Welcome back everyone to theCube SuperCloud 6. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante here and our Palo Alto studio is live for our presentation all day. We're going to talk about the AI innovators. We've got two great startups here. We've got Venkat, the CEO of Rockset and Kyle, head up product at onehouse.ai. Building AI apps in the cloud scale. Guys, great to see you, Venkat. Good to see you. Great to come in now. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us.  If you're not on the right side of this wave, you're either going to be driftwood or miss the wave. So you guys are in good position. We've had you both on the queue before. The big conversation is, okay, as startups, you guys got to get that next round of funding. Okay, we're just going to come down to the success and given that you're in the hottest area, both of you guys are. Data is the number one thing people are talking about with Genevieve. Bad data is bad gene AI. Then the next question is what infrastructure am I going to run it on? That's not about a server or cloud. That's a collection of stuff or a system. So these guys, this is the hottest area. So I want to get your perspective. One, as an innovator, how do you guys see the current market relative to how people are keeping up with the trends? Venke, we'll start with you. For sure. Thanks for the opportunity. And in terms of what's happening, the Genevieve applications, LLM based applications created a new category of applications that require a different data architecture. You can't use the traditional databases and traditional backends to try and build an inner weight in this space. And now I think the next wave of applications that are being developed is that every application is getting enhanced with AI. So it's not just that there is a new category of applications like chatbots and other things that are being created, but every application now is getting enhanced with AI. And so the demands on the data architecture that allows people to build these AI applications quickly and efficiently at scale is the most important need of the hour. And that's exactly what we're doing at Rockset. As a search and analytics database, we power applications that needs to be modern and that needs to be enhanced with AI. And so that's what we do. I think we have customers like JetBlue building generic applications on Rockset. We can talk about those kinds of use cases. But yeah, I think it's really, really important to continue to innovate in the space that the data architectures are enhanced with, you know, ability to store vector embeddings, ability to index vector embeddings, and so that you can extract value from both your structured and unstructured data. I know you guys are doing a lot and you're probably want to come back to that, but Kyle, I want to get you in here on this one question because like you guys are both doing things that aren't categorically what other people used to do. It's like, hey, they do observability. They do a database. They do that. Those were categorical, maybe they're magic quadrants or whatever. But now we're in a world where the needs are different. You need to be multiple things. So these new categorical formations are starting to happen. I noticed that both of you guys both have that same dynamic. Can you explain what's happening and why it's happening? Yeah, the wind is at our back, like you mentioned and team this up. We're building the businesses in that right space right now where there's a lot of urgency and a lot of demand. Everyone's trying to build better data structures and data structures and systems, as you mentioned that can be ready for building AI applications and generative AI. And what we're building at one house today is what we call the universal data lake house, something that can unify data from all of your variety of sources, whether these are event streams and you need to bring in real time data into your system or whether these are transactional databases that you have on a line of business applications and you need to bring in change data capture or even just pull out any of the data that's inside of your swamp of a data lake and add structure to this data, governance to this data, performance optimization. So it's analytics ready and ready to train your ML models, build and create the vector embeddings and store these in any downstream system that you need and leverage any tool that's out there to then go build that. So the big innovation in the so-called modern data platform of let's call it in 2015 to today was the separation of compute and storage in the cloud scale. We know that well, a lot of money came in. Obviously, Snowflake and Databricks got escape velocity and the hyperscalers obviously play there. So I'm curious as to how you see the next generation platform. We call it the sixth data platform. We're kind of playing around with names, but it's very different. It's powering intelligent apps, much more real time. That's why we love having Uber in because it's like real time people, places and things. As well, it's unifying all the different data sources. Now, of course, you've got existing data platforms trying to get there. How do you guys see this playing out? Maybe Venkat from the sort of intelligent apps perspective and Kyle, maybe from the, what is that future data store? What does that look like? I think if you look at these modern AI applications, the data architecture largely has two really, really important sides to it. There's this one side where you're training, you're either building new models or you're enhancing fine tuning existing models with your own data sets, which is your proprietary data that is helping you fine tune and build these models better. And so there's this whole infrastructure around how do you aggregate all this data and how do you use it to build really, really efficient models that helps you build products that are enhanced by AI and or you're taking other open source models and you're fine tuning it with your data sets.  And so both of these things need to get enhanced so that you can have these very fast iterative cycles. And the other really important component that wires across this entire stack is real time. And so AI applications, there's very few AI applications that can work in batch mode. And I'll give you an example. Let's say you wanna build a song recommendation. If you just, based on the song that is being listened, if you just kind of recommend another song that is closest to it in terms of vector space, that's not actually gonna be a very good recommendation engine because you might have heard, just heard that song five minutes ago. So that's a very bad recommendation for that individual user. So you have to incorporate behavioral data, you have to incorporate real time data in order to make these products really, really effective. Just real quick on that one point. I think this is really nuanced, but it's important. The vectors are important for identifying context. What you're saying is a new kind of data set needs to be behavioral in vector form or other form? No, it's usually in metadata. It's usually called metadata filtering in the AI kind of parlance. It's really important to combine traditional data sets and real time state that you have about what is happening with the listening history and other things in this particular example. And you have to incorporate that alongside the vector embeddings and vector search to build contextualized, personalized kind of recommendation engines and so forth. This is a unique use case that's situational based upon the GNAI movement that ML and GNAI have pulled out which is the New Holy Grail contextual and behavioral accuracy and personalization. And for that you need real time and whether it is on the lake house side, what one house and Apache hoodie allows you to kind of build your entire data architecture on the training side, on being able to accumulate all of that in real time or on the serving side, you really need a unified search and retrieval system which is what ROXID is. So, Snowflake would say put it all into Snowflake and they're going to do fine with that. They bring AI to all that. Snowflake, but we know the but. But it's hard to get transaction data. We can't get Unistora. So, okay, so last June, I guess we saw Databricks with Unity Catalog and said, we'll bring anybody's data in. Okay, that's cool. And then Amazon, you got metadata and glue. You got metadata in data zones and it's sort of all over the place but they'll figure that out. So, is that the problem you're solving? How do you see the world differently? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think that with the rise of AI and new tools are coming out every week, every month, you probably see new open source projects starting up and customers need interoperability and choice. I think I even read some of the research that you guys published from ETR that showed that 40 to 50% of accounts that use either Databricks or Snowflake are using both. And now a new trend that you've seen also from Snowflake, they're supporting open table formats such as Iceberg on the Data Lake side. And Databricks, of course, Delta Lake was created there. Now there's a third one also that's been around since 2016 that came out of Uber and that's where the origin story for OneHouse is as well. It's called Apache Hootie. And so right now customers are in kind of a tricky situation where if they are using Databricks, Databricks wants them to use Delta Lake. If they're using Snowflake, Snowflake wants them to use Iceberg. So we also just recently launched a new open source project. We co-launched this with Microsoft and Google and it's called X-Table, Apache X-Table. It's incubating into the Apache Software Foundation right now. And so this is a fresh news hot off the press, just put out the... Is Elon involved today? No, no, no. X-Table stands for cross-table and the purpose is to enable seamless interoperability between the... Yes, yes. So what's the impact? What is that going to enable? What is X-Table's going to enable? What's the impact? So now you no longer have to spend months. I've seen organizations spend months and months of analysis and they get trapped in analysis paralysis of which table format should I choose and which one. But each of these communities, there's purpose behind these communities. They're all three great projects and they all have special features behind them. And so now people are like, hey, do I need something that's closer to near real time and has a faster ingestion capabilities like Apache Hootie? Or do I need something that has a really great a specification of the format like Iceberg? Or do I need something that works incredibly well with Databricks like Delta Lake? And now they're kind of trapped in this decision-making process that's very hard to come to. Yeah, I want to explain. I mean, our view is we're moving from a world that is very application-centric to one that's data-centric. Doing that, you've got metadata that's locked inside of all these applications, silos. And that's the problem that you're trying to solve because applying AI to that. And then when you get to the point of systems of agency taking action, you can't do that unless you have a unified data source. And like you called out, like there was the great innovation of decoupling compute from storage, right? And the rise of Snowflake and these other tools similar. And now it's a time like you guys have talked about this sixth data platform, right? Now is the time to decouple data from storage and from all of these computer, everyone wants to build a vertical optimized stack. Yeah, we call it separating compute from storage that moving to separating compute from data. Yes, yes. All data sources are then available to any computer. We're not quite there yet, but there, because it feels like there's a lot of missing gaps. You guys are trying to fill those gaps, obviously. That's right. So the data ops is, so again, back to this point, if you believe that unified data or separating data from storage is going to happen, which we do, then look at general AI to your point and what you're saying is that real-time information, data addressability has to have low latency availability. Exactly. Highly available and high availability at the same time. That's not like the way it was. It used to be very slow and you call a database, you get stuff now to make data freely available is also has risks. Yes. You got security risks, you got exposed data, so you got to have all that governance kind of built in from day one. This is disrupting the market because all the data applications were stove piped. Okay, now if you take the silos away and take the stove pipes away and make it horizontally available, then you start thinking about, okay, what does that mean for the categories like observability? What about things like data? What's working with context? If I have vectors, if I'm generating answers, is there memory? Is what's good? How do I observe that? So every category of these big markets are inadequate. Yes, I think the models, the autodegressive LLMs, I think are doing a phenomenal job at with enhancements like RAG, right? Like one way you're infusing context is you turn a prompt into a similarity search, you retrieve relevant results, you add it to the prompt even though the user didn't actually specify it and using that the LLMs able to spit out a collection of words that happens to be actually quite accurate in a quite a number of situations. But again, if you think about an airline, major airline building a chatbot, what are people asking questions about? Real-time flight information, right? Take any particular generic application, recommendation engines, anomaly detectors, is this anomaly new? Is this happening now? Why does it matter? So in any part, in any application that is sophisticated and is actually gonna have real-world impact, but getting enhanced with AI, real-time has to be part of the answer. Otherwise it's a library that can give you static information about some book that was written or something like that. So it's able to kind of summarize that for you, but if you really have to put that to production and actually have built better products, enhancing, enhance with AI and all these. This is why we use the metaphor of Uber for all. You've got real-time riders, drivers, people, places and things, routes, transaction data, you've got- Got an application. And you've got prices and ETAs and the like. And those are all different data elements. You're bringing that together in real-time and now they have thousands of engineers building this stuff. But for Uber, for any organization to be able to build that, they need some kind of horizontal layer. So how do you deal with transactions? That's the hard part. Yes, that's right. Yeah, and transactions and coming from, there's a tricky art of trying to stitch your data across transactional systems, operational systems and analytical systems, right? And change data capture has been around for a long time. But when you try to bring this into data lakes and object storage, things like S3, that's when it gets even harder. And that's why some of these projects were born. This is where if you read back in the origin story from Uber itself, they were trying to bring transactions to a data lake and object storage, a dup at the time. And that's where there were Apache Hoody was born. And certain metadata layers were built around this to enable you to mutate data on otherwise immutable data inside object storage. So once you can bring systems from transactional databases and systems from like old to be systems, now you can have these in lakes where you can bring the best of the tools to the table, whether these are things like Databricks or with Apache Spark or Apache Flink, Presto, Trino, you name it, bring it to the table, you can create your vector embeddings from there, then serve these down into either vector databases or combined with search capabilities like Rockset and stitch this all together through your data architecture. Well, you guys both are doing great work as innovators. And we appreciate you coming on theCUBE. We have a few minutes left. And it's also hard for startups that are like in your category where you're doing things that don't look like it was before. And so, as Andy Jassy used to say in the early days of ADS on theCUBE is, you have to be misunderstood for a little while before people get it. And now people have started to get it. So last couple of minutes we have, I want to each you guys to talk to the cameras on the audience from my perspective of, I'm a customer and I'm an investor because you guys are doing a round of funding soon. Probably got tons of term sheets. What's the vision? What should be the customer to be thinking about your company? Why do you exist? What's the main thing that you do that's different than what people might think you do? And then if you're an investor, what's the pitch deck look like? What's the summary? I can go first. Rockset is a search analytics database built for the cloud. And if you want to build a generic applications, you want, you know, what customers are looking for is not one vector database over here, one another database for traditional search, and then another completely different system for real time analytics. We are a single database that can do unified search and retrieval. And we are built for powering end user customer facing applications. And so you can build very, very powerful applications and we're entirely built for the cloud. And so build your applications faster, extremely, you know, quick time to market and scaling efficiently in the cloud. And so we have a massive number of innovations we can index in real time with, you know, sub 100 millisecond kind of response times and data latencies. You can build very, very powerful applications and scale them efficiently in the cloud. That is what we do. And so Rockset, you know, wants to unify, you know, unifies all of your data sets across traditional search, vector search and real time analytics so that you can build these powerful applications and all simply using SQL. Real quick follow up there. Why is vector search important now? I mean, it's been around for a while, in context of the retrieval, augmentation generation or RAG as they call it. Why is it important? Why are people paying so much attention to this and why is it important for an enterprise? Yes, I think that is the best way for you to enhance, leverage all the innovations happening in AI. I'll give you a very simple example. If you're trying to do keyword search in your application, if somebody wants to type cold beverage, you also want to suggest iced coffee. It doesn't have the word cold or beverage in it. And that is the kind of, you know, enhancement your application can have when you can enhance your search applications with vector search. And so this is what I, you know, our thesis is that AI applications are not a new category of applications that sit by the side while traditional applications keep going. Every application that you're going to be using in your daily basis are going to get enhanced in AI and you're not even going to notice it because you're just going to take it for granted when I search for cold beverage, iced coffee should show up, otherwise you just won't use that application. Because the keyword match doesn't linguistically match by the language, but the vector calculates it differently. Correct. Okay, great. Kyle, you're up customer and investor. Start with the customer. What do you guys do that's different and important? And what's the pitch deck? Yeah, alongside with the customer, I'll share a quick story as well, but also a question for you. Do you see as companies and organizations go to build out and innovate around AI, you probably see pocket books open, right? In contrast to where general market trends are of a budget's tightening and things like this, I think any organization I've talked to, they're still great budget for building and innovating around AI. Yes, and we talked about that earlier. We showed some data. Great. They showed that and it's stealing from other budgets actually. Great. But they got to see proof points. They got to see proof points. They want to see instant ROI. But also in this new emerging domain, there's also baselines that haven't been set yet. And as companies go to build these, they're very quick to building architectures that will work for like a quick applications and quick innovations as they're building these new platforms. But now as the industry starts to mature and your data systems start to scale, you'll see opportunities where people will be pulling back from specific single databases and vector databases back to systems that can scale around data lakes. And so I'll share a quick story. There was an organization, I even wrote this up recently where they were trying to generate their vector embeddings from images and other text inputs. And it was taking a very long time to get it done. And they're running at data lake scale, which typically is like 100X where you sit from data warehouses or otherwise. And so they modified this from using specific single tools, brought this to data lakes where they could create them beddings, but then put them beddings in the purpose built system to run the vector search. And once they did this, they were able to get tremendous cost savings and time to vector embedding creation. And then they could put it in the appropriate system for the vector search and really fast analytics on top. And so to round that back from like one specific customer story, if you are aiming to build a data lake or data lake house, one house is the fastest and easiest way to get it done. Point and click, very simple to pull in all of your data from the variety of sources and not just bring it in, but now your data can be performance optimized. And we take care of all of the specialized database and data warehouse functionality, indexes, clustering, the things you take for granted in a normal database or data warehouse. We bring these to the lake and make it seamless for you to have all of your data analytics. What about traction? Where's the traction point you guys seeing right now? Yeah, traction is great. We see from all sides of the market, people want to build these data systems and structures and they're eager and they're like really pushing to get into these areas, whether it's coming from cost reduction or whether it's coming from innovation. So you see customer adoption on your side. Benkai, where's your traction point? Hundreds of customers in production from large enterprises to a 10% startup. Okay. We have customers like JetBlue, customers like Klarna, building anomaly detectors and generic applications on Rockset and they all want to scale. And coming back to one thing you mentioned, which is they have to see the ROI. So a lot of the AI applications are migrating away from the tinkering phase to I got to run it in production. Okay, show me the ROI, what is it? And where do I run it? Yes. Where do I host it? Do I host it in a clustered on premise or in cloud or cloud operation? Exactly. And Klarna is a customer and they published these results that they've had by adopting GenAI in the last week or so where they have replaced the work of 400 plus support agents and are able to do that. GenAI agents are able to do that at a fraction of the cost. So that's the kind of ROI you need. And the other really important point you made is this is not like a separate workload that's as often the side, 100% of workloads are going to be intelligent AI infused. And that is quite different than what we've seen in the past. Well, we actually a little bit over time but since you're here, it's a great R&D and good research for us too. Quick question for both of you. Is there a new persona emerging that's handling all of this? Because it's not the observability team. It's not the cloud native team. Although there may be a collection. Is there a new, it's not IT racking and stacking. Is there a new persona in organizations that are handling all of this? What I'm seeing is that the research department, traditional data scientists are really now being challenged to try and bring the right models and find you in the right models with proprietary datasets that every enterprise have so that the AI can do what that business needs as opposed to being very generic LLMs. Are they new teams forming? Are they pre-existing security teams? Are they platform engineering teams?  I think it's too early to say. I think everyone is challenged to try and adopt this because it's in the, you know, the things are moving very fast and evolving very quickly. But I think every function from, you know, analysis to data science to architecture. It's a new IT, it's a new thing. Yes. Well, compared to like traditional software engineering the tools and systems are still pretty immature for data and data engineering. But as we mature these tools and systems around data engineering, I think there's slightly a new role that I hear talked about of analytics engineer and someone that has wicked good chops on SQL and other things. But now as data tools and systems have become easier and more accessible now they can also provide those roles that were typically. It's the perfect storm. You've got the cloud native scale folks who know horizontal scalability. And then you get the, and also know data engineering SRE types and dev ops, dev sec ops. Then you got the analytics that have been handling the crown jewels where the data value is coming together, which by the way was not the motion we've seen in the past. Those were protected, highly protected, data science driven. Hyper specialized. Do you see that consolidate? I mean, I know there are teams of, you know, 30, 40, 50 people in the data pipeline. Data engineers, quality engineers, business analysts, they all have their own little sort of job to do and nothing can happen until that's done. It's a very linear sequential present. How do you see that changing? Will that collapse? Will AI, how do you see AI affecting that? Any thoughts on that? I think the data stock has it enhances AI. You know, some of these things would get automated away. Right? I think it's, you can now look at the data and summarize it without really going into the deep and pre-processing it. I think the way people are interacting with the data with these visualization tools and SQL based analytics, I think it's going to get upended with prompt engineering, you know, like you should be able to just, you know, talk to your, what's happening with my business, where do you really need an army of data analysts or I see XX to ask some very important questions about the data and interrogate the data. So I think the whole data architecture I'm saying is evolving very, very quickly. It'll set the table. It's going to set the agenda. We totally agree. Yes. The CGAI is emerging. A chief, generative AI often. Yeah, there you go. Guys, thanks for coming to Venkat. Great to see you. Thanks for having us. Guys, thanks for contributing this great conversation here on SuperCloud Six. You guys are both AI innovators and good luck on your next round. I'm sure you've got term sheets flying at you right away. Thank you so much. Cube in there for a little around the cube capital. Cube. We just started that yet. We're working on it. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on. Okay, we'll be right back with SuperCloud Six. AI, you understand the short break? Stay with us.


This is Social Confidential, where ad-week social media editors take a look behind the logo to find out who's tweeting and sharing from major brands. I'm Jessica Ferris, and I'm here with Jeanne Sager, who educates the internet by sharing wordly wit and wisdom through dictionary.com's social media accounts. You regularly share messaging that conveys that non-standard words and phrases are still real English. Why is that a common element of the platform's voice? We are really heavily invested in opening up language to everyone. We really see that English is an evolving language. Slaying is just as valuable and just as valid. Nobody gets to decide what the English language is. It's one of the misconceptions about dictionaries that we create the rules of the English language. We don't. We actually record how language is actually used. How is your word of the day chosen and how does that get iterated across different social channels? So we have an actual person on our staff that chooses the word of the day at dictionary.com. Our social team then turns around and gets to play off what they have come up with and present it in fun ways. We get to present these new words that often people have never even heard of. So that's the fun part about the social side of it. You've also addressed topics around racial slurs and the language of social justice topics. Why do you think it's important to have those discussions through this venue? We really believe also that language is powerful. Words that you use can have an impact. We are really focused on making sure that people understand the words that they're using as well as providing them with other options. One of the things that we love to be able to do is to explain different words that have come out, explain why it's important to capitalize the being black. What's a recent social media post that you're particularly proud of? On Instagram, we posted the definition of white privilege. There are a lot of people who want to learn. And so we started posting definitions, whether it was white privilege on Instagram, Black Lives Matter, and that was a term that was actually added to the dictionary. Talking about different words around racism, around race, and really helping people make smart decisions. If you had one piece of advice for other social media managers, what would it be? Engage, engage, engage. It is not a one-way conversation. You need to be listening to your users as well as talking to other people who are out there. I wouldn't say that you should be jumping onto Twitter or Instagram accounts and saying, hey, buy our product, but you can comment if they're talking about something related to your product and just throw a comment out there and just show that you are more than somebody that's a salesman. One of the things that's been really interesting about the pandemic is it has shown how important social media is in terms of giving us that chance to engage with other human beings. Social media is really just a great place to talk to other people, talk to brands, engage, learn, and develop as a human being. That's wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you very, very much. I'm Jessica Ferris. See you next time on Adweek's Social Confidential.


Hello, my name is Michael Williamson and I am part of art team at the Barnes Foundation and today I'd like to focus on the ballet door that is from the ballet people of West Africa. It's my goal in this discussion to examine the ballet door in the context of the Barnes Foundation not only as an aesthetic object but also as an expression of a cultural and spiritual life of the ballet people of West Africa. The door had great significance to Dr. Barnes as an object of aesthetic beauty, as an object imbued with power and mystery. In his writings from the 1920s when he first acquired the bulk of his African sculpture from the French dealer Paul Guillaume, he envisioned ancient Negro sculpture as vital cultural currency for the American New Negro to claim pride of place alongside equal and artistry to the art of Europe. The idea of equality among the races in political, artistic and cultural context in the 1920s America was a stance that Dr. Barnes boldly state his reputation on as a collector and as a largely self-taught art scholar. He engaged the great African American minds of the day to join him in extolling the value of ancient Negro sculpture, a landlock who was a fellow Central High School graduate, Harvard-educated Rhodes Scholar, and writer of the Manifesto the Legacy of Ancestral Arts, the sociologist Charles Johnson, who went on to become the first black president of Fisk University and Arthur Fawcett, another Central High School graduate, a revered public school teacher, folklorist and anthropologist. Dr. Barnes intended, quote, to have the best private collection of Negro sculpture in the world. Dr. Barnes saw in ancient Negro sculpture bold form, syncopated rhythms and uniting harmonies that he felt were also intrinsic to the American Negro spirituals he loved so much. Often, during the early years of the Barnes Foundation, Dr. Barnes would host musical recitals of Negro spirituals in the main gallery. Now in close reading of Dr. Barnes' writing for the 1920s regarding African sculpture, we see both his revolutionary vision and the limitations of his somewhat romanticized view of African art. Both Dr. Barnes and Paul Guillaume placed most of the African sculpture in the collection with the dates that ranged from before the 10th century through the 15th century. We now know that much of the African sculpture dates from the late 19th and early 20th century. On the May 1926 cover of Opportunity Journal of Negro Life, the ballet door has the grandiose title, Temple Door of the 16th Century. In African Art in the Barnes Foundation, Susan Mullen Vogel describes it simply as a door from inner room, I found that it is typical of a granary door. So it's really important to sort of take a look at the scale of the African continent and see it in context so that we have an idea of sort of the people and the cultures that created these objects. I would really describe the door more as a reliquary, which is sort of a religious object, a spiritual object, rather than a work of art. The ballet people don't really have or didn't have a concept of what art would be. Everything they made was related to nature. In this slide, you can see the left coup d'etroir and then you can see within on the right side where the various ethnic groups lived. And of course, you can't really look at Africa without examining colonialism and the socio-political divisions that were arbitrary. So there were various groups of people who normally wouldn't be together, but because of the creation of countries that they were kind of put together. So here's an example of some granary doors, grain and granaries. A granary would have whole sorghum, which is kind of a grain. It's almost like, it's a little bit like couscous. And they're made out of clay, and they have grooves that are made of straw. The work of building the granaries is shared by men and women, but much of the work is gendered. The men gather the wood. They build the wood superstructure, and then the women do the mudbrick construction. And this is obviously in current times, so this is for demonstration purposes. And think of it as making a very large pinch pot. And you can see here the placement of a door within the context of the structure. And the door here is plywood, and the woods probably bought from Home Depot as are the lock and the hinges, but these all would have been constructed from wood. And here's an example of a granary with a granary door that has been carved. And this is obviously an older granary. You can see how it functions in the context of the village. And I had the pleasure of traveling to South Africa in Botswana in the 1980s and building some houses. And this is from my sketchbook. And so here we get our ballet door. Based on the second floor of the Barnes Foundation, opposite Matisse's Bonan de Viva. And of course, here's a photograph of Paul Guillaume. Paul Guillaume came from humble beginnings. He was working as a clerk in an auto repair shop, and the objects, the African sculpture were actually included in large crates of rubber that came rubber for tires. And he saw these objects, was really mesmerized by them, placed them in the window of a shop, and then artists like Matisse, Blamink, Brock, Picasso, saw the sculpture and then Paul Guillaume opened his own small gallery and included the early moderns. And we then sort of, this is how kind of early modernist artists are influenced by African sculpture. So our door is really an extraordinary door because it's carved on both sides, which is really unusual. So on this side, you can see a crocodile at the bottom, a mask sort of in the center, and then two water fowl at the top. The door is about 54 inches high, about 20 inches wide, and it's on its own carved stand. And you can see at the bottom on the left, a little pin and a pin at the top of wood and that would have fit into the wall of the granary. The crocodile is seen, it seems from an aerial point of view, which is very typical, but also you can see that line of bilateral symmetry that it also could be seen as two crocodiles sort of almost like back to back. So that's really quite interesting.  And then above that, water fowl. So the idea that the theme here is water is related in many ways to the original creation of the Baolay people. In fact, the queen Ablupoka, when she needed to move her people from what is President Day, Ghana to Côte d'Ivoire, she had to cross the Kamoé River with her people. The water was rushing, they had no way to get across, and so she made a sacrifice. And the sacrifice was her only son. So the word Baolay is actually two words, and it means the son is dead. So she had to make this enormous sacrifice. So the water theme here seems to relate to that original creation myth. And on the reverse side is a grid. The grid is red iron oxide, the dark parts, and the white parts are kaolin, which is a sort of white clay, it's the basis of porcelain. Both of these things could be easily dug up near a river. And you can see that in the center, there's a square that kind of looks like offering, it's a square within a square within a square and a hole. That hole corresponds also to the hole underneath on the other side where the mask of the woman is. And that hole was likely the place where either a leather or a raffia handle would have been placed to be able to open the door. The idea of the grid represents duality, dark, light, male, female, good, bad, that kind of thing. One of the things I did is compared our door with other doors. So the Baolay door from the Brooklyn Museum has a grid pattern, but that grid is shifted so that it's kind of triangles like a harlequin pattern. And that is to symbolize increase represented by frogs, the idea of fertility. And I can also see that that crocodile is quite thin, so we can get a sense of how unusual our crocodile is from looking at some of the other doors. And from the Baolay door from the Metropolitan Museum, it has a pin lock, which represents the unity of male and female. And then it has the same, almost exactly the same image of the woman, the revered woman, the spirit wife, but there are two spirit wife images, and that often represents twins. I found that in Nigeria, it has the highest number of twin births in the world. Twins are seen as good luck. So we get to look at the original building of the Barnes Foundation. We can see that the entry portico is festooned with tile work and field tiles. Dr. Barnes chose the Baolay door symbol as well as other imitations in clay of the original African sculpture as the entranceway to the Barnes Foundation. And then the center, you can see the original sign for the Barnes Foundation. The Baolay door is actually the original sort of marketing kind of symbol of the Barnes. So you can imagine in 1825, when people would walk in to see Impressionists, post-Impressionists and early modern art, that the entranceway, they're greeted, they pass through African art as they look at the rest of the collection. So the architects who designed the Parkway building, Billie Sheehan and Todd Williams, were tasked with reinventing that relationship of African art to the collection. And they talked about the idea of wrapping the building in a fabric of stone. And they were inspired by the rhythms and the patterns of kente cloth. As you enter into the light court, you can see on the floor, a mosaic. And that mosaic is based on a drawing by Billie Sheehan. And it is an interpretation of what's on the right, which is called a liar's cloth. So it's kente cloth that's been sewn together. And it would be something that a chief would wear when he needed to make decisions, sort of almost like a lawyer making decisions, around who's telling the truth and who is lying. So it's literally a liar's cloth. Dr. Barnes really was enamored of this door. Dr. Barnes championed African American culture. He was considered progressive in terms of race and class for his time period. He yearned for America to fully accept the new Negro of the Harlem Renaissance as an equal. He established the Barnes Foundation as an educational institution, challenging the visual status quo in America and in Philadelphia. He was supremely confident in the transformative experience of art. Thanks for watching, and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.


And we are back. It's still the breakfast and plus TV Africa set for first major conversation this morning on security and elections in Nigeria. Well, the independent National Electoral Commission, Nigeria's electoral empire, INEC, as they are known, has lamented the growing wave of election-related insecurity across the country, expressing fear that the trend, if not checked, could lead to the cancellation or postponement of the forthcoming general polls in the country. Well, the chairman aboard of the Electoral Institute TEI, that's INEC's training arm, Professor Abdulahi Abdul-Zuru, he said the development could hinder the declaration of election results and precipitate what it calls a constitutional crisis. The electoral empire therefore called for concerted efforts to stem the tide of violence in the country. Well, data earlier released by the Independent National Electoral Commission detailed about 50 attacks on its facilities across the 15 states in the country, namely IMO with 11 attacks, OSHO with seven attacks, INU with five, AQUABA with five, ABONU with four, KROCHEV with four, ABIA with four, ANAMBRA with two, TARABBA with two, KADUNA with one, BONU with one, PAHYELSA with one, UNDO with one as well. Enjoying us to discuss insecurity and its effect on Nigeria's forthcoming election, we have two guests, Dr. Amosha Ladeji, a political scientist, joins us, from Singapore, a country I love so much. Dr. Ladeji, good morning to you, thank you very much for your time. Good morning, thank you for having me. All right, all right. And of course, Dixon Osaje is with us in the studio, Dixon is a global security analyst. Good morning to you, Mr. Osaje. Good morning, thank you for having me from Nigeria, I love so much. Yes indeed, no way here. All right, gentlemen, I think I'll start with a gentleman from Singapore. What are your thoughts on this warning, this fear expressed by an official of INEK? And of course, as the media has taken in that INEK has spoken, we're not unaware of the attacks on INEK facilities in different states, both at the state level and local government level. Do you agree that if the security situation is not unchecked, we might see an effect on next this year's election? Most certainly, the insecurity situation in the project can have great impact on the 2023 general election, because people need to be at peace for election hope. So the statement by INEK, it's either what we should expect, what they are planning to do based on the recurring pattern over the years, or what is happening and they are trying to prevent. So I see from two perspectives, but in the days ahead, it will come to conclusion whether it is what INEK is planning to do because we have a cancellation of the vote on the eve of election in 2011, 2015 and 2019, three successive times. So it may be like a launchpad for what we should expect in next month in terms of postponement. And it may also be that INEK is informing us about the true situation of INEK and they are trying to navigate themselves successfully around it. Either way, peace is essential. In an atmosphere of violence, in an atmosphere of conflict and rigor, definitely there cannot be a peaceful conduct of election. It will lead to voter apathy, it will lead to manipulation of the system itself and both the electoral empire and the electorate themselves will be honorable. So I think that INEK is on point to notifying Nigeria, but I believe it should be informing Nigerians just for the sake of awareness and they should be working with security agencies to prevent a situation whereby we would have another postponement of the election. If you look at under the current INEK chairman in 2019, there was a postponement of the election and I believe now it should make effort. I have not four years to prepare to write his name in gold this time to make sure that there's no postponement of election even though we can say that INEK fulfillment of their duty is relative in the sense that if INEK is ready, if the security agencies they are not ready, there's no much that INEK can do. But certainly to base on the project security system of Nigeria at this point in time, if there's no guarantee for security, definitely it will mark the conduct of the election. All right, Lixima Saajie, what are your thoughts on this? I mean he went down memory lane and we know that in 2015 the then Godok Jonathan administration delayed elections for some time because of a Boko RAM insurgency in northwest at the time, northeast at the time. As it stands, do you think that they attacked? I think it's shared data saying 50 of its facilities having attacked. Do we have a situation that warrants such a fear in your opinion? Well, in my opinion, I think INEK should be held accountable because I don't expect an agency that had four years to plan coming up with excuses. We're talking about critical infrastructure here and we'll talk about critical infrastructure. I think INEK owe Nigerian duty of care to protect their own facility. That's what the independent national electoral commission, independent in the sense that they carry out their own activities themselves. They shouldn't expect any agency to interfere from looking at their own properties around the corner, around this country. What I expected for INEK to do is to carry out an assessment of their property across the country because from 2019 to now it's four years. If you have four years to plan, that tells you that for example, if you're going to a bank now, let me take for example a bank in Nigeria here, where you have the nairas, the dollars and whatever the case may be, you can't break in easily to rob the bank. INEK should start looking at voters card as a banking system. They should start looking at all their equipment as a banking system. They need to start integrating security design in their facility because if they come on air and start saying that their facility has been attacked or whatever the case may be, I will ask them a question. What are the security design you integrated during the construction of those facilities?  It's not accepted with any given client because as an agency, you know very well that this voters material, this voters card or equipment are critical to the development of the Nigerian state. They are critical to the success of the Nigerian democratic system. So it's not something you just take into, take to some given environment, just dump it there in the primary school, in the secondary school, or in the local government because I went to Ekeja local government some time pass and somewhere you can just break in and get into the facilities. We're talking about items that are critical to the survival of the Nigerian state. So for me, I don't think INEC have any excuse to give Nigerians because we have four good years. So again, Admission 1999 will be graduating, 2019 will be graduating this year, that's four years in the university. So INEC have four years to plan. They have four years to fortify their security system. They have four years to beef up the security of their infrastructure. Yeah, when I'm talking about beefing up all the infrastructure in all the country, we're talking about where those materials are kept. If you are keeping them in the premises, for example, like in this edifice, I think they should fortify that edifice because criminal, what they don't like is delay. For a criminal to carry out criminal activities, they have the opportunity. So what the criminals element are doing here is that they're exploiting the vulnerability of INEC. Your vulnerability is the criminal's opportunity. So don't give them that room to explain. The agency, the other commission, if anything happens, they have themselves to blame because they've given left loop holes for these criminals to exploit. To exploit, yeah. And looking at the situation, they know what is on ground, they know what they need to do. They know what they need to do. To counter what these criminals are doing. Yes. Desi, what I thought on this, because Dexon here is saying that they have four years and they know what they have to do. If anything happens, then I guess to blame. I do with Dexon, but I have a bit of different opinion on the part of whether we should blame INEC. I think for the security, we should blame the police instead of blaming INEC. I think the police, they know how to be active when they choose to be. For example, when there was an attack on INEC facility in the South East, they know that election is approaching. These facilities are pulmonary. So I think that at that point in time, those INEC facilities would have been identified as hotspots and the DSS, the military police would have provided adequate security for those facilities, but that has not been the case. And I began to wonder that, why should this be an attack on INEC facility? It's a signal that it cannot call in every other state because in Nigeria, the kind of politics we play is very, very lucrative. Everybody wants to go into politics for what they're going to gain soon. It takes an eye on the part of the politician. It's like a door or a door after a door. So that makes the facility of INEC honorable. So I think I will put the blame at the dose of the police for failing to provide adequate security. And that's one of the problems that INEC has been having over the years because the police, if they don't cooperate with INEC, definitely there's not much that INEC can do in the sense that, for example now, INEC has made a chance to try with the introduction of people's encouraging technology for the transparency of the election. But INEC is not in charge of security. It's working collaboratively with the police. So if INEC independence is compromised by the police, no much can be done. For example, we have a situation whereby in terms of logistics, INEC has to collaborate with NULTWU, the national union of road transport workers. And sometimes some of these transports in their state would align with politicians to sabotage the effort of INEC. In that instance, we can't really blame INEC because INEC has provided the election materials, ad hoc staff, and everything necessary. But their effort is now being sabotaged. So I think we need commitment from the security agencies and other agencies that INEC works with for us to have a big group conduct of the election. And that goes down to the table of the president and the inspector general of police. The president has said it repeatedly that he has given orders for the police to do their job. So I don't see any situation if there's any cessation running. The police and BDG are always active. So when there is now attack on INEC facilities, is it that the police intelligence system does not foresee it? You're saying the police is in a position to ensure that INEC facilities are protected and of course that elections are run smoothly outside. This is something that some have also said. The police have the guns, they have the AK-47s, they know what to do. I think it's not a security... We are getting it wrong here. The doctor is trying to make a point, but I think we're getting it wrong here. You invited me into the studio this morning. If you don't invite me, I will not be here. It is the duty of the INEC to invite the Nigerian security agent to protect their facility. The security agent cannot intrude in the activities of INEC. So the reason why they cannot intrude is if you don't invite them, they will not be there. Now this is how it is. What should have been done is very simple. I listened to the INEC security director some weeks ago on a TV station and he was trying to make some complaint. What that man should have done is to have projected risk assessments in all the given facilities here in Nigeria. Having carried out those risk assessment ascertain the vulnerability analysis of those risk assessments. Then send a report to the Nigerian police and the Nigerian military and tell them that XYZ facilities, XYZ properties, are prone and vulnerable to attack. We will need to project like 100 or 200 policemen in those facilities. In the last election, the Nigerian police projected 30,000 security agents to break down a floor order in that facility. So what INEC should have done is that in each of those facilities where we have those critical infrastructure, they should have carried out an assessment. Carry out crime mapping. Crime mapping the sense that when you go to look at maybe for example, Abia State for example, and you look, you see that maybe the threat assessment in Abia State is on the high rise. You informed the Nigerian police that hey, this is the report from our security department. The threat assessment in Abia State is very high. In XYZ location, we will need like 50 policemen to mount that, put it in writing, send it to the IGP and request for those men and do rightly, those men will be deployed to such facility. So the Nigerian police is not to be blamed. The Nigerian military is not to be blamed. It is the duty of INEC to carry out an assessment of that. It's the INEC's business. The money the federal government released was not released to the Nigerian police. The money the federal government released was not released to the Nigerian military. It was released to INEC. So INEC owns Nigerian duty of care to carry out an assessment of all the crime prone environment and inform the Nigerian police. For example, now if I'm perceiving a threat in my environment, the police are not everywhere to see. Myself, I will inform the police, hey, I'm suspecting, I'm saying some suspicious movement within my facility, please, I will need the attention of the Nigerian police. So if you don't call up the police to project security men in those crime prone environment or where those facilities are deployed, then INEC will continue to suffer attack. If you have 200 policemen, we have 724 local government, for example, and those items have been deployed in most of those local governments, what the INEC needs to do is to project those policemen in those facilities. But what I have found out the problem is that there is no effective risk assessment and vulnerability analysis of the property. If they have carried out such activity between 2021 and 2022, carry out this crime mapping to be able to identify the possible location that will be prone to attack, then they will send the letter to the Nigerian police that we need an effective protection strategy within this facility. Then this facility will be protected. So for me, INEC will be held responsible. All right. Gentlemen, the federal government had, as this morning, they gave the information mechanism of the government has been set in motion to counter what the senior official of INEC had to say about elections in volatile areas, volatile parts of the country, or red zones, if I want to call it that. Minister of Culture and Information Culture and Tourism, Al-Hajjilai Muhammad yesterday had to make that move. In a statement, he said that the elections, rather, will hold a shadow, adding that nothing has happened to alter the timetable. So the position of the federal government through the minister of information, as we speak now, is he's saying that elections will hold a shadow, that nothing will happen to alter the election, or nothing has happened, rather, that will alter the election. The information minister is also saying that security agencies have assured the nation of a peaceful atmosphere for the poor. So what are your thoughts on this, this new statement issued by the federal government to counter what that senior official of INEC said, which was, I think, his view as a qualified person, experienced person, an official of INEC, with information on what has been happening around the country. Do you think the federal government is just trying to gloss over this situation, or that indeed, Al-Hajjilai Muhammad is right? I'll start with you, Deje. I think the federal government is just trying to gloss over this situation because we've seen orders upon orders, statements upon statements. I think if the federal government is really sincere, the president should have worked with the National Assembly in the space of the seven and half years that this government has been in power to reduce the premium that would place on politics. People would attack INEC facilities based on interest, and this interest goes down to the interest of the politicians. But if the premium that would place on politics is quite low, definitely the politicians will not have interest. Some of them, instead of being politicians now, will go and face their business, maybe, or find a career in this civil service, or just find any other thing to do. But so far as the game is higher than the cost, there will always be an attempt to sabotage this system. Because the game right now, what politicians stand to gain, you can imagine somebody that's desperate to be a governor, a politician that has gone to bank to get a loan to make sure that he has the finance to win election. That politician becomes desperate. He becomes a political investor. He is getting the money to invest, knowing that if he is going to recoup way more. So I think that the president should have used the opportunity of this second term to reduce what politicians stand to gain by being in power. If the president has done that, definitely there will be less attack on any offices because you know that even though if you have the power, like we have been other clients, you cannot sabotage the system. You cannot embezzle funds. So I think government should move from words to action to make sure that the premium with this on politics is reduced so that definitely there will be less interest in politics and people will go there for service. In terms of the insecurity, why is it that during electoral period in Yobie, even the O'Quarram hotspots, there will be relative peace? How do the politicians maneuver their way with the O'Quarram boys, the insurgents? So it shows that the politicians, they know how to kind of like maneuver their way if they want to. But if the political space is quite uninteresting in terms of the financial renumeration and if the institutions of government is quite strong that you can't play God when you are in political power, then I think there will be less insecurity and there will be less attack for the next facilities. Their attack is for a purpose and that is to gain and retain power. You talked about political investment. We hear in this report that the federal government didn't see it coming and like you said has moved to allay the fears to say the election will hold. There's no plan to cancel or postpone the election. Do you agree with that? Is he a prophet to know what will happen ahead? Do you agree that the situation we've seen across the states with these 50 attacks does not mean elections will not hold? They definitely will hold as Mohammed is saying. Well, it's a forecast from Lie Mohammed and has right to his own views. For me, I think the election is going to hold. But there's possibility of postponements because we've had that several, 2015 it was postponed, 2019 it was postponed at 12, I'm not mistaken. And this time around, I also think it might be postponed. Like Dr. Deji made some very fantastic points when he was talking about political investment. One of the problems we saw from here in India, political brutality, because most of these criminal elements for me, I think they were being listed from political talks. Sometimes when you make use of these talks, and after the election you abandon them, those equipment they use in career, their talk activities, to use it to attack the society, to attack the state. If the election is postponed or if it's not postponed, the major thing is that 2020 election will definitely hold because I don't think we're going to hold it in 2024. It's definitely going to hold in 2023 because the president, the international community and this great nation, duty of care, it was this nation, the accountability to run this election because it was handed over, it gained this power from President Gulaw Jonathan and he needs to also leave a mark, credibility mark, so that we'll remember him for holding a free, credible election. Indeed, he had said last year that the will of the people must prevail in a general election and that is what exactly the government will do, given a marching order to security agencies. And I think on December 2 last year, the National Security Advisor Baba Ganamungunu had said that, since the president said this, we're sounding the warning to the political actors, politicians that won't tolerate anything. We are good at sounding the warning, it's belong. But is it just about the politicians?  They created the problem themselves because sometimes we fail to think about the Nigerian states. If we have people who think about the Nigerian states, you understand that election is a win or lose. It's a game of two-faced, there's no draw in election. You either win or you lose. If it's a game of two-faced, I'm not talking about two-faced musicians here, if it's a game of two-faced, every politician needs to understand that they live to fight another day.  They see it as, I need to recover my losses, I need to gain my losses. We've seen a lot of people throwing money around, throwing banters around, gaslighting everywhere. You're saying that they have the power, the politicians, to also make sure there is no violence. Oh yeah, they did this to talk to their followers and to talk to their people to actually do something about it. We see what happens, because I mean, Separatist group, IPUB had said, in the Southeast there will be no elections before now. We don't know if the game has changed a bit because of the emergence of PTOB, but the unknown gunmen phenomenon is still there. We have terrorists and bandits both in North and the South, East and West. Let's see what happens. Gentlemen, I want to thank you very much for joining us via Zoom from Singapore. We've had Dr. Moshala Deji, a political scientist, and I don't know if you're joining us from Clackey or Sentosa or any of those parts of Singapore. Dixon Osai has been here with me in the studio. From Nigeria. From Nigeria, which we so much love. From Victoria Island, Lagos. He's a global security analyst. Thank you, gentlemen, very much for your time. Thank you. We'll be back here with more discussions right here on the breakfast and plus TV Africa. Please stay with us.


First off, I'd like to thank Robert, Debbie, Jared, and company for hosting the event. It was fabulous. Second time to Madison, Hura, it was great. I'd also like to throw a shout out to Sean for the guidance over the last month and Sam for all the family support. And my second mother, Cheryl, my nominator and co-worker, I started my journey back in 1998 and I went right into tech as soon as I got out of high school. Didn't think that I belonged there, so I bailed my first semester. Decided to take a couple years, decide what I wanted, made it back. This time I was pregnant. Started my journey again. Baby came early. Ended up bailing again. So I kind of took a couple years off again. Thought I'd make one more attempt. And when I did, I had some medical issues. I ended up getting radiation treatment, which knocked me down again. I figured, you know, my fight wasn't done. I'm not giving up. So my last final Hura, I am here one last time. Three years going. I'm majoring in healthcare business management. I am looking at actually graduating with my associates that's coming here and transferring to UW Green Bay to work on my bachelors. So it's been quite the up and down journey. Never gave up. And all little bumps and road had great family support at NTC. Cheryl was always there to greet me every day. And I've just enjoyed everybody that I met all through the college system. Definitely think that the technical college is a better fit versus a UW to get that initiative with the hands-on experience just as everybody else has said. But I want to thank everybody else. Hope you all had a good night. I did and thank you.


Let's start this video by asking the question, are the rights of minority groups valuable? This sounds like a very strange question because, well, for one, we don't even really often actually know what a minority group is. So let's start there. What is a minority group? Well, mostly when you think of this, you think of the word minority when you think of it as being a number. Think of it as being a group of people who are smaller than the other group of people. But that is actually not truly how it really works in the real world. How it really works is that minority groups and minority rights have to do with disempowered groups. I maybe heard the word empowerment before. In this case, disempowered means that there are groups that have had traditionally less power than other groups. So disempowered groups. These disempowered groups, they really range across the spectrum of society. You can think of disempowered groups as anything from something like age. Old people, young people. You can think of things like gender, so men and women.   You can think of things like ethnic background. So what group you come from. Maybe think about religion. You're starting to maybe recognize some names that we've talked about or some words or ideas that we've talked about in previous courses or in previous lessons in this course. You also have things like cultural, and this is a very important one, cultural role, not culture, have issues of wealth. So different groups who are less or more, usually in most cases, less wealthy. You have a rhyming word that has very different connotations. Health, so whether you're a healthy person or not, or maybe whether you have a certain kind of different ability or a different set, ability set than the sort of standard population. So all of these groups and really many more groups are what we call minority groups, and they are what we're talking about when we talk about minority rights. A really good example of minority rights is actually women's rights. Women's rights are kind of fascinating because they're old but at the same time still kind of new. There have been women's rights movements and strong women leaders in societies going back throughout history, but the women's rights movement is still in some ways quite young. And I guess you could kind of divide the women's rights movements or different rights that involve women into dimensions, and that is maybe just the way that we can think about it right now. So if you remember our dimensions, what was our first dimension? Civil and political rights. Second dimension, those were being the economic, and a short knit economic, social, and cultural. And this word right here kind of gets at something we're going to talk about in our next lesson. And then our third dimension, those collective rights, which we're going to talk about less in the case of this lesson right here. So if you take a look at something like the first dimension, as it relates to women, you have rights like voting, for example. So the right to vote. Or maybe you have something like the right to... well, not the right to safety, but safety is a very important aspect of maybe your civil and political rights. And your economic rights and your social and your cultural rights might have things relating to your wages. Many of these have to do with the workplace right here. And then under your collective rights, obviously this has to do with environment, with society, with things like that. And we're not going to go into detail right there, but that is maybe one way of thinking about those rights as well. We're going to talk though in detail about this right here, this sort of conversation, around the rights of women relating to their safety. And to do that, we're going to talk about one of our heroes here at the All-Versity office. This awesome lady right here. Her name is Maria. She is from Brazil, and her whole name is Maria de Peña. And Maria is a very fascinating case of a person who's taken her human rights very seriously and she's taken them places that have actually helped a lot of other people. Maria was in a marriage. She was a successful woman working as a pharmacist, a bio-pharmacist, and her husband was beating her. So she was the victim of what's something we call domestic abuse. Domestic abuse is when one partner in a relationship abuses the other. So it can be between a man and a woman.  That is all domestic abuse. And it is also parents beating children or children abusing parents as well. So it's violence within family units. Well, Maria's case was very extreme.  And the second time, he tried to shoot her. He actually succeeded in shooting her. And that bullet landed in her spine and put her in this wheelchair here, which is why she's sitting in a wheelchair in this picture. And her friends and people around her who cared about her were saying, you need to take this to the authorities. And she tried. She took it to the court. And the courts were letting him off because the thing was that courts are based on laws. And if you don't have any laws about something, well, it's kind of hard to convict someone of a crime that they've committed if there's just no law about it.  But because it was domestic abuse and because there wasn't a whole lot of legal precedents or legal boundaries based on his actions, he really kind of got off quite easy. And her friends and her support system said, well, you know, this is not good. And she said this herself. She said, this is not a good situation. We need to fight for rights in our community. So she took the case to a regional organization, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission. We'll be talking more about these in another lesson, organizations like this one. But together with this organization, she then took the case to the country's highest courts and to international media and lots of different places and pushed for laws. She pushed for laws that would allow for restraining orders. So when a husband beats a wife that she can file a restraining order or when a domestic partner, we shouldn't say wife and husband, we can say domestic partners, they can get restraining orders. She pushed for things like individuals being able to go to courts so they actually created special courts dedicated to domestic violence, which is really important because there are so many cases of domestic violence around the world. And most importantly, I think this is fascinating that there wasn't even language about this. They actually worked to define domestic violence in the first place. Define domestic violence and create the entire concept for the legal community. So all of this might seem, you know, the question is like how is this related to human rights? Well, we mentioned it in the last slide. Domestic abuse is deeply integrated with your safety and that safety is being violated by that person who is abusing you or your friend or whoever might be involved. And that safety is a first dimension right. That's something that the state is required to offer you. And so that's why someone like Maria can go to her country and say you need to create a system of courts. You need to create the ability to tell someone to stop bugging me with something like a restraining order. I'm missing there. My spelling. Anyway, and we also have even the very definition, even being able to know exactly what violence is or not, is important, all relating back to our first dimension rights. So Maria is a big hero and in 2006, there actually was a law that was created in her name. Now when people have problems in their homes and when they have cases of domestic abuse, they can take it to a court and they can be heard and they can fight for their right to be safe and happy and live a better life. So it's a great example of someone doing something about human rights in their community and we should all be thinking about people like Maria when we're thinking about positive movement, good things in human rights. So you've got an example there of minority rights, in this case for women. There's lots of other stories about minority rights on the Alvarsity website and buried inside of the course. So go dig around at Alvarsity.org.


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