Thank you very much, Johanna. Thank you very much to the Centre for inviting me. It's great to be in such a familiar place and to see so many familiar faces. I've just done what a lot of us lawyers do quite often, which is sign a piece of paper without knowing anything about what it says, but I trust that Anita wouldn't have asked me to sign something that is detrimental. Right, so my topic is the application of human rights law to war. Over the last 20 years or so, both international and national courts have accepted the principle that the application of international human rights law is not limited to peacetime. I have some misgivings about this development, as you can gather from the title of my presentation, but human rights scholars and activists have generally welcomed this change. To set up my concerns, I would like to take a step back from the detail of the case law on the application of human rights law to conflict and reflect on the broader significance of these developments. And in particular, I would like to consider the application of human rights law to wartime together with the distinction between war and peace. These two questions, the war-peace distinction and the application of human rights in war are, in my view, closely intertwined. I will present my analysis in three stages. First, I will discuss the origins of the distinction between war and peace in international law, a distinction which did not arise by accident. It is foundational and it rests on important philosophical considerations. Secondly, I will consider how modern international law is recasting this distinction, mainly as a consequence of the application of human rights law to war. The recasting of the legal distinction between war and peace is happening against the background of important changes in the nature of war, which must also be briefly explored. Thirdly, I will attempt to draw some conclusions on the applications of human rights to war. And I will argue that while in many ways this development is part of the long historical process of humanisation of warfare, it also poses risks, not least to human rights themselves. But there is a jurisprudence constant at this point which supports this principle and I don't think this jurisprudence is going to be overruled anytime soon. So the risks and the problems must be addressed within this new framework. And in some ways what we will have to do is to reinvent the wheel, namely to return to the foundational distinction between war and peace, but in a way that factors in the role of human rights. So let me start with the distinction between war and peace, its origins and significance. In his seminal work on international relations, the French thinker Raymond Daron explained that any jurist or philosopher dealing with war must address a fundamental question. Must international law foresee or exclude the possibility of war? Among those who thought that international law and law in general must by definition exclude the possibility of war was immanuel Kant. War was for Kant the negation of law. The idea of a law of war in Kantian terms is a contradiction. International law is to some extent founded on Kantian premises, as far as international organization is concerned, but not as far as the regulation of war is concerned. When it comes to war, the premises of international law are mainly grossion. So what did grossious have to say? Well, there is an important passage in the Prolegomena to his great book, the Eurebelia package, which summarizes his thinking on war. That's paragraph 16 and he said the following. It is so far from the truth to admit, as some can try, that in war all laws cease, that on the contrary, war must not be undertaken if not in the enforcement of law, nor must it be conducted if not within the bounds of law and faith. De Mostonis said, well, that war is waged against those who cannot be constrained judicially. For wars to be just, they must be executed with no less conscientiousness than is required in judicial proceedings. Paraphrasing class of it, you might say that for grossious, war was the continuation of law through other means. In grossious, as in the medieval just war tradition that reverberates in his writings, peace is the natural condition of humankind. But war, exceptional and regrettable, though it is, is nonetheless subject to law. It is grossious who invented the notion of the state of war as a legal state. Until the changes in the usabellum in the 20th century, this notion was central to international law. When a state manifested an intent to be hostile with another state, animus belli gerendi, whether through an express declaration of war through specific hostile acts or through belliger statements, a state of war was said to obtain between those two countries. The state of war triggered the shift in the applicable law from the law of peace to the law of war. As Marina Manchini has shown in her work on the state of war, although to a large extent rendered obsolete by the changes in the usabellum introduced by the United Nations Charter, this notion is far from disappeared from state practice. But even without the state of war, the post war international legal regulation of war remain grossion for at least two reasons. Firstly, as discussed, international law continues to foresee war and places it and place it under the law rather than treat it as come to that preferred as denigation of law. Secondly, before the challenge of human rights law, the war peace distinction remain foundational. As highlighted by Stephen Neff, the war peace distinction in grossious is linked to another fundamental distinction between what he called primary rights and secondary rights. Now in grossious speak, these terms have a different meaning than in the law state responsibility. For grossious primary rights are those that can be exercised against the actual wrong doer. So if you take action against the person who's stolen your property, that's the exercise of a primary right. And that primary right according to grossious is guaranteed by the natural law. By contrast, secondary rights are exercised against persons other than the actual wrong doer. And the main example of a secondary right is war, or as grossious call it, public war. And that's because in war action is taken against individuals, simply because of their association with an enemy state and not because of any personal responsibility. But the natural law cannot admit of the possibility of persons other than the actual wrong doer incurring any responsibility. And it is for this reason that grossious says the regulation of war has to be found not mainly natural law, but in what he calls volitional law, that is the law created voluntarily by states. Stephen Neff again summarizes the importance of this change. With this distinction between primary and secondary rights, grossious transferred the entire law of war at a stroke from the realm of natural law into that of voluntary law. The effect was to open the way for treating war in a more flexible manner than before, as a man made institution whose rules could be crafted and recrafted as necessary by human beings themselves to serve their own purposes. By subjecting war to law, and in particular to the law created by states, grossious also accomplished another important result. He protected the higher norms embodied in natural law from the phenomenon of war. I will return to this point because one of my criticisms of the application of human rights to war is precisely the higher norms embodied in human rights risk being diminished and corrupted by war. And I think to some extent are already being diminished and corrupted. The best of our ideas must be protected from the worst of our reality. Before looking at how these understandings are being challenged in the present day, let me just say a few more words about another thinker who wrote a few decades after grossious Thomas Hobbes. Contrary to the stereotyped understanding of this philosophy, Hobbes had very little to say about international relations about one paragraph in the Leviathan. But his theory of the state law rested on a completely different assumption from grossious. For Hobbes, the natural condition of humankind is war, it is not peace. And Hobbes also differ from grossious in that he did not think that natural law seized to apply in the state of war, which for grossious for for Hobbes was a state of internal rather than international war. But having said that the national law applied, Hobbes went on to explain this, the laws of nature while immutable and eternal, and I'm quoting from the Leviathan, oblige in foreign internal, that is to say, they bind to a desire they should take place. But in foreign external, that is the putting them in act, not always. So for Hobbes, when he comes to natural rights or human rights, applying to war, an impasse or an aporia, the Hobbes Unaporia about human rights in war is that human rights exist, but they cannot be respected. Now, the issue is not just that there is a discrepancy with between what must be done, what must happen, and what happens for Hobbes to discrepancy is more fundamental. It's between what must happen and what can happen. Necessity normally entails possibility, the impossible should never be necessary. And on some definition of possible, the proposition x is necessary, but impossible is actually logically untenable. Now, I'm not sure if the Hobbes Unaporia, what I've described as the Hobbes Unaporia does entail as much as a logical contradiction. But it certainly points to a very serious problem in the application of human rights to war. And this is a point with which, as we shall see, the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights has also struggled. The question of what to make of human rights, which it says, should apply principle, but cannot be secured in practice in the circumstances of war. But let me now move on to the second part of the analysis, the crisis in this foundational distinction between war and peace, which has emerged over the last 20 years, particularly through the application of human rights to war. In a frequently cited passage, in the opinion of the legality of the use or threat to use nuclear weapons, the International Court of Justice wrote that the protection of the ICPR, and I'm quoting, does not seize in times of war, except by operation of Article 4, the provisional derogation. Now, the ICPR is of course positive, law not natural law, but the theoretical and practical difficulties of applying human rights to war are not all that different from the difficulties with which grocers and Hobbes grappled in discussing the relationship between natural law and natural rights on the one hand, and war. And after all, to use the words of Sir Hirsch Lauterbach, fundamental rights are rights superior to the law of the sovereign state. With the statement that I cited just before of the ICJ, the door was opened to the Hobbesian aporia. The question of the relationship between natural rights and war, which grocers had studiously avoided, and Hobbes had identified, but essentially dismissed as unsolvable, took center stage. The court in that same paragraph introduced a qualification to the proposition that human rights applying war time. And that's the idea that the application of human rights is subject to the Lex Specialis. The court explained the functioning of the Lex Specialis in relation to the right to life. And that's what it said. In principle, the right not arbitrarily to be deprived of one's life applies also in hostilities. The test of what is an arbitrary deprivation of life, however, then falls to be determined by the applicable Lex Specialis, namely the law applicable in armed conflict which is designed to regulate the conduct of hostilities. Thus, whether a particular loss of life through the use of a certain weapon in warfare is to be considered an arbitrary deprivation of life contrary to article six of the covenant can only be decided by reference of the law applicable in armed conflict and not deduced from the terms of the covenant itself. Now, this is quite a shift in the way we think about the regulation of war. Grocers would have regarded the question, is there a right to life in war as a category error? This is not the question you ask when you think about war. You start from different premises. Hobbes would have given that question an affirmative answer but qualified it with a sort of so what in practice that right can not be respected. It's war. In terms of positive international law, we were accustomed to two ledges generalis, the law of peace and the law of war existing in parallel of course with some overlap but it's two different areas of international law. Now we have instead one lex generalis which can be modified by a lex specialis. This is an analytically and morally different approach to the regulation of war, even if the outcome is the same. The concrete operation of the lex specialis is no straightforward matter and many of the writers on these topics have commented on this. Human rights law is articulated in general principles which have been developed into sometimes quite specific rules in the extensive jurisprudence of international human rights courts and of domestic courts applying human rights. The law of arm conflict is articulated in a small number of general principles and a large number of very specific rules. The law of arm conflict has not benefited to the same extent as human rights from incremental development through judicial decisions. The main method of incremental development in the law of arm conflict remains non-judicial state practice. But even more fundamentally human rights law is premised on equality. It can rest on no other premise than equality. The law of arm conflict operates on the basis of distinction of status that is inequality. The ICJ's attempt to bring these two entirely diverse systems together by focusing on the meaning of the word arbitrary in the definition of the right to life was ingenious but problematic. The ICJ returned to this question in the wall advisory opinion where to its previous analysis in nuclear weapons it added the following. As regards the relationship between international humanitarian law and human rights law there are three possible situations. Some rights may be exclusively matters of international humanitarian law, others may be exclusively matters of human rights law, yet others may be matters of both of these branches of international law. Another case in which the court addressed the relationship between human rights and IHL is armed activities in Congo. In that case it enumerated both human rights and IHL provisions of which the acts of the Ugandan forces were found to be in clear violation. But no analysis of these provisions was developed by the court possibly because as Sir Daniel Bethlehem has observed there was overlap rather than conflict between human rights and IHL in that particular case. Unsurprisingly given these developments much of the debate in the academic literature on the relationship between human rights and law firm conflict is about the emergence of a mixed paradigm and calls for convergence abound. The court that has probably contributed the most to convergence albeit in a somewhat erratic way is the European Court of Human Rights. Erratic first and foremost because although it has decided in numerous cases arising in the context of an armed conflict the court has been very reluctant to say anything at all about the law of armed conflict with one exception to which I will come. But it is generally not full of the lead of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights in the Abellia case where the Commission was prepared to apply IHL as leg specialist directly. Although I should add that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has been less enthusiastic about the direct application of human rights of IHL rather. The case that stands as a partial exception to what I've said about the ECHR is the al-Skeny decision of the Grand Chamber of 2011. In the al-Skeny judgment the court tips its hat to IHL but it is not clear to what effect. The court's judgment is divided as usual into three parts procedure facts and law. The court discusses IHL in a series of paragraphs contained in the facts section of the judgment under the heading relevant international law materials. But by the time the court gets to the law section where its actual findings are found it has basically forgotten IHL. But the most interesting aspect of the ECHR jurisprudence is its handling of what I've described as the Hobbesian Aporia having rights which cannot in practice be secured. Eager not to appear unreasonable ever since Bancovich the court has referred to the capacity of states to respect rights in the concrete situations. But in Bancovich the court was also keen not to diminish the norm so that it could fit the facts. Indeed it held that the wording of article one of the ECHR does not provide any support for the suggestion that the obligation to secure the rights and freedoms defined in section one of this convention can be divided and tailored in accordance with the particular circumstances of the extra territorial act in question. Norms should apply to facts not facts to norms. In al-Sqaimi however the court changed position. It did so as part of its analysis of jurisdiction almost as an attempt to immediately alleviate concerns about what it had found on jurisdiction. And the key passage is this one where the court overrules Bancovich on the dividing and tailoring point. It is clear that whenever the state through its agents exercises control and authority over an individual and thus jurisdiction the state is under an obligation to secure to their individual the rights and freedoms that are relevant to the situation of that individual. In this sense therefore the convention rights can be divided and tailored. So the obligation is to secure rights that are relevant whatever that means and the obligations can now and the rights can now be divided and tailored. The judgment of the Grand Chamber in al-Sqaimi has had a profound effect on the judgment of the UK Supreme Court in the recent decision Smith and Ministry of Defence. The UK government maintained that state parties to the ECHR had never intended the ECHR to apply to armed forces operating outside their territory. In the Catherine Smith case which had been decided in 2010 the Supreme Court had found in favour of the government by majority of six to three. But in the 2013 Smith decision the majority of the Supreme Court found that after the ECHR al-Sqaimi judgment that view could no longer be maintained. The ECHR's departure from Bancovich on the question of dividing and tailoring rights was one of the main factors to which the Supreme Court drew attention. It said it was always going to be difficult to see how if that was to be the guiding principle it could be possible to accept that a state's armed forces abroad in whatever circumstances were within the jurisdiction for the purposes of Article 1 as the ability of the state to guarantee the entire range of the convention rights would in many cases be severely limited. So the answer of the Strasbourg Court and now the Supreme Court to the Hobbesian Aporia is human rights apply but we can make adjustments to make them fit the situation. Now this convergence of IHL and human rights is part of a bigger process of convergence between war and peace and it is not just happening in Strasbourg or in Parliament Square. It is also happening in other jurisdictions if you think for example of the decision of the Israeli Supreme Court on targeted killings. It isn't clear whether that's a decision under human rights law under IHL or it is an example of a mixed decision. But this convergence as I said which is happening in different jurisdictions is part of a bigger process of convergence between war and peace. The law of war and the phenomenon of war to some extent seem to be evolving along similar paths. In the past some writers most notably Philip Jessup and Gail Schwarzenberger had argued that international law needed to replace the war-peace dichotomy with a trichotomy war-peace and the intermediate state or status-mixtures. This proposal had no success when he was first advanced in the 40s and 50s but interestingly we may be going back to it as a result of this convergence and certainly there are many in the academic literature who are welcoming convergence. Whether convergence is the solution it is clear that war has also gone through significant changes and that the war-peace distinction may in some ways be difficult to maintain also in a phenomenological sense. The decline of interstate war but also changes in non-international conflicts and the decline in non- international conflicts are well documented. Technology is also contributing to changes in the nature of warfare that to some extent challenge the distinction between war and peace and I'll just give three examples of these new technologies one with which everyone is familiar because it has been in the media for some time is the rise of remote warfare through UAVs or drones. Now remote warfare does blare this distinction between war and peace in more than one way. Another technology that I think will become more and more prominent in public argument and certainly preoccupies states considerably already is the risk of weaponization of biotechnologies. Some of you may have seen the latest issue of foreign affairs is dedicated to this. All the key barriers to the artificial synthesis of viruses and bacterias have been overcome. The physicist Freeman Dyson says that in the not-so-distant future children will design and create living organisms rather than play with Lego but one need not look into the future to understand the perils. In September 2011 a Dutch professor announced that he had found a way in his lab to turn the H5N1 virus from a virus that infected mainly birds and only rarely transmitted to humans into human to human flu. The death rate for the H5N1 virus in the few cases where human transmission has occurred was 59%. So there was considerable concern that in the laboratory the human to human flu could be changed so as to incorporate the H5N1 virus. A Japanese professor shortly thereafter said I've done the same in my lab and I think a Chinese group of scientists has said that they've replicated a similar exercise 127 times with H5N1. There is a case in Holland concerning the publication of the results of this research. The Dutch government has so far successfully blocked the publication of this research and scientists are asked to publish their results if they have to in heavily redacted form. The cost of these technologies is declining very rapidly and the information is available on the internet. The equipment to do quite a lot of this stuff costs only tens of thousands of pounds.  Now Thomas Frank entitled one of his books The Empower Self and it is true that this empowered individual is becoming the protagonist of our era but empowerment is not always for the better and the kind of threats that will emerge from the single rogue individual with this enormous destructive potential will also be somewhere in the penumbra between war and peace. The third example of a technology that I think blurs that distinction is the rise of what some scholars call non-obvious warfare in particular cyber warfare. One of my colleagues at Kings Thomas Reid has just finished a book that has been doing really well on on cyber warfare he argues that cyber attacks are sophisticated versions of three activities that are as old as human conflict itself sabotage espionage subversion so not open obvious warfare but warfare that is not in any way declared or made manifest but contrary to widely held views cyber attacks in Thomas Reid's opinion help diminish rather than accentuate political political violence. This is quite an interesting idea the relationship between these new technologies and violence because the correlation may be maybe inverse. Now let me move to an assessment of the current state of the law on human rights and war in light of these remarks and observations about broader trends. You probably all know about Harry Truman once asking for a one-handed economist because all the economists that he had consulted would always have answers like on the one hand and on the other hand. Now I'm going to be two-handed in my conclusions but I will say at the outset that my reservations about the current system the current approach to the application of human rights to war and the repercussions that this has had on the distinction between war and peace outweigh anything positive I may have to say about it. Now let's start with the positive side and this is really going to make you all feel better. The good side of the story is this there is an even bigger picture than the big picture of the war peace distinction that is relevant to the topic of the application of war of human rights to war. This bigger than the big picture is the story of the reduction of violence and war in human societies. When I moved to kings and joined for 75 percent of my time at the Department of War Studies as the only lawyer I expected to be surrounded by hardcore realists who had complete faith in the inevitability of war and violence and would view an international lawyer like myself with his Kantian belief in human perfectibility as a cute mascot of just the nuisance at worst. I was quite surprised to find out that among war study scholars all the money's on the war being in clear decline and that this decline has been going on for a while and some people even think they weren't really going to grow out of war pretty soon. The first scholar who advanced this thesis as an empirical not as a normative but as an empirical statement was Norbert Elias. In the civilizing process a book which was published just before the Second World War not the best timing for the kind of ideas. Elias argued that human beings had over the centuries been developing a second nature which allowed them to restrain the more instinctive and brutal first nature and by calling it second nature Elias was saying this is not just about human beings obeying to external pressure external rules for fear of punishment or social habits it's actually a change in human nature. More recently Stephen Pinker has taken that thesis forward in his book The Better Angels of our Nature. He has mastered evidence on the steady decline in homicide rates and violence across human societies at 8.8 out of 100,000 homicide rates in the world are the lowest they've ever been. And war is also affected by this process and it is not just Pinker who argues that but a host of scholars that go from Ned LeBeau to Azar Gat. It is magnificent book Warring Human Civilization published by Cambridge. As I said the decline in interstate war is a well-documented fact internal conflict is also now declining. It is true of course that we have weapons that can kill far more than before but the surprising thing is that we are not doing so. World War II was the bloodiest war in human history in absolute terms but relative to the population World War II is surpassed by at least eight other conflicts. Some of which it is surpassed by eight other conflicts some of which many of you will have never have heard of. These were conflicts that wiped out a far larger percentage of the population alive at the time than World War II did. So what's the link between this big trend that seems to have gone on across through human history and across human societies and human rights in World War I can't help thinking that the application of human rights to war this further attempt to constrain war is part of this process of rejection of war and that to use Stephen Pinker's words the better angels of our nature are at work in Strasbourg in the Hague and Parliament Square the Supreme Court side of Parliament Square also the Parliament side of Parliament Square the better angels of our nature at work there when all these developments are taking place but angels are not very good at considering unintended consequences and so I come to my other hand the not so good one. When the ICJ was trying to come up with some ingenious way of keeping the right to life in play in the context let us not forget of nuclear weapons its better angels did not pause to consider the fact that what Marco Milanovic calls the lexpecialist magic was transforming the right to life into an absurdity. The court said that the right not to be arbitrarily deprived of one's life applies in wartime too but that arbitrariness must be determined in accordance with the laws of unconfident. Now it will be recalled that the law that the court concluded in that case that it was not clear whether international law allowed the use of nuclear weapons in extreme cases of self-defense and so what that means in terms of the right to life is that there is some definition of the right to life which might accommodate the instantaneous annihilation of hundreds of thousands of lives. Would it not have been better if the court had instead proceeded on the assumption that human rights do cease in wartime and that as grocers would have probably said we have to think through a different category rather than contaminate the idea of the right to life. All the court could have said that human rights do not cease in wartime as it did and that of course the use of nuclear weapons breaches the right to life. The Strasbourg court has fared no better no better at handling the unintended consequences of its own better angels. The Strasbourg court already starts from a strong balancing philosophy. The principle of proportionality has added what I would describe as a utilitarian calculus in the application of rights that is from a liberal theory of rights I think very problematic in the argument in the United States the argument between absolutists and balances on the First Amendment was resolved in favor of the absolutists but even the balances in that argument if you read those decisions would have probably been horrified at the extent to which proportionality has been taken in Strasbourg. If that weren't enough the European Court of Human Rights now has a new method of rights slicing and this time it hasn't even tried to disguise it under a suave term like proportionality it openly speaks of tailoring and dividing rights but what are the limits of this tailoring and dividing in the passage from which I cited the course speaks of rights that are relevant to the situation of the individual how is this relevance going to be assessed on which theory will the court decide that certain rights are relevant to individuals in helmet but not relevant to individuals in Hampstead. Rights that are already subject to proportionality can now be divided and tailored and what is left of the idea of human rights is in my view in many respects in a liberal sense no longer a right but possibly also in an analytical sense not a right they are more akin to what French and Italian administrative lawyers would call legitimate interests these are interests that we have vis-à-vis the state but they have to be balanced against other state interests and can be taken away and will be variable and they're not quite clearly defined so to conclude let me come back to my question is human rights I think the question was in the future so the answer to the question is formulated the title of my paper is I don't know because I don't know about the future but if the question is human rights corrupting is war corrupting human rights is human rights contributing to taming war I think that war has clearly been restrained and continues to be restrain restrained in ways that we're only beginning to understand actually because of the extraordinary processes that I've described then human rights may be more the symptoms rather than the cause of this restraint but what is quite problematic in my view is that war has already to quite a significant extent begun to corrupt and diminish the idea of human rights and it is here in my view that lies a great danger


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back here on theCUBE, the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV. We wrap up our coverage today. Day two of Dell EMC World 2017. We're live in Las Vegas. I'm John Walls, along with Rebecca Knight, and joining us now, all the way from Tobacco Road, I'm William, who is the IT infrastructure architect of North Carolina State University, and beautiful Raleigh, North Carolina. Patrick, thank you for joining us. Thank you. Yeah, tell us first off, you know, in academia, you're the first, somebody from that community that we haven't a chance to speak with over the past two days. What are you seeing here that you're going to find of interest that you, that will take back to you to Raleigh, that they've been put into practice? Right, so we are really taking a look at the technologies that we have in play, and there's been a lot of new announcements at the conference this year. So we have Unity Storage, we have Data Domain, and there's been announcements pretty much across that product spectrum. So we've been looking, going to the breakout sessions, talking to the experts, and trying to take a look at the technology and see how we can take advantage of the new features that are offered in our environment. So before the cameras are rolling, you were setting the scene a little bit, and describing the kinds of data needs, security needs that you have for a busy, thriving and large college campus. Can you lay that out for our viewers? Right, so for a college campus, one of the biggest concerns is around security, right? So there's a mandate or a desire, as part of the academic culture, to be as open as possible, because the goal is to exchange ideas and to share resources between the university and across our set of institutions. And so contrast that with the reality that we have to maintain a high level of security now. So there's obviously a lot of incidents. We are a Google mail university and as you know, there was recently an attack on Gmail, right? So one of the things that we've had to do is to say, we're going to implement two factor authentication. We're going to develop a classification system around how we assess and manage data. So depending on the category, there's different levels of security that are in place, but in place, in order to help us manage that environment, while also trying to remain as open as possible. So you have a lot of competing interests, it seems. Trying to balance those interests is how much of your job? 100%. Yeah, so what I would say is that in order to be able to get proposals forward, I have to be able to make the case on all sides of the equation. So I have to make the correct academic case. I have to make the correct business case. And I have to make the correct cultural case. And if I can make those cases coincide, then we can succeed and move things forward and get proposals. Yeah, because you're saying at NC State, it's not central IT. I mean, you're in IT, but there are some of the four schools that have options and they can make their own decisions. And so I would think coordination, integration are not barriers, but certainly challenges for you. That's right, so we call ourselves the central IT group. However, there is no mandate for each of the colleges to use central IT services. So our goal is to create kind of a foundational set of services that the consumers can income and build on top of rather than building their own resources. And we like to see that grow kind of organically rather than to mandate use of central services. And we've actually had great success. So we've had a lot of resources to come back from the edge into the central fold and be able to grow that centrally, put a higher level of resiliency on top of those services and satisfy our customers. In terms of one of the challenges though, cost is a huge one. And making sure that things do come in within budget and not a penny over. Can you talk a little bit about some of those obstacles and how you overcome them? Right, so cost is everything for us, right? Our budgets have been flat for the past three years, but the demand for growth and capacity in existing environments and the demand for new services is ongoing. So what we've been able to do is to work really hard on assessing our resources. We implemented Cloud IQ a year ago when it was first announced to get a kind of a long-term view of our environment and kind of track our growth. And that has enabled us to put the right data in the appropriate tier and be able to maximize our investment. And that's really helped us to be able to continue to grow our environment as we move forward. When you're talking about the different clients or constituencies you're trying to please, you've got the students, the faculty, the administration, the staff. What do students want? What do faculty want? And how do you give them what they want? That's right. So students, it's really interesting because the student perspective has really changed over the past couple of years and it caught us off guard. We have a pervasive data network on our campus. We have all the dorms wired. They're about, we have about 21,000 students total, but about 8,000 stay on campus. All those dorms were hardwired, but we did not have Wi-Fi enabled in all the dorms. And we surveyed students every year. Last year we surveyed them and we got very bad marks because that Ethernet jack was not enough for them. If you look at what you typically show up with now, how many devices have hardwired jack? None, right? So they show up with four devices. They couldn't use any of them on our data network. And their response on the survey was we, the one that I remember the most was, our lives depend on Wi-Fi. That was a quote, right? So we, of course, immediately went and looked at how we roll out 4,000 access points right away. We did that over a summer. That was able to succeed. We also have a very unique set of challenges in that because I mentioned that we only have 4,000 students that actually are slightly more than that, that stay on campus. The majority of them moved back and forth between classes. So 10 a.m. when 5,000 people walk by one access point. When they've just woken up, 10 a.m. Or log in to check their email, et cetera. So those are unique challenges. So what we have to do is, what are the tools to track the application resources? What's normal application performance? What's a normal peak? And what's a breakout that's outside of the normal? And how do we profile that? And we want to be well ahead of the demand so that we can put those resources in place ahead of the need. So what do you do about the challenge of future deployments? Your budget's going to be somewhat constrained.  Your constituents have new and growing demands. That's right. So I mean, tough not to crack, isn't it? You're trying to make it in your cloud strategy. What are you going to do with that? You've got a 14G server coming on board now. How do you balance that from the academic perspective? All right, so you mentioned that. And also, I didn't mention that one of our data centers is aging. And so on top of all that, we're also starting to see, put a strain on our data center resources. What we really hope to be able to do is to leverage some type of a hybrid cloud strategy, right? The challenge for us has been, what is our application profile? So if you look at applications that are great fit in cloud and applications that are not a great fit in cloud, the traditional backend applications, the core infrastructure applications are not necessarily a great fit. And so what we're trying to figure out is, what is the best hybrid solution that will help us move our environment forward and still leverage existing resources? So looking ahead, what does the college campus of the future, the technology-enabled college campus of the future look like? Give us a picture. Well, I think one of the best examples I can give is our hunt library. So we opened a new library on what we call our Centennial Campus a few years ago. And it was designed from the ground up as kind of a new model of what does the next generation of the library look like? Because it's not, if you think of a library now, you don't think of a traditional, okay, here's a building in the stacks and stacks and stacks of books. So they put the books off in a corner and there is a large robotic library that's designed to handle the books and the bulk of it is about collaborative spaces. So there are high-end collaborative workstations, consolidated areas, you know, there are students that are in the design school, if you want to go and practice your DJ skills, you can do that there as well. So that's where things are really headed. So Patrick, before we let you go, my final question is, when are you going to be Carolina and Duke of basketball? We're waiting. So we have that championship banners from the 80s. And I'm tired of looking at that. So we're really looking forward to- The states are all gone. Right. Patrick Williams, NC State, thank you for being with us here on theCUBE. Safe travels back home and continued success at Raleigh. We appreciate the time. All right. That wraps it up here on theCUBE. Day two is in the books. We'll see you back here tomorrow morning at 11.30 central time. That's 2.30 on the East Coast for more live interviews live from Las Vegas until then for Rebecca Knight. I'm John Walls. Have a good night.


The panel, the discussion, an objective and impartial view of the issues of interest to you. Nation Beat is on now. Hi and welcome to Nation Beat, a production of the Government Information Service and NTN. I am your host Kendall Eugene. So today we have the pleasure of sitting with the three-time Queen's Commonwealth Essay Competition National Awardee. Cadizia Holliday, good afternoon. Good afternoon. And Cadizia is currently studying clinical psychology and her essays, which we are going to listen to in a few minutes, have earned her and our beautiful island cold awards. Cadizia, welcome. Thank you. Let's chat a little bit about you before we get into the essays, which I am sure a lot of our listeners and viewers will be most interested in not only listening to but hearing how you recite your spoken word. And I really call it a talent to be able to write, but not only write, but recite what is written in a powerful way to get a reaction from your reader, your listener. It's a massive talent, but we'll come to that in a while. Who is Cadizia Holliday? Well, I'm currently 21 years old. I'm studying in the U.S. right now in Oberlin College, which is a small liberal arts college. I'm studying in addition to psychology, creative writing as well. My hopes are that I will become a clinical psychologist in the future and a professional writer. But my writing journey began at a very young age. I usually begin a lot of interviews when people ask me, how did I begin with the small anecdote that I began writing at a very, very young age. I fell in love with woods at a very, very young age. My childhood years were spent going to school for eight hours and then coming home to read for another eight. And after reading book after book, I had the epiphany that I didn't need to always be the one being inspired. I could be the one doing the inspiring. I was a very interesting child. I had a lot of tangible collections. But one of the collections that I, I guess, rarely speak about because it's not so tangible was my collection of woods. I've always had like this extreme, I would say, very peculiar fascination with woods. I loved adding words to my vocabulary. I love sounding out loud advanced words for my age. And that was not a collection or an obsession. I would say that left whilst I was in primary school, a secondary school that still continues to this day. I have a very strange relationship with woods. And I think that that is something that does continue to fuel my passion for writing today. Kalizha, in all my years interviewing, this is the first time someone has told me they have a strange collection of woods. It's like a fascination of learning a new word every day.  That book you started writing in, do you still have it to this day? I have, yeah, I have all of my books. Oh, books? Yeah. Yeah, I have several journals and notebooks at home. I've never thrown out a book that I've used for writing. Why do you think you have such a fascination with learning new woods? I'm not too sure. I haven't been the most neurotypical child, neurotypical person on a whole actually. But there's this phenomenon called synesthesia where people actually... It's a very strange thing to describe. I'm probably not doing it justice here, but people experience other additional sensations when they're doing something that is not necessarily connected to it. So for example, some people might have a color associated with a specific word or a taste associated with something else. So for me, I don't know how it started, but I've had this sort of taste since I was very young, associated with sounding out different words and sounding out different vowels. So words like... I'll give you an example. Please. One of my favorite words is enigmatic. Not just because it's a fancy word, I don't know how else to describe it, but it just feels right to me. Another word is surreptitious. Excuse me? Surreptitious. Surreptitious. Yes, so clandestine. So I would just pronounce words growing up just for the fun of it. And right now, I do engage in so many different types of creative writing, but my favorite is spoken wood. And spoken wood incorporates actually paying attention to rhythm and sound and actual performance. And that is my favorite avenue of creative writing for an array of different reasons, but that particularly is one of those reasons. I get to be in a space where I'm doing what I love, but I'm also not just doing what I love because of any aim of inspiring, but also because I just love pronouncing words and articulating my words in addition to connecting with people. I saw that in your very first video that you presented for the essay competition, the Queen's Commonwealth Essay Competition. And when you read out your essay, before that I was used to individuals reading out poems. And when I heard she has essays, I was like, oh cool, let me listen to her. And when you read it out, it's almost like you were reading a poem, but you enjoyed it. You enjoyed bringing it out to the listening and viewing public. Is that what you mean when you say you like sounding out your words and you fall in love with what you do? Yes, definitely. If you were to ask anybody I went to school with to describe me, people probably say I'm a writer, but most people would say quiet, which is very true. I'm a very, very introverted person. Very, very reserved to a very extreme, but that has strangely enough never affected me performing my poetry on stage. It has not affected my spoken word performance because when I get on stage, actually the moment from me leaving the audience to walking onto the stage, I feel like anxiety and nervousness, but from the moment I begin my poem to the moment I end my poem within that space, it's almost like I'm inhabiting the words that I'm performing, I'm speaking, I'm connecting with, like, I embody the message, the sounds that I am speaking. So, yeah, that definitely is some of it. All right. Well, I think it's time we allow our viewers to at least listen to your first poem. Okay. Now, before I ask you anything about that first poem, we are going to all watch it together. We're going to listen and then we'll talk about it. Is that okay? Yes. That's all right. Okay. So, let's check out her very first poem, the one that brought her her first gold award in the Queens Commonwealth Essay Competition. Hello, my name is Khadija Haldi and this is the piece that I submitted for the 2018 Queens Commonwealth Essay Competition. The title is The Road to a Safer Future. I believe that The Road to a Safer Future is not paved with pretentious pronouncements. Neither is it laid by the passing of new laws, nor the skyscraping of highways of new leaders cemented in public pretenses. I believe that we have spent centuries cruising along the sidewalk to the road that leads to a safer future. Pulverizing innocent pebbles, cup-sizing free-thinking flower pots, yelling antagonistic apologies for the dirt left behind. I believe that on The Road to a Safer Future it is ironic increasingly so that we focus the majority of our energy on the external commotion of traffic. The colours of the paints that colour each vehicle continuously choosing to disregard the blatant fact that we all innately carry the exact same fuel. I believe that the lone pedestrians trudging along at the edge of The Road to a Safer Future are judged by their poverty and seldom by the vehicles that we rob from them by our reluctance to offer a ride. I believe that we religiously regard the tracks of white and yellow marks positioned strategically along The Road, not recalling it seems to erase umbilical blueprints from past constructors and trace into The Road our own. I believe that these are the century-old propensities that protect the erroneous allegation of the unattainability of a safer future. Evidently, it shows that the issue in fact is not inconsistency, but precisely its exact opposite, consistency. A repeated repetition of the exact same concession along The Road. I believe with utmost conviction that the renovation of our routine sensitive mindsets is the only avenue to gaining ground on The Road to a Safer Future. Habitually, we address the carelessness of the drivers and seldom the stained windshields from which they look through. Mind you, on a day-to-day basis, generations of mentalities are premolded and marred in advance as per fault of the routine-based confines of the past. The Road to a Safer Future? I believe that we misinterpret the signs at its sides. For instance, the ones that read stop we completely crop out of our vision because we automatically associate stop with the direction for permanent delay when all it really is is a prompt for a moment of reflection so that we can learn from our ways. I believe that we readily embrace the word shortcut because we refuse to grasp that it's just an illusion, directly deceiving. And in the end, when we finally see it for what it really is, we take no blame and incriminate an innocent road for the dismal products of our own poor decision-making. I believe that the accidents and collisions that we get into along The Road to a Safer Future are too hastily cleaned up preventing us from absorbing the implications of the acts of speeding and disobedience and overtaking. I believe that the thousands of tragedies about aren't mere coincidences because it's at these roundabouts that we all exit from varying backgrounds and experiences and situations and we've never been sufficiently taught to exhibit patience and understanding at such intimate intersections. I believe that we seldom adhere to the rules of The Road because no one has ever sat us down and embedded the magnitudes of the fines issued as a result of rebellion and deviation. I believe that we crash into lampposts and tumbling to traffic lights because we harbor the innate, toddler-like tendency to topple off-course even in the presence of light and clear direction. I believe that the most glaring and underrated sources of lights are the lampposts located at the very beginning of The Road to a Safer Future in the form of innocence and curiosity and hope. I believe that these lights are the lights that we shield our eyes to because we've all been darkened by the tar-coating this road and the introduction of light to darkness now would be scary and unfamiliar and frightening. I believe that the real reason we fly nuclear obscenities out through the windows of our vehicles is not because we harbor hate for our fellow drivers, but because we aim to conceal the insecurity and lack of control we feel over the wheel. I believe that the real reason we wind our windows down to patronised passing drivers is not because they have persecuted us in any way but because we all have this quiet embedded fare that by the time we find The Safer Future our engines will be empty and our tanks bear. I believe that we each grow up promising to change things when we're old enough to reach the wheel and that finally when we are old enough we forget those past dreams. I believe that the scratches and nicks we receive taint us more than we can see and that no amount of paint can erase them but at least we can still believe. I believe that on this road, on this journey to safety, we are never going to simply agree. I believe that we will always drive at different speeds but I believe that the racial irrespective of individual belief or hierarchical seat or driving speed is eternally equivalent to potential and promise. I believe that the way we process the tickets we receive mentally is the key to driving more patiently in the future. I believe most of all that we can't all expect to fit into one lane. Logically it's impossible that eventually all individual lanes will lead to one junction called a safer future. The road to a safer future. 2018 Gold Award tell us about your creative space when you were writing that essay. Interestingly enough I don't remember the details but I don't really think that that's necessarily because of the distance of time but this poem was actually an interesting poem in the sense that if you listen to it, it's very, very literary and iridite language but I do remember the writing process being ironically not as difficult as it may seem once I finalized, once I decided on the concept that I wanted for it because this was the first time that I had entered the Queens Commonwealth essay competition and I remember looking at the title the title was connected to something about the road to a safer future and I just stared at that phrase the road to a safer future trying to figure out how I could make this piece creative and it just hit me to just read it at face value, the road to a safer future because I mean from at face value that prompt is calling for you to look at something more larger but I thought okay, what if I actually keep it at face value and then expand on it so for my piece I decided to look at a literal road to think about our future or at least the distance from the present to the future at a literal road and to identify various elements and signage and just aspects on a literal road like lamps and street lights and speed bumps and to sort of parallel them with more abstract things and yeah that's how that piece was born once I realized that that's the direction I wanted to go with it everything else kind of flowed out how long did it take you to get into that creative drive like get everything flowing yeah I'd like to say that there's a clear cut answer for that but there really isn't it it really depends on the type of day the time of day the state of mind for that piece ironically I would say that it's actually getting more difficult to write nowadays but I don't think that's because of the writing process itself so much as it is just life being hectic and busy and you know shrouded with life being life but I always like when I'm experiencing writer's block I'm not somebody who forces myself to sit down and make sure I get the words out I allow myself to take the break that I need and come back how important and I'm so happy you mentioned that is it for a writer to take breaks in between a project because I have a feeling that a lot of our young creatives believe that they should be churning out work and churning out work and not thinking that maybe I need to take at least a break or two how important is it I spoke to this recently in a keynote speech that I did and even like right now in creative writing I feel like there's this atmosphere in the literary world and not just an atmosphere this is what a lot of professors will tell you and writing professionals that you should have a writing journal every day you should make sure you're writing it every single day you should not let the sunset without having written at least something and if that works for some people I think that's great but personally for me that hasn't worked because with each day there are just different challenges I don't always have the same energy I don't always have the same motivation and I find that forcing myself or beating down on myself or not extending myself that grace and that compassion to allow for rest ends up doing more harm than good so personally I would advise to take a break when you need to take a rest but always return so it's not that I'm saying it's okay to give up but I'm saying it's okay to rest it's okay to take a pause but at the end of the day return to your work and see what comes out so important that you're saying that especially with how influences have taken over the social media space and most of them would give their advice and I have heard quite a few give the advice of if you sleep you lose out on life if you sleep you miss out on this and that but not remembering that sleep is actually you resetting your body you're getting that recharge that you so richly deserve we have two more essays to listen to and we're going to do that right after the break and when we come back we're going to find out a little bit more about your inspirations I'm very curious to know who inspires you as the creators so after the break we'll come back we'll have a chat with Cadizia she is of course the three time queen she is a common world essay competition a national awardee and today we are very pleased to have her in our presence this is Nation Beat we'll be back after this oi you have realized you step on my toe we'll do something about it gasai bussindaman hola if somebody try to cross you and a matting start to take you no need for our all violence cause the police is there to help you if our troubles start in this session hola it is so strange seeing my cartoon form in a commercial and that's what I just saw a while ago looking at me be like oh look it's me I'm here with the Cadizia holiday welcome back to Nation Beat production of the government information service and NTN Cadizia is our three time queen's common world essay competition national awardee when she told me her the title I had to applaud her because I am still practicing remembering that mouthful and you've done you do it like it's clockwork Cadizia I don't think I said congratulations no that's bad that's horrible congratulations on winning and making our island also proud and we enjoy boosting our awardees any time we get ok however we hardly know who inspires our winners who inspires the awardees and how do they get to where they are so tell us a little bit about your inspiration before we jump into our second essay ok well despite the obsession that I told you about with Woods with Woods there was also I think a lot of writers turned to writing for self expression which is valid and makes sense but for me also writing helped me escape a deep pit that I thought I wouldn't be able to come out mentally when I was younger so I turned to writing sort of as an escape a means of catharsis some of most of the spoken word that I do is actually centered about mental health advocacy which is something else that I'm very passionate about so I merge my writing, my creative writing with my mental health advocacy which birthed the creation of a vision of myself online called Ash Speaks I have a YouTube channel which is dedicated to that I guess in general I would say emotion but I'm a very introverted person so despite my own journey with mental illness and mental health struggles I'm somebody who's very observant and very very sensitive and I found myself from a very young child observing and being the one that was listening rather than talking so there was a lot that I picked up on or thought that I picked up on and interpreted and being someone who was not very easily comfortable with people in social settings and I didn't have the largest pool of friends I would turn to my own journals as a means of processing what I was seeing or what I was interpreting or what I was feeling and that continues to be definitely continues to be something today I do continue to use my writing particularly on Instagram I use my Instagram page sort of as this diary that I allow the public to see and my idea with that is I'm not really sure how to put it into words but I've always found it very freeing to be vulnerable in a public space once my words will package in some form of creative writing so I like to say that Ash which is Ash Speaks is the unmasked version of Cadizia Holiday because Ash Speaks allows me to write creatively but in a public space and yeah just generally the idea of connecting with people because connection is something that I'm very passionate about but it's kind of been hard for me as someone who's been very introverted but I find that people of course welcome vulnerability and for me vulnerability is only possible when I'm writing so having this sort of online space this online platform that allows me to be vulnerable, allows me to connect allows me to focus and and advocate for healing and in advocating for my own healing I also advocate for others healing and well that's one of the primary reasons that I want to be a clinical psychologist I want to continue this sort of work but more in a professional sense now alright we're going to listen to your second essay now Family, Community, Nation, Commonwealth that one I had to listen to it twice okay I can honestly say if they ask me to choose which one I really like the most or put a favorite I'll not put it 1, 2, 3 but I'll say yeah this one is a facelift of mine alright just because of the character I met in that essay so let's take a listen to that one and like we did with the first we'll come back and chat a little bit about it Hello my name is Khadija Halliday and I attend Sir Arthur Lewis Community College this piece that I'm about to perform was the piece that I submitted to last year's 2019 annual International Queens Essay Commonwealth Competition the topic that I chose was Family, Community, Nation, Commonwealth what are our opportunities for shared sustainable growth the title of my piece is I am Tiny but I am Hope Hope, get down from there I startle and look up at momma for a bit merely grinning toothily I decide to not listen I continue in my attempts to climb the mountainous front desk my hands making somewhat of a sticky mess on the walls of the desk as I do so this most definitely isn't the first time that I am attempting to climb this front desk we'll visit the hospital frequently and yes each time I giggle as the desk groans upon my arrival but I don't think it really mines the lady at the front desk sure doesn't neither does momma she stops me when she realizes that I'm about to hurt myself usually that is sometimes when she's busy filling out piles of papers or talking to the lady at the front desk or arguing in hush tones over the phone I fall but I'm learning and all consequences have actions that's what momma says as she hurriedly with a protective gentleness puts me off and blows a raspberry on my cheek I don't mind the learning even in those moments when salty rivulets are trickling down the rise of my cheeks I am tiny but I am big and that's why I continue to climb hope commonwealth this however brings me to a halt commonwealth is my second name but momma only uses it when she needs me to listen momma doesn't wait for me to get down on my own she swoops in and carries me away from whatever danger she believes I was in the sudden whooshing movement tickles my insides and escapes in the happy form of bubbles of laughter momma looks down sternly at me but her right side of her face too tickles with young laughter that's enough learning for today she decides but not with any harshness I am not upset I understand that momma wants the best for me and that momma has to protect me and that momma named me hope first because that is what I am first to her hope misnation the lady at the desk calls momma immediately looks up to her name and gives the lady with a smile as we are given the indication to head on momma's soft smile probably seems soothing to the lady but I feel the strain of it momma takes my sticky hand in hers completely unbothered by the sticky mess I'm making together we walk by now my own two feet know the path by heart but momma never lets go of my hand momma never lets go mom momma greets quietly as we meet grandma in the next waiting room I can feel my face stretching to beam as grandma opens her large beckoning arms wide for me I rush in eagerly albeit clumsily but she stabilizes me grandma stabilizes me despite having taken my first steps a few years ago grandma insists that I'm still learning to walk momma agrees with her I want to as well but I'm still understanding grandma hugs like a community that's what momma says and momma's smart real smart she has her own stethoscope and it's real not like the toy ones I have I swear but momma says that none of her smartness matters in fact momma says that sometimes she doesn't feel so smart in less kind words when she's speaking to grandma alone and thinks that I can't hear it doesn't matter that she's doctor nation at her fancy meetings the ones in which she dresses up in her fancy suits that she lets me wear sometimes for fun momma says that none of that matters her true safety net is her mom and grandma hugs like a community so it makes sense to me I love momma her smartness and her protect me but I also love and need what momma got grandma the warm yummy feeling that her hugs give I need that feeling as we approach the familiar giant door grandma pauses for the tiniest bit before touching the door note it's tiny but I notice it I'm tiny but I notice things grandma looks at me and softens her face teasingly sticking out her tongue at me I giggle and stick my own out but behind me momma's shallow breathing reminds me of what grandma is trying to distract me from they think they're protecting me they don't want to expose me to the scary monsters of the world I'm tiny but I think and I think that I need to meet the scary monsters now so that I can grow up understanding what I need to kill I'm tiny but I think we enter and we see her family when I was even tinier than I am now momma had tried to explain the concept of a great grandmother momma tried so hard to explain how she fit in the family her in that word repeated so often I called her just that family and yes I'm old enough now but family is what I've always known momma and grandma used to be amused by this but now they too sometimes slip and call her family I'm frightened as I gaze at her body connected to the machines that I don't know any of the names to and there's a lot I look at momma but she turns away realizing that I'm staring at the lone rivulet trickling down her face I wish she wouldn't I'm tiny but I need to know I look at grandma I don't even know I tried to tell her I need to know the pain of all the generations that gave birth to me she understands a bit more than momma she allows me to gaze at her own rivulets of tears before she crumples and has to turn away I'm tiny but I'm beginning to understand looking back at the bed I approach family I stare at her barely their hands I've seen them with my eyes but I know grandma has albums family used to be big not chubby like me, massive her hands are barely there now and her body is still but her hands are shaking her hands occasionally twitch as she attempts to stop the shaking her attempts are familiar I'm tiny but I too shake sometimes for example when momma's busy when she's looking I want to make her proud I want to make grandma proud too I'm the hope but I too shake sometimes I'm tiny but I'm strong family's now tiny too but no longer strong my still somewhat sticky hands hug her her hand hugs closer some of my quiet shaking becomes louder while some of her is quiet are we both now shaking or are we sharing her hand hugs tighter my hands do too the sticky mess of my hand doesn't bother her she's family and we need family momma says I'm tiny but I am the future maybe but we need family for the future I can't let family die I'm tiny but without families my name means nothing there are no opportunities for shared growth I won't let family die her eyes open and immediately mind play hide and seek because I'm tiny but all of a sudden I'm heavy heavy by the hurt I see swarming through the broken irises of family stories of the past stories happening I see mothers leaving and fathers drinking and children coping I see pain I see a lifetime of families breaking I see a century of families losing families I see families ending I see how my family is ending her hand tightens around my hand I thought we had shared all that we could but I was wrong I am tiny and I am wrong I can't know all the pain of yesterday even though I try I want to make tomorrow better but there's too much history is mama right to turn away when she cries is grandma curing us a little when she hugs family doesn't know neither do I but this lack of answers is something we share this search for answers is what we share families hooting and I'm not deaf to the stifles sobs from behind me and I'm not ignorant to my innocence but though I'm tiny I hoot I gaze into family's eyes her broken irises are coming together again they're reflecting something they don't have their own light they're borrowing a light what are you reflecting family hope she whispers this is all I think about as we leave mama holding tightly onto my hand as the lady at the desk says have a good day Miss Nation and grandma hugging me like a community as we pass it I look back at the tall but no longer formidable height of the counter I know I'll be back and our family knows it too I will climb again I'm tiny but I'm hope mama smiles softly down at me herring me mumble my name sleepily hope will be common hope I can tell you now that's my favorite character because when I heard the essay I immediately remembered my niece running up and down when she was a toddler and my mom who would equally try to get her under control and say hey no don't do that, hey don't do that but the manager say hey no don't do that should be doing the exact same thing so basically your pieces compels the reader or the listener to put themselves in the shoes of your character alright and again when I heard the name hope it basically had me thinking yes I know she's already thinking about a human being but I can't help but just imagine a little girl being that child in hope tell us about that essay why the name hope well it's interesting rewatching it now I'm trying to remember like what my thought process was when I wrote the piece and although I can't connect with again the details I do know that a lot of my pieces begin first with the emotion that I'm trying to convey and then the sort of setting and the characters kind of flesh themselves out for this essay the prompt was what are our what are the realities for shared growth something like that and I just had the idea to personify four different entities so the commonwealth nations family and hope and in doing that and making each of these persons related by great grandmother grandmother mother and then daughter I'm kind of implying that there is a connection between these like there is an inherent connection between all of these entities and that hope is the most integral her being the youngest but also connected to what you were saying about your niece I've always been very fascinated with hope as a concept I did this documentary a while back about my own relationship with hope I say documentary but it was very self directed just by myself but your documentary yeah so it was called assassinating hope so it was about me essentially realizing I don't know I was as I said I was a very strange kid I came up with this formula when I was younger that I didn't like feeling disappointment and all of the sadness and neuroticism that comes with disappointment so I realized that whenever I hoped for something that's when I would feel disappointed so in order for me to get disappointment and all those negative feelings I would have to get rid of hope so I went on this journey of yeah trying to kill hope so like never have any hope in any situation whatsoever and I realized in doing so that I was essentially killing myself in the very most succinct way to put it and then yeah I came up with this other this other formula where it was me hope disappointment that's just life and I think that hope is something that's just very integral in any question about our opportunities for shared growth as a nation as a commonwealth as any sort of entity for the future because hope is something that as much as you try to tame them like you were saying with your me so as much as you try to assassinate it like my documentary said as much as you try to yeah minimize it like it doesn't die it doesn't go away hope is always there as yeah like hope is always there and even if it does die always resurrects and just like thinking about that resilience that comes with hope that natural indomitable human spirit that comes with the idea of hope I wanted to really make that come through in this piece so in the final scene where we're seeing the great grandmother on the bed although she's dying there's this sort of internal monologue regarding just the connection of all entities so the family's dying and underneath that so it just keeps it's supposed to be this sort of generational cyclical nature but hope is supposed to make the decision that she's not going to watch or she's not going to repeat the same mistakes as her predecessors so yeah that was the kind of idea that I had with the piece but I was mainly thinking I felt what I wanted the piece to convey and then I worked backwards on fleshing out everything else yeah going backwards and fleshing out everything else this is what you had me doing with your third piece thank you very much for giving me that headache when you gave us the intro and you guys inherited just a little while she deliberately said I'm going to do it in one way it's going to have one meaning and I'm paraphrasing here and in another way it's going to have a different meaning and I was like now I have a whole assignment to go and do and that is that's going to take us into our next viewing for your to the final award winning essay it had to do with planet concept and I thought to myself if she going to speak on climate change if she going to speak on our current situations happening how we're not taking care of the earth and what do we need to do and it had me very interested and very intrigued so we're going to listen to the third essay right now and then we're going to find out just how did you even think to come up with that ladder for concept you have taken a good one My name is Khadija Halideh I am a recensor author the topic that I chose for this year's competition was there is no planet B how will climate change affect you and your community the title of my piece is our only planet B is a failed planet A this piece is a reverse poem which means when I read it the first way and then when I reverse it and read it the other way around line by line it will have a completely different meaning so please pay attention to the end is a failed planet A our only planet B the simple truth is that climate change is not a real issue for today only the delusional dare to declare that we absolutely have to change the way we live now such falsehoods are nothing more than fairy tales the fate of the future primarily depends on only the people of the future no blame belongs to the people of the present it is completely unacceptable to say the opposite without an unwavering doubt it is far more worthwhile doing the following that is just focusing on the problems we cause only if they affect us today and just trusting that our children will handle the residue of our decisions all by themselves tomorrow imagine the sheer cruelty of depriving ourselves of maximum wealth for the sake of the maximum health of other lives that divides our own we should be thinking realistically for the sake of the maximum quality of life for our humanity it is imperative we understand that survival is selfishness or in other words to survive is to be selfish how can one think that a garden of Eden can be possible without the exile of half of Adam and Eve of course not tell me is it misguided to believe that everything must come at a cost and that in this particular case has to be that cost and that this is simply the way the rule works in spite of this known truth the stubborn will still contest this by insisting that some rules are meant to be broken but it's too bad for them that everything coming at a cost is the superior rule of life not one person can counter otherwise experts say that there will come a time some islands will not survive the increased sea levels some species will not survive the increased global warming and some people will not survive the increased epidemic occurrence sadly but certainly significant success is never without significant sacrifice significant expansion is never without significant annihilation if you are not going to comprehend this and contemplate the bigger picture it is just plain ignorant for you to insist that for absolutely no good reason entire ecosystems and biomes and habitats are suffering without worthy cause and without noble purpose and without clear intention how could anyone agree to such nonsense isn't our ideal standard of living the result of all this destruction it is frustrating that there is still so much resistance to this obvious truth be part of the right revolution we shouldn't fight for the animals like they are equals and fight for the trees like they won't grow back and fight for the unborn like they are already born blind dreamers not big dreamers dare to believe wholeheartedly that preservation of the environment is preservation of all humanity this is just naivety not hope but hopelessness it is impractical to trust in our capacity for change too many of us keep miscalculating the trauma we ensue in the name of advancement while severely understating our planet's ability to heal itself we put too much unrealistic trust in our conscience and our morals and our humanity we must never compromise maximum advancement for our race we should not be in any kind of confusion about this why is there still so much ignorance we need to forget about being sustainable and concede to the principle survival of the fittest it is mindless to say things like to remember we are not the only human is to ensure that we stay human progress always trumps collateral especially collateral means the fate of people who don't yet exist undoubtedly it is just absurd to believe that the term humanity incorporates everyone including those who are not yet born this is the simple truth now I shall read the poem the other way around and it will have a completely different meaning this is the simple truth the term humanity incorporates everyone including those who are not yet born undoubtedly it is just absurd to believe that progress always trumps collateral especially collateral means the fate of people who don't yet exist to remember we are not the only human is to ensure that we stay human it is mindless to say things like we need to forget about being sustainable and concede to the principle survival of the fittest so much ignorance why is there still confusion about this we should not be in any kind of race for maximum advancement we must never compromise our conscience and our morals and our humanity we put too much unrealistic trust in our planet's ability to just heal itself what severely understating the trauma we ensue in the name of advancement too many of us keep miscalculating our capacity for change it is impractical to trust in hopelessness but not hope this is just naivety big dreamers not blind dreamers dare to believe wholeheartedly that preservation of the environment is preservation of all humanity shouldn't we fight for the animals like they are equals and fight for the trees like they won't grow back and fight for the unborn like they are already born be part of the right revolution it is frustrating that there is still so much resistance this obvious truth the result of all this destruction is not our ideal standard of living how could anyone agree to such nonsense without clear intention and without noble purpose and without worthy cause entire ecosystems and biomes and habitats are suffering for absolutely no good reason if you are not going to comprehend this and contemplate the bigger picture it is just plain ignorant for you to insist that significant success is never without significant sacrifice and that significant expansion is never without significant annihilation sadly but certainly there will come a time some islands will not survive the increased sea levels some species will not survive the increased global warming and some people will not survive the increased epidemic occurrence experts say that everything coming at a cost is the superior rule of life not one person can counter otherwise well it's too bad for them that some rules are meant to be broken in spite of this known truth the stubborn will still contest this by insisting that everything must come at a cost and that in this particular case the earth just has to be that cost and that this is simply the way the rule works tell me is it misguided to believe that a garden of Eden can be possible without the exile of half of Adam and Eve of course not how can one think that to survive is to be selfish or in other words survival is selfishness thinking realistically for the sake of the maximum quality of life for our humanity it is imperative we understand that we should be depriving ourselves of maximum wealth for the sake of the maximum health of other lives besides our own imagine the sheer cruelty of just trusting that our children will handle the residue of our decisions all by themselves tomorrow and just focusing on the problems we cause only if they affect us today without an unwavering doubt it is far more worthwhile doing the following that is the opposite it is completely unacceptable to say no blame belongs to the people of the present only the people of the future such falsehoods are nothing more than fairy tales the fate of the future primarily depends on the way we live now we absolutely have to change only the delusional dare to declare that climate change is not a real issue for today the simple truth is that our only planet b is a failed planet a planet b is a our only planet b is a failed planet a brilliant brilliant because you never need a plan b if your plan a is solid but we don't take care of planet a you give us a ladder to deal with we go up then we come back down why did you choose that format well we know that climate change exists but there is still a host of people who don't believe that it does and I was just really focused on that binary when I was writing the piece and I kept thinking our only planet b is a failed planet a for some reason I switched it around I was like what if I was to write the piece and switch around the entire piece to have the other perspective so I have the piece being read one way as coming from someone who does not believe in climate change and then when I read the piece the other way what if I have the piece reading as somebody who does believe in climate change so yeah that was that was the thought process behind that piece it's called a reverse poem I've read them before in my literature journey I've never tried one it was extremely taxing it was like I had to like write each line on a paper it's kind of hard to describe you'd have to actually try to write it to see how difficult it is but you'd have to write each line not each line like each phrase on a paper and then you have to spread it out on the floor and like jigsaw each piece until like you could read it one way and then backwards the other way in the working sense it was it became a sort of arts and crafts project but yeah it was it was an interesting piece it was it really was and when I listened to it I thought to myself if she was my English A teacher I would struggle to get at least 89% in her class not even 89% because she would be challenging me every day and you challenge her for every day don't you yes I would like to think so what take away would you have loved for individuals who have obtained from your especially the last one you just listened to the last essay the planet B and the planet A I guess in general this is kind of more generalized advice as I said one of my main aims with writing all of my pieces is connecting with someone and as someone who's tried to like bring my my writing to a public space with Ash Speaks and just Khadija in general with sharing your work there's always this sort of worry and doubt that comes with reaching as many people as because ideally you want to reach more than one person but I think the encouragement that I would give to a lot of writers is that is to not negate or to not minimize or discount connecting with one person because one human being is like an entire system of idiosyncrasies and personality and quirks and hobbies and tendencies and history so to connect with even something singular something so vast is a major feat it's a major accomplishment so I would just encourage people to especially like when you're performing connect with one person from up on stage and even when you're writing write with the audience of one in mind try to get to that one person I think that I think that that's what I would um that's a take away before we take ourselves away I would like you to just give us a small treat today now that one was totally off script alright folks when we saw her poems her essays we immediately thought to ourselves she's reading this off the top of her head spoken with artists normally do that and I'm sure you have a poem or two in your head you can recite at will to give us just a little snippet of something you're working on yes I have a piece coming out regarding colorism my experience as a dark skinned woman growing up in St. Lucia like Caribbean but also very much inspired by my younger sisters who are also dark skinned and just sisters in a more general sense just dark skinned friends dark skinned relatives dark skinned people I don't even know so the piece is entitled Black Skin it's supposed to premiere before the month ends so watch out for that on Ash Speaks and Calivash TV so I'm just going to I'm just going to perform a few lines from it thank you this is a poem about growing up with black skin no not brown skin not fair skin not the lightness belonging to a I'm talking dark rich, melanated glistening skin that ignited itself in the sun that in spite of me trying to inspire myself to overcome I cannot expunge myself loathing for it this is not a poem about self love this is a poem about the psychological displacement self hatred which started in school with me witnessing kids with skin the same color as mine gets shredded by bullying whilst I stood by and did nothing out of terror of being identified as even uglier than I had already thought that I was I had already been taught that I was I did nothing this is a poem about that time in third form that that girl looked me dead in the eyes as I walked past her she said to me with the familiar conviction of a pentecostal pastor you you look like a neg our word donkey and I was merely walking to class you see this is not a poem about growing up black this is a poem about growing up with black skin which is a different thing this is a different thing for me it was everything as a kid it was insecurity and insanity all at once it was me quickly getting used to being the dark ugly duckling in every friend setting it was those same friends being terrified to look like me it was my obsession with overpriced lightning creams it was me giving up an entire tennis scholarship because sports would mean sun and sun would mean rays and rays would mean me risking more blackness shit this is a poem about some serious pain this is a and I'll leave it oh oh ladies and gentlemen our three-time Queen's Commonwealth Essay Competition National Awardee Cadizia Halliday thank you so much for joining Nation Beat today thank you for having me wish you all the best especially in your studies thank you and we hope to hear a lot more from you in the coming weeks thank you okay this has been Nation Beat I am your host Kendall Eugene production of the Internet Information Service and NTN you have a good day the panel the discussion an objective an impartial view of the issues of interest to you Nation Beat is on now


Hi and welcome to Nursing School Explained. Today's topic is hyper or smaller hypoglycemic state or syndrome also called HHS. And this is usually a complication that happens to patients who are type 2 diabetics. Diabetics. Most likely the cause is going to be infection or stress. And type 2 diabetes, like I said, as well as elderly patients at higher risk. And it's usually gradual onset. So what happens physiologically? So there's increased levels of blood sugars in the body because of this infection that the patient is suffering from, which leads to increase in osmolarity. So their blood is more concentrated because of these elevated levels of blood glucose in their serum, which leads to dehydration but without ketoacidosis. So ketoacidosis is something that happens when there's a complete lack of insulin in type 1 diabetics, but in type 2 diabetics for the most part the beta cells of the pancreas still work to a certain degree where they still secrete some kind of insulin to prevent this ketoacidosis, which is basically breakdown of fatty acid stores to help with cellular metabolism when there's no increased source of glucose available. So in HHS we have osmolarity, dehydration, but no ketoacidosis because we have sufficient insulin available in the system to prevent ketone breakdown. Now patients will present with these three symptoms again, the three P's, polyuria, polydipsia and polyphasia. Lots of urination because the patient has all these increased levels of blood glucose circulating in their bloodstream. So the kidneys will try and get rid of these molecules. Polydipsia because the patient is very dehydrated, so now the thirst mechanism kicks in. And then polyphasia because we have the glucose that's circulating in the bloodstream, but is unable to be absorbed by the cells because there is a lack of insulin, but not quite to the extent that type 1's would have where they have absolutely no insulin available. Patients will be severely dehydrated, they might be nauseated or vomiting, and lots of times because we're dealing with the elderly population, the patient will come in with a chief complaint of altered level of consciousness. And then eventually during the workup it will be discovered that the patient is in HHS. And the altered level of consciousness can be so severe because the dehydration leads to electrolyte imbalances that the patient can suffer from seizures. Now diagnostic tests usually include the blood glucose level of more than 600. So that is a very very high blood glucose level as discussed over here causing this increase in osmolarity and the significant amount of dehydration that we'll see in these patients. Their osmolarity will be greater than 320, so again very concentrated serum because the patient is so significantly dehydrated. Along with that with the dehydration they'll be hypotensive and tachycardic. And then their pH is usually above 7.30 and their bicarb is greater than 18 which means that the patient is not in metabolic acidosis like patients in DKA would be. And they may have a small amount of ketone spilling in the urine that can be detected. So diagnosis sorry treatment for HHS includes isotonic IV fluid administration to treat the severe dehydration and increase in serum osmolarity the patient is suffering from. But because we're dealing with elderly patients we want to be extra careful to monitor them very closely when we do administer large amounts of isotonic fluids because some of these elderly patients might have comorbidity such as congestive heart failure, hypertension, underlying renal disorders and they might not tolerate large amounts of isotonic IV fluids over a short period of time because that can lead to fluid volume overload and then they will be exhibiting signs and symptoms such as pulmonary edema, crackles, peripheral edema, JVD all those things because their heart and kidneys are just not able to handle large amounts of fluids given over a short period of time. So certainly they will need isotonic IV fluids but at a much more controlled rate such as maybe 250 an hour over you know six to eight hours or whatever it is that the patient needs and then certainly they will need to be monitored very closely their labs will be needed to be monitored very closely blood sugar as well as serum osmolarity and then urine output and then patients in HHS they may or they may not need insulin depending on how their pancreatic function is they may need insulin in the IV or they may not and then certainly once the patient recovers from that from their altered level of consciousness whatever the infection or stressor was that caused the syndrome in the first place a lots of education will be needed to teach the patients what to watch out for so that they don't have this complication again of hyper osmotic hyperglycemic symptom syndrome. So in order to really understand HHS I also recommend you watching the video on type 1 and 2 diabetes and DKA diabetic ketoacidosis to grasp the difference between the two of you I hope between the two of them I hope you enjoyed this video I'll see you next time at nursing school explained