elliptical cross section, horseshoe vertical wall and box type cross section. So accordingly purpose and condition of the site we have to decide the shape of the tunnel. These are the advantages of the tunnels. We have beyond 18 to 20 meter deep cutting in hills tunnels are economical construction is independently possible without disturbing the surface activities like life and traffic. They serve as underground shelters in case of bombing and enemy attack. The tunnels are cheaper compared to bridges or the surface carriage of water, sewage or gas means by constructing the tunnels you can transport the sewage as well as gas also. Modern technique makes the tunnel construction safe and sound. So these are the disadvantages means the initial cost which is required for the construction of tunnel is more than other constructions like bridges and roads. The special costly equipments and machineries are required and the labor which are required for the construction those are technically skilled. It is the slow construction activity which requires the long duration for completion of the project. Now you pause this video and try to answer this questions. So these are the answers for the questions. These are the references considered for the further study. Thank you.


Hello friends welcome to the session I am Malka. I am going to help you find dy by dx n y equal to secant inverse 1 upon 2x square minus 1 where 0 is less than x is less than 1 by root 2. Now let us start with the solution y equal to secant inverse 1 upon 2x square minus 1. Now let x cos theta this implies theta equal to cos inverse x this is our first equation. Now this implies y equal to secant inverse into 1 upon cos 2 cos square theta minus 1 this implies y equal to secant inverse into 1 upon cos 2 theta as we all know that cos 2 theta is equal to 2 cos square theta minus 1. So this implies y equal to secant inverse into secant 2 theta this implies y equal to 2 theta this implies y equal to 2 into cos inverse x. Now differentiate both sides with respect to x we get dy by dx equal to 2 into dx of cos inverse x. This implies dy by dx equal to 2 into minus 1 upon square root of 1 minus x square. Therefore dy by dx equal to minus 2 upon square root of 1 minus x square. Hope you understood the solution and enjoyed the session. Goodbye and take care.


Cofan Hagan yn debyg 2009. Mae'r clynyddiaeth clynyddol yn ymddangos fel y cyfnodd, sy'n cyfnodd, fel y cyfnodd, o'r lluniau o'r clynyddol. Obama wedi'u cyfnodd. Rwy'n gweithio ar ymddangos gyda'r ysgol o'r anzail i'r cyfnoddau i'r cyfnoddau, gael eich cyfnoddau sy'n cyfnoddau, oedd yn 5 o 6 oeddiad. Rwy'n gweithio i'r cyfnoddau i'r cyfnoddau, Felly, mae'n rhaid i'r etymau ar hyn o'r gallu tych subrygiad ar gyfer ein bod yn bwyd. Ac rwyf wedi'i cyfnodd gyda siwtio ar gyfer y prysgwrs. Rwyf wedi'u cyfrifio o'r striwn i'r rhaglau yn y rhodd. Ond, eich llyfun o'r vihau advantages ac rwyf wedi nhw i chi. Rwyf wedi'u cyfrifio i mi ddweud y piataid i gael 29 yn ymwyf a rwyf wedi neb yn cyfrifio'r rydyn ni i'r dweud nad yna'u gilydd. Roeddwn i'n gwneud yw eu bydd am bwynt iawn. Ac y gallwn i'n gweithio i'w gwybod i'w boxau, sy'n cael ei fod yn y tiff yma, y gallwn i'n gweithio i'r gwybod, dyna'r gweithio ar y portol i'r cyfnod gyllideb gyda gyda'r kingdom. Mae'n gweithio yn newid y platform 9 i 3 cwrtos yn Cwng Cross. Mae'r gweithio'r gweithio y dyna'r gweithio'r gweithio yn gweithio'r gweithio ar y cyfrig sydd yma ac mae'r cyfrig sydd ar y gweithio'r gweithio. Mae'r gweithio yn gweithio ar y gweithio, ac yn ymweld yn yw'r realac sydd gweithio ar hynny. Rhywbeth yw'r hunnwau lleolol yn gweithio'r hunnwau. Rhywbeth yw'r unrhywbeth, y gallwn ar 60,000 rhywbeth gweithio, cerddw, lychio, gweithio, bynnwyr, gyda hunnwau lleolol. Mae'n golygu bod yn ymddi, mae'n gweithio a'r ffath. Felly mae'n gweithio i gyd yn ychydig o'r llwyffaeth, mae'n gweithio i ddau cyflenau. this builders. This bees that are responsible for looking off the babies. This guards, the scouts. There's all sorts of different sorts of functions. This she also researches to discover this something called Lazy bees. If you watch this kind of chaos of movement and follow the individual bees backwards and forwards, turns out that quite a high proportion of them are just walking backwards and forwards, walking backwards and forwards, holding a piece of paper under their arms, looking like they're busy. And no one really knows exactly what they're doing. Bees, as I said, communicate through scent, smell and sight. And the conversations they have aren't just with each other. It's also a conversation they have with plants, plants and flowers. So there's this magical experience you have if you get up early enough in the morning. You can see the enthusiasm among these creatures to get out and get going among the flowers. You see them lining up along the edge of the beehive, ready to go as soon as the temperature climbs up enough for them to go out and fly. Bees, when they fly to a flower, they see colours that we can only just imagine in our human worlds. They have 72 scent receptors, so they can taste the individual flowers, communicate exactly which flower they landed on to their sisters when they fly back to the hive and where it's been. So that flower is different from that flower. They have these hairs on their bodies, the kind of hairy creatures. Each hair is a kind of sensual organ for communicating with the world around them. So when a bee flies into a flower and pollinates it, the static electricity in that flower changes, and when she flies to the next one, she can actually feel on her body if another bee has been there recently. So you have to try and imagine what it's like for a bee in a city like Brighton or Copenhagen in the summer, the sun's shining. The smells and scents and colours are washing out of the plants as the trains go through the green corridors. How are the parks? What do the flower beds and gardens look like when you're in it? It's an incredibly rich world that these animals inhabit. And if you think bees are funky, you should meet the beekeepers. Beekeepers are mostly male. Honeybees are almost all female. Beekeepers are also furry in their own way, obviously kind of bearded. The first beekeeper I met, he told me the origin story of the honeybee. This is apparently true.  There were dinosaurs and volcanoes and bamboo and that kind of stuff. One day, the first primitive bee flew from the first primitive flower over to the next primitive flower and discovered a new kind of sexual relationship, pollination. If you look in the fossil record, you can see that from this black and white world in just a few tens of millions of years, everything that we associate with the richness and bounty of the world today so colour, taste, smell, all of the fruits, juicy strawberries and apples, all of the sticky things that sustain not just human life, but also the lives of all the other insects and animals and birds that survive on it, emerged out of that pollination, an enormous amount of productivity which turned the world on its head. It occurred to me when I found out about this that this is basically the model that we're all reaching after as a model that includes the partnership between bees and flowers. It's the pleasure. This is a sexual relationship. They're not doing this. We think that bees are being hardworking, but they're not doing it because they're working hard. They're doing it because it feels great. Anyone who's seen those kind of slow-motion pictures of flowers opening, you can't also imagine that it's not enormously pleasurable for the flower to be pollinated by a tickling bee coming inside it. So this is about pleasure. This is about productivity. This is about partnership. And it's about a form of production that doesn't erode and destroy the world as we do as human beings, but enriches it. And it's like this is a mirror to the world in which we live in now. It occurred to me that maybe the greatest challenge of our time today is to actually have these two worlds meet each other, is to actually find out how can we produce industries, how can we make things that enrich and enliven and make our world both socially and environmentally richer? This is not sustainability. This is beyond sustainability. Sustainability is about keeping things the same. This is about making things more colourful and juicier. And how do we get there from the world as it is today? I thought that I'd take this quite literally and decided to make an urban honey company in Copenhagen producing honey in the city. But before I tell you about how that went, I would like to give a bit of context. We all know about the wonderful Danish social democratic state. This is a system that has become significantly worse in the last 10 years, like a lot of the rest of Europe. There is a regime in Denmark at the moment that is tearing chunks out of the welfare system, that is pushing tens of thousands of people into poverty. The Danish government at the moment has a policy towards refugees and immigrants, which is basically to make his life as unpleasant and uncomfortable for them as possible. These policies are driven by an ideological belief in a lot of ways that the way in which we can get poor, sick, traumatised people to play a role in society is to force them to work, get them into jobs. It is in a world where 50% of jobs are vanishing as a result of technology, as we've heard today, a mindless utopia that they're trying to emphasise. So before I talk about my business, I think it's really important to emphasise here that as entrepreneurs we're given a platform and it's important that we use that platform to fight for a political framework which is fairer to these sorts of people. That means fair benefits. It means, as we talked about today, fighting and using our voice to say that we need some kind of universal basic income. As producers of physical products, we also have a huge opportunity. We have an opportunity to knock our customers. I don't know why they put this water here. That's the second I spill now. There's one left. We have a responsibility to our customers and our suppliers to knock them out of their silos, out of their social and political silos. Who makes this stuff? Where does it come from? Who is it? It doesn't matter if it's honey, if it's a biro, if it's your notebook, all these physical objects we surround ourselves in the world, they come from people and those people have names and faces and we need to show what those names and faces are. And finally, I think it's important that again and again we emphasise how important it is that the social and political side are the same, that these areas are linked. So I'll give you an example. This is Arith. He's one of our colleagues. He's a beekeeper, one of the three beekeepers we have working for us. He's from Syria. Arith came to Denmark two years ago. He came from Turkey, Greece, overland through Italy and arrived in Denmark. Arith was a beekeeper outside Aleppo in a small village for 17 years before he came to Denmark. When he first came into our office, he was presented by the Job Centre, he couldn't speak a word of Danish and he came in and we could see on his body that he had so much he wanted to express but couldn't, he just didn't have the vocabulary for it. And yet you could just see in his thumbs, in his hands the way he picked up and smelt the wax and the bees and the equipment that he had this sense of relief, this sense of familiarity, this sense of belonging back with the beekeepers. He's learned at Danish now and he is now responsible for looking after about 250 beehives over the whole of Copenhagen. They're on the roof of the city hall. They're on the roof of this amusement park. They're on water utilities. They're on big corporate businesses. Here he is at the airport. We work with both businesses and social projects. So businesses actually pay us to put bees on their rooftops in their car parks in bits of used land. And we use that money to train new beekeepers and work in other areas and conduct different sorts of events with that. Arif isn't just looking after the bees and producing this honey. He's also teaching and training. We think it's really important to involve all of the communities in the city in producing honey and working with the bees. So a rift together with an English woman, a Sudanese guy, has been teaching a group of 25 other refugees in a park in central Copenhagen. They come from Afghanistan, from Sudan, from Africa, from Bangladesh. And the bees they're looking for, looking after, are flying out from this park. They're flying, whether they like it or not, into the window boxes and parks, into people's gardens. They're pollinating their apples and strawberries and producing a honey that our project is then buying back and selling onwards to the people of Copenhagen.  We're also working with... We're working with other community projects with formerly homeless. We've got projects in two houses, social housing estates and other deprived areas, bringing these people together to help them look after the bees. For these people, it's not a job. They're not going to be able to work as beekeepers, but it gives them a sense of belonging. It gives them a role in the community that we're able to symbolise with the honey that they produce. Honey is a wonderful, magical substance. We're also working with families and children. Kids get this stuff immediately, so when you bring groups of children into the factory, they can immediately see the connection between people, environment and bees. Like I said, honey, it's been like oil. You can make it into all sorts of other products. So we work with other local producers to make honey into ice cream, into candies, into beer and rum, you can see here. These are things that we sell to supermarkets and users to finance the project. But perhaps the thing that I love most about the project, I talked, starting off, talking about this kind of secret magical world that exists under the surface of our world as it is today, is that when you begin to produce honey over the whole city, you realise that every street, every garden, every window box, every park has its own taste and its own flavour. It's a taste and a flavour that contains the stories of the people who looked after the bees, the businesses that had them on their roofs, the people who planted the flowers. It's a taste and flavour that changes from year to year. So what you harvest on this date from this district this year will change the year after. It's a picture that changes constantly, shifting in colour and taste and flavour according to the flowers that we choose to produce. And results in this, I've just got four, but last year we had 65 different colours and different tastes of honey from the whole city. And when you bring all these things together, you get a whole different picture of what the city of Copenhagen looks like. And that's what we're trying to do in our project and that's why we say honey is something that you make together. Thanks.