Texas John Alden by Robert Howard I hear the citizens of Warhoop has organized themselves into a committee of public safety, which they says is to protect the town again me, Breckinridge Elkins. Such doons as that irritates me. You'd think I was a public menace or something. I'm pretty darn tired of their slanders. I didn't tear down their cuss of jail, the Buffalo hunters done it. How could I, when I was in it at the time? As for the silver boots, saloon, and dance-hall, it wouldn't have got shot up if the owner'd showed any sense.  Looks which says I went to Warhoop a purpose to wreck the town is liars. I never had no idea at first of going there at all. It's off the railroad, and infested with tin-horn gamblers and Buffalo hunters and such-like varmints, and no place for a trail-driver. My visit to this layer of vice came about like this. I'd rode point on a herd of longhorns clean from the lower Pekas to Goshen, where the railroad was, and I stayed there after the trail-boss and the other boys headed south to spark the bell of the town, Betty Wilkinson, which Gal was as pretty as a brand-new buoy-knife. She seemed to like me middlin' tolerable, but I had rivals—notably a snub-nosed Arizona waddy by the name of Biz Ridgway. This varmints persistence was so plum aggravatin' that I come in on him sudden like one mornin' in the back room of the Spanish Mustang in Goshen, and I says, Listen here, you sand-burr in a pant of progress. I'm a peaceable man, generous and retiring to a fault, but I'm reachin' the limit of my endurance. Ain't they no gals in Arizona that you've got to come pester in mine?  I'm askin' you like a gent to keep away from Betty Wilkinson before somethin' unpleasant is forced to happen to ya. He kinda rared up and says, I ain't the only gent which is sparkin' Betty. Why don't you make war-talk with Rudwell Shapely, Junior? He ain't nothin' but a puttin'-headed tender foot I responded coldly. I don't consider him in no serious light. A gal with as much sense as Betty wouldn't pay him no mind. But you got a slick tongue and might snake your way ahead of me, so I'm tellin' you, he started to get up in a hurry and I reach from a buoy. But then he sunk back down in his chair, and to my amazement he busted in the tears.  Woe is me, Monty. You're right, Brack. I got no business hangin' around Betty, but I didn't know she was your gal. I ain't got no matrimonial intention dawn to her. I'm just kinda consolin' myself with her company whilst bein' parted by cruel fate from my own true love.  You ain't in love with Betty. You got another gal? A pitcher of divine beauty! Vow'd he, wipin' his eyes on my bandanna. Gloria Love-Venner, which swings in the silver boot over to war-hoop. We was to wed—hear his emotions overcome him, and he sobbed loudly, but fate interfered. He moaned. I was banished from war-hoop, never to return. In a thoughtless moment I kind of pushed a bartender with a claw hammer, and he had a stroke of apoplexity or something, and died, and they blame me. I was forced to flee without tellin' my true love where I was goin'. I ain't dared to go back because them folks over there are so prejudiced against me, they threaten to arrest me on sight. My true love is eatin' her heart out, waitin' for me to come and claim her as my bride whilst I live here in exile. Biz then wept bitterly on my shoulder till I throwed him off in some embarrassment.  I can't write nor read neither, he said, and I don't trust nobody to send word to her by. She's so beautiful the critter I'd send'd probably fall in love with her herself, the low-down polecat. Suddenly he grabbed my hand with both a hison, and said, Brick, you've got an honest face and I never did believe all they say about you anyway. Why don't you go and tell her? I'll do better than that if it'll keep you away from Betty, I says. I'll bring this gal over here to Goshen.  I wouldn't entrust nobody else with such a sacred mission. Just go to the silver boot and tell Ace Middleton you want to see Gloria Levinner alone. All right, I said. I ran a buck-board to bring her back in. I'll be countin' the hours till ya heaves over the horizon with my true love, declined he, reachin' for the whiskey bottle. So I hustled out. And who should I run into but that poor, sappified shrimp of a Rudwell shapely junior in his monkey-jacket and tight-riding pants and barnished English boots. We liked to have a collision as I barged through the swingin' doors, and he squeaked and staggered back and hollered, Don't shoot! Who said anything about shootin', I asked irritably, and he kinda got his color back and looked me over like I was a side-show or somethin' like he always done. Your home, says he, is a long way from here, is it not, Mr. Elkins? Yeah, I said. I live on Wolf Mountain, way down near where the Pekas runs into the Rio Grande. Indeed, he said kind of hopefully. I suppose you'll be returning soon? Nah, I ain't, I says. I'll probably stay here all fall.  I wondered why he should get so down in the mouth just because I weren't goin' home. But them tender-foot ain't got no sense, and they ain't no use wastein' time tryin' to figure out why they does things, cause they generally don't know their selves. For instance, why should an object like Rudwell Shapely Jr. come to Goshen, I wanted to know? I asked him once, point blank, and he says it was a primitive urge to see life in the raw, whatever that means. I thought maybe he was talkin' about Grubb, but the cook at the Laramie restaurant says he takes his beef steaks well done like the rest of us. Well, anyway, I got onto my house, Captain Kidd, and pulled for Warhoop, which laid some miles west of Goshen. I warn't wastein' no time, because the quicker I got Gloria LaVenor to Goshen, the quicker I'd have a clear field with Betty. Of course it would've been easier and quicker just to shoot Biz, but I didn't know how Betty'd take it. Women is funny that way. I figured to eat dinner at the Halfway House, a tavern which stood on the prairie about Halfway between Goshen and Warhoop, but as I approached it I met a most peculiar lookin' object headin' east. I presently recognized it as a cowboy named Tump Garrison, and he looked like he'd been through a sorghum mill. His half brim was pulled loose from the crown and hung around his neck like a collar. His clothes hung in rags. His face was skint all over, and one ear showed signs of havin' been chawed on long and earnestly. "'Where was the tornado?' I asked, pullin' up. He'd give me a suspicious look out of the eye he could still see with. "'Oh, it's you, Breck,' he says then. "'My brains is so addled I didn't recognize you at first.' "'In fact,' says he, tenderly caressing a lump on his head the size of a turkey egg. "'It's just a few minutes ago I managed to remember my own name.' "'What happened?' I asked with interest. "'I ain't sure,' says he, spittin' out two or three loose tushes. "'Least wise, I ain't sure just what happened after that their table-like was shattered over my head. Things is a little foggy after that, but up to that time my memory is flawless.' "'Briefly, Breck,' says he, rising in his stirrups to rub his pants where they was the print of a boot-heel, "'I discovered that I warn't welcome at the Halfway House, and big as you be, I advise you to avoid it like you would the yellow jandice. "'It's a public tavern,' I says. "'It was,' says he, workin' his right leg to see if it was still in giant. "'It was to Amuse Harrison, the buffalo-hunter, a rogue there to hold a private celebration of his own. He don't like cattle, nor them which handles them. He told me so his self just before he hit me with the bung-starter. He said he weren't aimin' to be pestered by no darn Texas cattle-pushers whilst he's enjoyin' a little relaxation. It was just after issue a misstatement that he'd throwed me through the roulette-wheel. "'You ain't from Texas,' I said. "'You're from the nations.' "'That's what I told him whilst he was doin' a war dance on my brisket,' says Trump. But he said he was too broad-minded to bother with technicalities. Anyway, he says Cowboys was the plague of the range, irregardless of where they'd come from. "'Oh, he did, did he?' I says irritably. "'Well, I ain't huntin' trouble. I'm on an errand of mercy.  I eat my dinner at the Halfway House, irregardless of all the buffalo hunters north of the Semeron. I'd give a dollar to see the fun,' says Trump. But my other eyes closedin' fast, and I got to get amongst friends. So he pulled for Goshen, and I rode on to the Halfway House, where I seen a big bay-hos tied to the hitch-rack. I watered Captain Kidd and went in. "'Sss,' the bartender says, "'get out quick as you can. Moose Harrison's asleep in the back room.' "'I'm hungry,' I responded, settin' down at a table which stood nigh the bar. "'Bring me a steak with potatoes and onions and a quart of coffee and a can of clean peaches. And whilst the stuff's cookin', give me nine or ten bottles of beer to wash the dust out of my gullet.' "'Listen,' says the barkeep, "'reflect and consider. Your young in life is sweet. Don't you know that Moose Harrison is pisoned at anything that looks like a cow-puncher? When he's on a whiskey tear as at present, he's more painter than human. He's killed more mint. Will you stop blattin' and bring me my rations?' I requested. He shakes his head, sad-like, and says, "'Well, all right. After all, it's your hide. At least try not to make no racket.' He swore to have the lifeblood of anybody which wakes him up.' I said I didn't want no trouble with nobody. And he tiptoed back to the kitchen and whispered my order to the cook, then brung me nine or ten bottles of beer, and slipped back behind the bar and watched me, with morbid fascination. I drunk the beer, and whilst drinkin' I got to kinda broodin' about Moose Harrison havin' the nerve to order everybody to keep quiet whilst he slept. But there liars which claims I throw'd the empty bottles at the door in the back room, a purpose to wake Harrison up. When the waiter brung my grub, I wanted to clear the table to make room for it. So I just kinda tossed the bottles aside. And could I help it if they all busted on the back room door? Was it my fault that Harrison was such a light sleeper? But the bartender moaned and ducked down behind the bar. And the waiter run'd through the kitchen and followed the cook in a sprint across the prairie. And a most remarkable beller burst forth from the back room. The next instant the door was tore off the hinges, and an enormous human came bulging into the bar room. He wore buckskins, his whiskers bristled, and his eyes was red as a drunk command she's. What, intarnation? Were a marty and a voice which cracked the windowpane? Does my gall blasted eyes deceive me? Is that there a cussed cow puncher sittin' there wolfin' beefsteak as brash as if he was a white man? You ride herd on them insults I roared, rise and sudden, and his eyes kinda popped when he seen I was about three inches taller than him. I got as much right here as you have. Name your weapons, blustered he. He had a butcher knife and two six shooters on his belt. Name them yourself, I snorted.  That suits me, says he. I'll festoon that bar with your innards. And he takes hold of his belt like he was gonna unbuckle it. Then quick as a flash he whipped out a gun. But I was watchin' for that, and my right hand forty-five banged just as his muzzle cleared leather. The barkeep stuck his head up from behind the bar. Heck, he says wild-eyed. You beat Moose Harrison to the draw, and him with the edge. I wouldn't have believed it was possible if I hadn't saw it. But his friends'll ride your trail for this. Weren't it self-defense, I demanded? A clear case, says he. But that won't mean nothin' to them wild and woolly buffalo skinners. You better get back to Goshen where you got friends. I got business in war-hoop, I says. Dang it, my coffee's cold. Dispose of the carcass and heat it up, will ya? So he drug Harrison out, cussin' cause he was so heavy. Claimin' I ought to help him. But I told him it warn't my tavern. I also refused to pay for a decanter which Harrison's wild shot had busted. He got mad and said he hoped the buffalo hunters did hang me. But I told him they'd have to catch me without my guns first, and I slept with him on. Then I finished my dinner and pulled for war-hoop. It was about sundown when I got there, and I was pretty hungry again. But I aimed to see Biz's gal before I'd done anything else. So I put my hawse in the livery's table, and Seanie had a big feed. Then I headed for the silver boot, which is the biggest joint in town. There was plenty hilarity goin' on, but I seen no cowboys. The revelers was mostly gamblers, or buffalo hunters, or soldiers, or freighters. War-hoop warn't popular with cattlemen. They warn't no buyers or loadin' pins there, and for pleasure it warn't nigh as good a town as Goshen anyway. I asked a barman where Ace Middleton was, and he pointed out a big fowler with a generous tummy, decorated with a fancy vest and a gold watch chain about the size of a trace chain. He wore mighty handsome clothes and a diamond-haas shoe stick-pin and waxed mustache. So I went up to him. He looked me over with very little favor. Oh, a cow-puncher, eh? Well, your money's as good as anybody's. Enjoy yourself, but don't get wild. I ain't amen to get wild, I says. I want to see Gloria LaVenor. When I says that, he give a convulsive start and choked on a cigar. Everybody now has stopped laughing and talking and turned to watches. What did you say? He gurgled, gagging up the cigar. Did I honestly hear you asking to see Gloria LaVenor? Sure, I says. I aim to take her back to Goshen to get married. You deleted expletive, says he, and grabbed up a table and broke off a leg and hit me over the head with it. It was most unexpected and took me plum off guard. I hadn't no idea what he was busting the table up for, and I was too surprised to duck. If it hadn't been for my stets in it might have cracked my head. As it was, it talked me back into the crowd, but before I could get my balance, three or four bouncers grabbed me and somebody jerked my pistol out of the scabbard. Throw him out! roared Ace, acting like a wild man. He was plum purple in the face. Steal my girl, will he? Hold him while I bust him in the snoot! He then rushed up and hit me very severely in the nose, whilst them bouncers was holding my arms. Well, up to that time I hadn't made no resistance. I was too astonished, but this was going too far, even if Ace was local, as it appeared. Nobody weren't holding my legs, so I kicked Ace in the stomach, and he curled up on the floor with a strangled shriek. I then started sparing them bouncers in the legs, and they yelled and let go of me. And somebody hit me in the ear with a blackjack. That made me mad.  That straightened me up, so I hit him on the jaw, and he fell down across Ace, which was holding his stomach and trying to yell for the city marshal. Some low-minded scoundrel got a strangled hold around my neck from behind and started beating me on the head with a pair of brass nooks. I ducked and throwed him over my head, then I kicked out backwards and knocked over a couple more.  Six or seven of them then throwed themselves on to me with howls of joy. And I seen I'd have to use violence in spite of myself. So I drawed my buoy and started cutting my way through them. They couldn't let go of me quicker if I'd been a cougar. They scattered every witch away, splatterin' blood and howlin' blue murder. And I rizz, rarin' and rampacious. Somebody shot at me just then, and I wheeled to locate him when a man run in at the door and pointed a pistol at me. Before I could sling my knife through him, which was my earnest intention, he hollered, drop your deadly weapon. I'm the city marshal and you're under arrest. What for, I demanded. I ain't done nothing. Nothing, says Aves Middleton fiercely as his menials lifted him onto his feet. You've just sliced pieces out of five or six of our leading citizens. And here's my head bouncer, Red Krogan, out cold with a busted jaw, to say nothing of pushing my stomach through my spine. Ow, you must have mule blood in you blaster soul. Sentry, he ordered the marshal. He came in here drunk and raging and threatening, and started a fight for nothing. Do your duty. Arrest that cusset outlaw. Well, Papp always tells me not to never resist no officer of the law. And anyway, the marshal had my gun. And so many people was hollering and cussin' and talkin' it kinda confused me. When he's any thinkin' to be did, I like to have a quiet place to do it, and plenty of time. So the first thing I knowed, Sentry had handcuffs on me and he hauls me off down the street with a big crowd fallin' makin' remarks which is supposed to be funny.  There I was in jail without even seein' Gloria Levinner. It was plum-disgustful. The crowd all hustled back to the silver boot to watch them fellers get sewed up which had fell a foul of my buoy. All but one fat cuss which said he was a guard. And he sat down in the front of the jail, with a double-barreled shotgun across his lap, and went to sleep. Well, there weren't nothin' in the jail but a bunk with a husk blanket on it, and a wooden bench. The bunk was too short for me to sleep on with any comfort, bein' built for a six-foot man, so I sat down on it and waited for someone to bring me some grub. So after a while the marsh'll come and looked in at the window and cussed me. It's a good thing for you, he says, that you didn't kill none of them fellers. As it is, maybe we won't hang you. You won't have to hang me if you don't bring me some grub pretty soon, I says. Are you going to let me starve in this darn jail? We don't encourage crime in our town by feeding criminals, he says. If you want grub, give me the money to buy it with. I told him I didn't have but five bucks and I thought I'd pay him a fine with that. He said five bucks wouldn't begin to pay him a fine, so I give him the five spot to buy grub with, and he took it and went off. I waited and waited, but he didn't come. I hollered to the guard, but he kept on snoring. And pretty soon someone said, psst, at the window. I went over and looked out, and they was a woman standing behind the jail. The moon had come up over the prairie as bright as day, and though she had a cloak with a hood throwed over her, by what I could see of her face she was awful pretty. I'm Gloria Levinner, says she. I'm risking my life coming here, but I wanted to get a look at the man who was crazy enough to tell Ace Middleton he wanted to see me. What's crazy about that, I asked. Don't you know Ace has killed three men already for trying to flirt with me, says she. Any man who can break red Krogan's jaw like you did must be a bear cat, but it was sheer madness to tell Ace you wanted to marry me. Ah, he never give me time to explain about that, I says. It weren't me which wants to marry you. But what business is it of Middletons? This here's a free country. That's what I thought till I started working for him, she says bitterly. He fell in love with me, and he's so insanely jealous he won't let anyone even speak to me. He keeps me practically a prisoner and watches me like a hawk. I can't get away from him. Nobody in town dares to help me. They won't even rent me a horse at the livery's table. You see, Ace owns most of the town, and lots of people are in debt to him. The rest are afraid of him. I guess I'll have to spend the rest of my life under his thumb, she says despairfully. You won't neither, I says. As soon as I can get word to my friends in Goshen to send me alone to pay my fine and get me out of this fool jail, I'll take you to Goshen where your true love is pining for you. My true love, says she, kind of startled like. What do you mean? Biz Ridgway is in Goshen, I says. He don't dare come after you, his self. So he sent me to fetch you. She didn't say nothing for a spell, and then she spoke kind of breathless. All right. I must get back to the silver boot now, or Ace will miss me and start looking for me. I'll find Santry and pay your fine tonight. When he lets you out, come to the back door of the silver boot and wait in the alley. I'll come to you there as soon as I can slip away. So I said all right, and she went away.  But he did wake up about fifteen minutes after she left. A gang of men came up the street, whooping and cussing, and he jumped to his feet. Curses! Here comes Brent Hansen and the mob of them buffalo hunters, and they got a rope. They're heading for the jail. Who do you reckon they're after, I inquired?  And in about a minute they ain't gonna be nobody nigh it, but you and them. When Hansen and his bunches and liquor, they don't care who they shoot. He then laid down a shotgun, and lit a shuck down a back alley as hard as he could leg it. So about a dozen buffalo hunters and buckskins and whiskers come surging up to the jail and kicked on the door. They couldn't get the door open so they went around behind the shack and looked in at the winder. It's him all right, says one of them. Let's shoot him through the winder. But the other said, nah, let's do the job in proper order. And I asked them what they wanted. We aims to hang you, they answered enthusiastically. You can't do that, I says. It's again the law. You killed Moose Harrison, said the biggest one which they called Hansen. Well, it was an even break, and he tried to get the drop on me, I says. Then Hansen says, enough of such quibbling. We've made up our mind to hang you so let's don't hear no more arguments about it.  It'll be easier than busting down the door. And hustle up, because I'm in a hurry to get back to that poker game at the rare and buffalo. So they tied a rope onto the bars and all laid onto it and heaved and grunted. Some of the bars come loose at one end. I picked up the bench aiming to bust their full skulls with it as they clumped through the winder. But just then another fella run up. Wait, boys, he hollered. Don't waste your muscle. I'd just seen Santry down at the Topeka Queen gambling with the money he'd taken off that darn cowboy, and he'd give me the key to the door. So they abandoned the winder and surged round to the front of the jail, and I quickly propped the bench again the door and run to the winder and tore out them bars which is already loose. I could hear them rattling at the door and as I clumped through the winder one of them said, the locks turned but the door stuck. Heave again it.  Just then the bench give way inside and the door flew open, and all them fellers tried to crowd through. As a result, they was all jammed up in the door and cussing something fierce. Quick crowding yelled Hanson. Holy catamount, he's gone. The jail's empty. I then up with my shotgun and give them both barrels and the seat of their britches which was the handiest to aim at, and they led out a most amazing squall and busted loose and fell head first into the jail. Some of them kept on going head down like they'd started and hit the back wall so hard it knocked them stiff, and the others fell over them. They was all tangled up in a pile cussing and yelling to beat the devil. So I slammed the door and locked it and run around behind the jail-house.  Help! I'm mortally injured!  Ain't none of you hurt bad. Throw your guns out the window and lay down on the floor. Hustle before I give you another blast through the window. They didn't know the shotgun was empty, so they throwed their weapons out in a hurry and lay down, but they weren't quiet about it. They seemed to consider they'd been subjected to cruel and unusual treatment, and the bird-shot and their sterns must have been a stingin' right smart, because the language they used was plumb painful to hear. I stuck a couple of their pistols in my belt.  I then snuck back into the shatters and headed for the livery stable. The livery stableman was reading a newspaper by a lantern, and he looked surprised and said he thought I was in jail. I ignored this remark and told him to hitch me a fast haust to a buckboard whilst I saddled Captain Kidd. Wait a minute, says he. I here tell you told a smidleton you aimed to elope with Gloria Levinner. You'd taken this rig for her? Yes, I am, I says. Well, I'm a friend of Middletons, he says, and I won't wrench in no rig under no circumstances. Then get out of my way, I said. I'll hitch the haust up myself. He then draw'd a buoy so I clenched with him, and as we was rastlin' around he sort of knocked his head against the swingle-tree I happened to have in my hand at the time and collapses with a low gurgle. So I tied him up and rolled him under an oatsman. I also rolled out a buckboard and hitched the best-lookin' harness hausts I could find to it, and then folks' liars, which is goin' around sayin' I stole that there outfit, it was sent back later. I saddled my hausts and tied him on behind the buckboard and got in and started for the silver boot, wonderin' how long it'd take them fool buffalo hunters to find out I was just bluffin' and weren't lyin' out behind the jail to shoot'em as they climbed out. I turned into the alley which run behind the silver boot, then tied the hausts and went up to the back door and peeked in. Gloria was there. She grabbed me and I could feel her tremblin'. I thought you'd never come, she whispered. It'll be time for my singin' act again in just a few minutes. I've been waitin' here ever since I paid Sandra your fine. What kept you so long? He left the silver boot as soon as I gave him money. He never turned me out to load down skunk, I muttered. Some, uh, friends got me out. Come on, get in the buckboard. I helped her up and give her the lines. I got a debt to settle before I leave town, I said. You go on and wait for me at that clump of cottonwoods east of town. I'll be on pretty soon. So she pulled out in a hurry and I got on to Captain Kidd. I rode him round to the front of the silver boot, tied him to the hitch-rack and dismounted. The silver boot was crowded. I could see Ace struttin' around, jawin' a big black cigar, and jokin' and slappin' folks on the back. Everybody was havin' such a hilarious time nobody noticed me as I stood in the bar way. So I pulled the Buffalo Hunters forty-fives and let BAM at the mirror behind the bar. The barman yelped and ducked the flying glass and everybody whirled and gaited.  Get him! But them bouncers had seen my guns and they was shyin' away, all except the scar-faced thug which had hit me with the bat, and he whipped a gun from under his vest. So I shot him through the right shoulder and he fell over behind the Monty Table. I begun to spray the crowd with hot lead, free and generous, and they stampeded every which away.  I likewise riddled the mirror behind the bar and shot down some of the hangin' lamps and busted most of the bottles on the shelves. Ace ducked behind a stack of beer-kegs and opened a fire on me, but he showed poor judgment in not noticing he was right under a hangin' lamp. I shot it off the ceiling and it fell down on his head, and you ought to have heard him holler when the burnin' aisle run down his whiffless neck. He come prancing into the open, wiping his neck with one hand and trying to shoot me with the other, and I drilled him through the hind leg. He fell down and bellard like a bull with its tail coched in a fence gate. "'You turned, murderer,' says he passionately. "'How have your life for this?' "'Shut up, I snarled. I'm just paying you back for all the pain and humiliation I suffered in this din of iniquity.'  Just then somebody yelled, "'Halt in the name of the law!' and I looked around and saw it was that tin-horned marshal named Santry with a gun in his hand. "'I arrest you again,' he bawled. "'Lay down your weapons.' "'I'll lay your carcass down,' I responded. "'You ain't fittin' for it to be no law officer. "'You gambled away the five dollars I give you for grub, and you took the fine money Miss Levenner gave you, and didn't turn me out, and you give the key to the mobsters which wanted to hang me. "'You ain't no law.  "'Now you got a gun in your hand same as me. "'Either start shootin' or throw it down.'" Well, he hollered, "'Don't shoot!' and throwed it down and histed his hands. I seen he had my knife and pistol stuck in his belt, so I took them off of him, and tossed the forty-fives I'd been used on to the billiard table, and said, "'Give these back to the buffalo hunters.'" But just then he whipped out a thirty-eight he was wearing under his arm and shot at me, and knocked my head off. Then he turned and run around the end of the bar, all bent over to get his head below it. So I grabbed the bartender's shotgun and let bam with both barrels, just as his rear end was going out of sight. He shrieked blue ruin, and started havin' a fit behind the bar. So I throwed the shotgun through the roulette wheel and stalked forth, leaving ace and the bouncer in the marshal, wailing and wallerin' on the floor. It was plum-disgustful the way they wept and cussed over their trifle and injuries. I'd come out on the street so sudden that then cusses, which was hidein' behind the hostroft to shoot me as I come out, was took by surprise, and only grazed me in a few places. So I throwed a few slugs amongst them and they took to their heels. I got on Captain Kidd and headed east down the street, ignoring the shots fired at me from the alleys and windows. That is, I ignored him except to shoot back at him as I run. And I reckon that's how the mayor got the lobe of his ears shot off. I thought I heard somebody holler when I answered a shot fired at me from behind the mayor's board fence. Well, when I got to the clump of cotton-woods, there weren't no sign of Gloria, the Hoss, or the Buckboard. But there was a note stuck up on a tree which I grabbed and read by the light of the moon. It said, Dear Tejano, your friend must have been kidding you. I never even knew anybody named Biz Ridgway, but I'm takin' this chance of gettin' away from Ace. I'm heading for Trevano Springs, and I'll send the Buckboard back from there. Thank you for everything. Gloria LaVenter. I got to Goshen about sunup, having loped all the way. Biz Ridgway was at the bar of the Spanish Mustang, and when he seen me, he turned pale and dived for the winder, but I grabbed him. What you mean by tellin' me that lie about you and Gloria LaVenter, I demanded? Was you tryin' to get me killed? Well, says he, to tell you the truth, Brack, I was. All's fair in love and war, you know. I wanted to get you out of the way, so I'd have a clear field with Betty Wilkinson, had a note about Ace Middleton and Gloria, and figured he'd do the job if I sent you over there. But you needn't get mad. It didn't do me no good. Betty's already married. What? I yelled. He ducked instinctively. Yeah, he says. He took advantage of your absence to pop the question, and she accepted him, and they're on their way to Kansas City for their honeymoon. He never had the nerve to ask her while you was in town, for fear you'd shoot him.  Who, I screamed, foaming slightly at the mouth. Rudwell's shapely junior, says he. It's all your fault. It was at this moment that I dislocated Biz Ridgway's hind leg. I likewise defies the criticism which has been directed at this perfectly natural action on Elkins, with a busted heart, is no man to trifle with. End of Texas John Alden. End of Bear Creek Collection, Volume 2.


How'd you end up see see you end up on the gatekeeper list?  I don't know Big D That's my homie, but I don't even like that type of like yeah, I mean like what is that? I don't know Jay Prince. He's in the league of his own I say mad, but I understood it though from the interview we did with Big D See, I know already how he be coming though, but Big D. He's super.   You can't say he not up there You know I'm saying I'm not saying like he led my I came to say not legendary like Jay Prince. I mean Black man. I'm been there from the beginning number one blogging platform Just got five certified RIA a Plax platinum platform cash page, you know I'm saying like What else he got to do, huh? He take and he's taking artists who have no buzz and blowing them up He not jumping on a bandwagon once they got a buzz and say, okay, let me take you to the next level His MO is let me find somebody who has nothing Internment of something and that's every artist bottom got him that beatbox challenge that yeah, yeah That's shine cotton. That's his artist Because he was like man, I think Shawn just don't get the prey, you know, it's a new day and then that's how he feels So you really that's his opinion and and how can you and he put you in the same category with with Jay Prince? Jay Prince is in the league is on Just turned 30 like bro, I say that too But I understand why he coming from far as on the internet side of him what he's saying from his perspective for sure I Put me above somebody who been in the game for 40 years kind of like disrespectful like yeah, but I don't think he meant it that way I think for the simple fact I don't take it that way because I know who Jay Prince is Jay Prince is a pillar Jay Prince was with He did the ghetto boys. He paved the way for a fifth ward boys. I'm that guy So I'm from that era fact so I can tell you he did what you you had a lot of work to do when you come To that part but he's talking about from his perspective on the blogging side and kind of the things that you've accomplished in your Time, yeah, and you got shout out the big D mogul too You know what I'm saying and and and Jay Prince man respect man that book man. It's a beast. No for sure No, like these dudes tell me I'm not in the rap game.  Yeah, like niggas can't ever say that I owe them money or anything Yeah, it's just the fact that I can't work with them when they want me to work with you being honest I'm just being honest. Yeah, it's a lot of people that are out here that are you know make doing funny business I'm just hard to get in contact with and I feel like that helped my brain get to where exactly Because if somebody sees you all the time, they're not gonna appreciate you. Yeah. Yeah, so Before you started this I know you used to work at Best Buy, but even before that where did you used to work before? When I graduated high school my dad was the manager of a GameStop warehouse He was a supervisor. Okay, and he would hire everybody for my school And a lot of them got fired because they were still with the video games outside of the GameStop warehouse They would it was easy to sneak them out, but they'll catch you eventually And they would wait to catch they were wait for you to steal a whole bunch of games So they could follow a case because it's hard to follow case on somebody with one, two, right? Xbox ps2 threes at the time So he hired me for the first shift because he worked third shift so we couldn't work the same shift He's Sean Cotton, too. Wow. So you're junior. Well, not really because we don't have the same middle name Yeah, I guess I'm not a damn junior either Middle name so maybe that means I'm a junior cuz he didn't have no middle name. Yeah, how does that work? I don't know Sometimes I will be considered a junior, but for the most part I'm not a junior hypothetically. What do you want to see? Say cheese at it's at its highest point. I want to break keep breaking artists make more I just want to keep changing lives I want to do more for the youth too. I don't feel like I'm doing everything that I should be doing Having more people a street team of guys who you know, I want to keep these kids busy and The weed farm say cheese farms. I want to become a billionaire out there. Wow and I Just want to open more businesses I don't want to just be stuck in this blogger journalist world Say people be trying to put me in a box. Yeah, I want to be stuck in the box How did you came up with your name say cheese? Say cheese. How did you come up with that? Shit the name? Yeah? I know it's like say cheese cheese, you know You're on camera. I don't know it just came to me. That's what I'm saying How did you like one day you was like I'm gonna do it. It just sounded it just I don't I didn't I didn't want to I didn't want to come up with a Like it's a lot of different media outlets that are too They're not marketable like us far as like get money TV or Hood hood hood block the block, you know sit like that. I don't know It just was a name that rolled off the tongue and it stuck and it stuck like


Another stem disease that we're going to talk about is Dutch elm disease. Now this particular disease has an insect vector associated with it. So many of the things that we're looking for to try and identify Dutch elm disease are actually looking at the evidence that the insect has been there. One way to certainly figure out if you have Dutch elm disease is one of the first things that you may see is you have an elm leaf that is wilting. And that's a classic symptom of Dutch elm disease. It will cause wilting and sometimes it will cause yellowing of leaves and then wilting and then the tree. What's happening is the fungus is blocking the water conducting vessels so the tree can't bring water to the tree. Excuse me, the roots can't bring water to the tree. So we may see wilting on the leaves. The other thing we may see if you take a small branch and you peel away the bark you'll see some staining. What's happening here is the fungus is staining the internal xylem and it's gray to brown. If we were to have a branch here that did not have Dutch elm disease it would be creamy pure white. So this staining here is very common symptom of Dutch elm disease. The other thing associated if you look closely we see some insect galleries and these particular insect galleries are from the insect that is actually moving the fungus around. This is actually scolitis multistriatus and it's called that because it makes the gallery that goes up and down with the wood and it lays its eggs and all the insects scatter and it's multistriation. We have another example here. There's also another insect vector associated with this and this is the native elm bark beetle. Unlike where the scolitis multistratus goes up and down the native elm bark beetle goes across the bark. So what we have here is the scolitis multistratus going up and down and then we have the native elm bark beetle going back and forth and this is on the inside of the bark. So when you see these two insect galleries associated with elm bark you can pretty much assume you have Dutch elm disease and here's the inside where we remove the bark and you can see all the galleries and we have both multistratus on here going up and down and we have the native elm bark beetle going back and forth and we also have a very teeny tiny insect which if you were to take a hand lens you could see the scolitis multistratus tiny little insect associated with Dutch elm disease. So we would see wilting on the elm. We may see yellowing on the elm. We may see staining on the xylem and we would see the gallery, the two gallery patterns up and down and across and that would be Dutch elm disease.


Bitcoin baby today, I'm going to be giving away some Bitcoin now only once but twice and today I'm going to be showing you how to buy Bitcoin for my application on your phone is the best app out there but anyways enough with that let's get into the video. All right guys we're back before I talk about the app that's going to provide you the opportunity to buy Bitcoin straight from the simple use of your phone. There's going to be a link down in the description you click that link and then you're able to sign up for I'm giving away $20 worth of Bitcoin two weeks from now so all you do you click that link and then you can have free entries into winning $20 worth of Bitcoin but if you stick around to the end of this video I'm going to be giving away another $20 worth of Bitcoin but you have to stick around to the end in order to find out exactly how to enter that way to win Bitcoin so if you're very lucky you can find a way to win $40 worth of Bitcoin from this channel along so go ahead and hit that thumbs up button for that and subscribe to the channel so you can keep up with this contest but anyway guys the app is called Coinbase if we go over to the app store it has over 756,000 ratings with 4.7 star rating score is Coinbase I've been using this app for a couple of years now this has been the only way that I have personally bought Bitcoin is through this app and then I send it to my off-site wallet elsewhere to keep my keys free that all sounds confusing I'm going to explain it to you in this video but yeah all you do you sign up with Coinbase you link your card to it or your your bank account and then you simply just buy and purchase Bitcoin or Ethereum or Litecoin those are just different types of cryptocurrency so we go over to my Coinbase account right now I currently have around $2,106 in my Coinbase account I have other Bitcoin stored elsewhere but while Bitcoin is down right now to around $7,553 I'm going to show you exactly how simple it is to buy Bitcoin from this app so I'm going to click on Bitcoin hit trade buy I already have everything linked up and then one time purchase of $100 buy which I'm going instantly and buy now so $100 is worth 0.01276747 worth of a Bitcoin instead sell some purchase there you go guys now I have $2,203 in my account if we take a look at Bitcoin itself over the last year Bitcoin is up 125% the low was $3,179 and the high was $12,647 and the current price right now it pulled back a little bit it said $7,559 so I decided to buy extra $100 worth of Bitcoin right there but the cool thing about this app is that you could buy, sell and when you sell it your currency goes directly back into your bank account so you don't have to sell it to a friend so they can sell it to a friend or you don't have to buy Lamborghini with your Bitcoin you can just sell your Bitcoin and that money will go right back into your account another cool feature about Coinbase is that they also have Bitcoin you could buy Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Lite Coin, Ripple so there's a couple of things that you could buy on here and my portfolio I have and my portfolio I have about $1000 worth of Bitcoin some Litecoin Ethereum and some Ripple on here along with some Bitcoin SV so I remember when Bitcoin verse blew up around the holidays two years ago Coinbase actually had to shut down for people signing up to to on Coinbase because it was a big rush Bitcoin was going up like $500 every single day all the way up to $20,000 it started off at like $3,000 and it was such a rush it couldn't handle it so if you guys want to be on the safe side you can just sign up for Bitcoin today I mean you can sign up for Coinbase today just to have an account and you don't really have to buy anything at the moment you can wait for the perfect buying opportunity or you can even buy some Bitcoin and send it to a family member for the Christmas break. Alright so before I tell you how you can win $20 worth of free Bitcoin in this video that you have to stick around to the end to I'm going to tell you how you enter the contest to win another $20 worth of Bitcoin not going to send to your Coinbase account all you have to do is click the link down in the description it signs you up for the contest if you subscribe to this channel you get 25 free entries that is the most simplest way to get a whole bunch of entries to win this contest it's just to basically subscribe to this channel if you're already subscribed just hit that button and you'll get 25 free entries for that there's a couple of videos down there you can watch if for each video that you watch you could get another five free entries into this contest and then the last one if you download the Coinbase app using the link in the contest then you'll get another 25 free entries and you don't have to spend any money and you can gain a whole bunch of entries every single day by doing those tasks but for the ones that stuck around to the end of this video here's your treat I'm going to show you how you can win $20 worth of Bitcoin in this video alone all you have to do is sign up for Coinbase and then once you do sign up for Coinbase it's completely free you click you go to your portfolio and then you click Bitcoin all right once you click Bitcoin you click BTC wallet and then there's a little square at the top right and all you have to do is click the URL code bam click that and then hit I understand all right so this is your BTC wallet uh that long code underneath it that is your personal wallet all you have to do is hit copy address and then paste it into the comment section of this video once you paste it into the comment section of this video just paste it down there that is your personal wallet you don't have to hide it from anybody only anybody can send money to that wallet nobody can take money out of that wallet so paste it down in comment section of this video and what price point do you think Bitcoin would be at by the end of the year by Christmas time what price do you think Bitcoin would be at at the end by Christmas time uh December 25th all right and then coming down what would you do with the $20 worth of Bitcoin if you do win so um leave your address below what price do you think Bitcoin would be at and what would you do with the $20 if you win the contest so that is for everyone that stuck around to the end of this video congratulations you made it through so now you have two opportunities to win some free Bitcoin but yeah guys other than that I just wanted to show you this simple app on how to buy and sell Bitcoin from from your phone so you don't need a fancy computer you don't need um a super gadget to lock away all your codes to to hide your Bitcoin from your family members or from hackers or anything like that you don't need that all you need is a simple app on your phone but other than that guys I'm just giving you a quick um giveaway opportunity for you guys for subscribing to my channel you guys have been doing amazing coming and watching my videos and leaving comments and leaving thumbs up I really appreciate you guys so I'm I'm deciding to give some back to you guys so I'm giving $20 worth of Bitcoin uh for the contest winners for the ones that just pretty much um watched the beginning part of this video and I'm giving away $20 to the guys that stick away to the end and who knows you can even win both but um this channel I told you that I was going to talk about cryptocurrency in this channel I'm not shying away from it a lot of channels like the shy away from it uh I got in Bitcoin so long ago that the price could go back down to $3,000 and I was still being profit but um I'm just giving you just the knowledge that I have from being in the cryptocurrency world okay but other than that this is Zeke bringing you the dream green show and I'm out peace


My name is Marc Portier and I'd like to welcome you to my home for this webinar on the work zones in open science. Thanks for showing up and a big thanks also to Open Belgium for bringing us together today. The slides are available and free for reuse under creative comments, but I do appreciate your attribution and your determination to share alike. I have a limited amount of time and way too much content, so let us quickly get some slides out of the way. Since one year and some days I work at Vlis, which is the Flanders Marine Institute. We are 20 years old and based in Ostens on the Belgian coast. Our mission is to enable an advanced marine research in all possible domains. And that ranges from biology, geography, ecology, and even includes history, medicine all the way up to psychology. We do this to promote an advanced society in general and therefore we target various audiences that we see as important stakeholders in and around the benefits and responsibilities for our beloved seas. Narrowing down to my role, I only have time to mention the department I work for, which is the VMDC. In English, that acronym expands to the Flanders Marine Data Center. Our focus is on data, data management, and the design of data systems to support it. We participate in many and a lot of projects and all of them have different levels of geographical coverage and outreach. Most notably, I think we publish a number of data products for the marine research domain and those are ranging from something like the Schalde monitor, which shows our local expertise and connection. But it scales up via the European level for projects like rubies, which tracks marine biodiversity, but even spans the globe with the reference databases we manage and govern for marine species and marine regions. And concerning open science, we are active on the Flemish level inside the Flemish Research Data Network and the Flemish Open Science Board. And in Europe, we participate in projects of the European Open Science Cloud. Within the VMDC then, together with three colleagues, we make up the open science team. We make sure the organization as a whole realizes and keeps furthering its open ambitions. So what we are doing is implementing the fair principles, advocating to and supporting research groups and adapting the data systems to be open by design. In doing so, we very much like and embrace open source and linked data technologies. And if this sounds appealing to you, keep an eye on the slash jobs page of the Vlis website because we are working towards an extra job opening in the team. And this is me and the various ways to contact me or find me. Ah, yes, this slide and some form or another. This has been in every public speaking slide deck I've given since 2009. Honestly, honestly, and honestly, the web is totally awesome on so many levels. And I think we should regularly have parties just to remain consciously aware of that. It turns out this slide keeps being relevant. So I keep it in and it surely will be today. So we will come back to this fabulous web. Right. Now, all of that is out of the way. Here is the actual agenda for today. I see this as going to be six main blocks. The first one to lay down some introduction and overview of what open science is. And then five actual identified work zones. That could turn out to be too much, but let us be ambitious. Finally, this is 2021 and we do this online. So I don't hear nor see you. And the point is we should we would we would very much like your feedback, even more than only your feedback. We actually want to reach out and recruit some of you to collaborate on some of these tasks and to achieve that goal. I would like to ask you to use this code writing space we have foreseen and which should have been shared in the chat also. And also, at the end, you might prepare yourself to open up your own mic for our audience participation part. Also, some of my colleagues are around so they might interact on the chat while I am talking. In an experiment, I did an effort to include QR codes for all the links I mentioned. So if you have a device with a QR scanner around, you can follow up on those as well. And a last tip, my voice is mostly not going to read out what is on the slides. Okay, I expect you to be able to do that for yourself and allow my comments to be loosely providing additional insights around that structure. So on with the show. When I talk about open science, I almost always end up doing some fair bashing. If you haven't heard about it, the fair acronym is the first thing you learn when coming to the open science field. It's a bit like a rite of passage or a painful tattoo, something like a required code to become part of this club and to sign into its belief system. The letters spell the expectations for all data and publications. All of them should be made, findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Don't get me wrong, it is a very smart acronym and a very suitable top level shopping list of the things to cover. However, it is also becoming its own purpose. Most importantly, in my personal opinion, it is too often translated into a simple checklist. One that allows people to declare we have done enough to reach the end of their responsibility. They just need to check all four boxes as quickly as possible. So instead of taking that route, I want to invite you to a more open and unbound thinking about open science. This is what we take as the guiding user story for the work we do. To provide a relevant slice of the global research data set that is as simple as a Google search. We actually package this in our gyro as bug number one for the complete team. And we believe it's probably going to take us until we retire to get it done. We see this as having two parts. The first part is about the natural way of finding the data. If you go to Google today, you will be able to have it answer quite convoluted questions. An example, who is the actress playing the wife of Stephen Hawking? Or who is the director of that movie? This kind of natural way to find is precisely what you would like to achieve for the data lookups in the realm of scientific work. And on the left side of the slide, you see a number of examples in the marine domain of how such searches could be expressed. In contrast, on the right side of the slide, we have listed all the steps that are involved today to actually answer those questions. And if you look carefully behind, semi-transparent behind the list in the background, you see a big pie chart. And that brings this to my next slide. It turns out that no less than 79% of the working day of a data scientist is wasted on those steps. All of them are avoidable and overhead issues. And if this 79% could be reduced to 18%, it would shrink their working day to only one third. If we turn that around, we could make every full-time hire of one data scientist count as three. And we believe it is precisely this kind of web-scaling that open science should aim for. Society is funding the research, so logically it keeps the right to expect a high return on investment. Open science often serves on a way of high ethical motives, but we should not be shy to claim economic goals as well. We should make and deliver on a promise to reduce the cost of doing research. The next open science doesn't stop at targeting the science community alone. With the second part of our ambitious bug, we want to stress the need to target the general public. The research community needs to push its quality information out on that same web everybody has learned to use. It has to be available there and it has to be made high-ranking. At the bottom, you'll find my catchy Twitter quote on the subject. If you agree, scan the career code and give it some of your Twitter love. And remember, this event is using the hashtag Open Belgium 21. So now we have a challenging job and we see two parts in it. And in our head, both parts lead us to the web. First, as an example of easy and natural search, but also as the platform to reach everyone out there. So we believe the backbone of this fantastic web is the foundation for open science, especially the principles of the semantic web. Which brings us to our, this we call the IKEA observation slide. It should explain to you the subtle difference between semantics and metadata. And it also shows the connected unity of this whole eternity. It is always data, metadata and never forget the third one, semantics. We need them all and they should be kept together. I mentioned the smart Google search earlier, but you might remember this scenario. It's less than a year ago. You have booked the flight and suddenly your email client receives a confirmation email. And it is successful in assisting you to add that event to your calendar. And you have to understand it is not an effect of some spooky artificial intelligence or any big brother stuff. I know it looks like they know about your plans, but in the reality, this effect is driven through clear and straightforward semantic annotations inside the message. Inside the message, there are just some schema.org terms hidden inside the HTML, the HTML of your email. And those allow your mail clients to understand part of the information that you are reading. And magical effects like these are easily achievable when we add semantics to the data. And that is what the phrase making data machine actionable really is about. And then going back to research, I think maybe even worse than in other domains, the attention for semantics has been absent and allow me to put that in context. The required understanding of meaning and intentions has not been neglected. Rather, it has simply been kept implicit. They assume it to be known among the smart peers. But in reality, in most cases, you have on the one side a knowledgeable producer of the data. And it talks only to the unknowing random external consumer via some intermediate data system. It is therefore essential that all insights and understanding, all semantics are captured and made explicit. To conclude, all of this shows the access part of open science is only the tip of the iceberg. You might remember that Richard Stallman from the Free Software Foundation at some point in time clarified that free and free software should be read as freedom or free speech and not as free beer. In the same way, I think the open and open science really refers to open-ended and not to open cans. Open is about taking up the extra work. The data is not released only to repeat your own findings and experiments. Instead, it needs some extra work. It must be prepared so it can be rehashed, reassembled, recombined in future new contexts. Their original meaning should be kept, but their reuse should allow solving new problems. And there's also come back to targeting audiences outside the inner circle of the new research community. The shared data should function as an open invitation to three new classes of players. One is the scientists from other domains. Then you have the citizen scientists and the general public. But also we should target machines, brains that are wired totally different than we are and that could show us some new perspective on the data. In one poetic quote, we call this the rule zero of open science. If you're doing it only for the scientists, you are doing it wrong. So at last, we are ready to get into the work zones. Number one is about vocab management and lookup. Just to make sure we are all on the same page, vocab is just short for vocabulary. And that word should make you think about dictionaries. I should actually now explain that RDF is the language of the semantic web and introduce you to its grammar, but we don't have time for that and we don't need it.  Lists that hold and explain all the terms in use. So hold this dictionary image for a moment. Okay, the Flemish people, the Dick von Dauer and allow me to make just two adjustments. One is conceptual, unlike natural languages, which can be messy. These vocabularies make each term totally unambiguous and clear by themselves. That means that no extra context is required and also the other way around. No added context could change the meaning. So when they are used in a statement, there should be no confusion about how to read and interpret it. The second adjustment is a smart technical trick. The terms themselves are spelled out like web addresses. And yes, that makes it very modern web fashionable, but there is logic to this fancy madness. A lot can be said about it, namespacing and DNS management and whatever. Okay, but for the day story, we keep it at appreciating only one specific property of this URL. It is known as the follow your nose property. You can just type these terms into a web browser and end up at a page that gives you the explanation. So doing a dictionary lookup in this system is just as simple as using your web browser. Finally, to get it totally clear, we now have the ID. These are just three examples from the marine science domain. The first example shows a universally accepted term identified by marine regions. This one's particularly is numbered 2350 and is in fact referring to the North Sea. The second one is about my favorite marine species and people sometimes call it the horseshoe crab. But the correct worldwide way to talk about this is to use http://lsid.tidwig.org slash urn-colon-lsid-colon-marine-species.org-colon tax name and then 150511, beautiful creature.  A little bit looks like a photocopier. It's in fact used to detect and measure plankton species in water samples. And it's known as the zoo scam, but the real good thing is that the unambiguous identifier for it has been coined by our British colleagues. So I hope this gives you a feeling how exposing our own data sets using these terms is actually the way we ensure they can be understood and compared with the rest of the world. Now that you understand what vocabs are, if you didn't already, you probably also see feel, I hope, you feel how important it is to know all the words and all the dictionaries and to use them correctly. And this is precisely what this first work zone is about, making sure people get tools that help them assign the correct vocab terms in the context of their work. The slide lists only two services you can find on the web to search for terms that are available. And many more are around and they're very useful, but these listings are very general and they're not tuned to the subset shared between the members of your research team. Also, they might not be tuned to much your own language nor include search terms or even local slang. And thirdly, there is no easy way to integrate these services with the applications for your team. So we put that all into one use case diagram and this is what we'd like to see. We introduce here some vocab admin, a role that governs the vocabs your team should be using. And at this level, popular local search terms, translations or team slang could be added to make them findable. Next, that's the green section. We consider how custom applications could use widgets that do lookups directly into the selected lists of searchable terms. And by using this setup, we aim at reaching the end goal, having actual scientists apply the correct terms to the data they are sharing. And remember rule zero of open science, we're not doing it only for the scientists. This comes down to if all of this actually becomes even more useful in a context of citizen science. With tools like this, we can assume members of the general public are assigning the proper semantics to the data they are producing and making it more available for the researchers. Finally, this slide introduces a spontaneous set of building blocks to get the job done, just one ID. Talking in depth about this is part of the invitation of today, but not here and now, I have four more zones to cover. The second one is going back to the trinity of coexisting data, metadata and semantics. It centers around the search for a unifying semantic research data package. We already talked about the wasted efficiency of our data scientists, but allow me to revisit the topic. When scientists go out to grab existing data sets, they do so full of hope and dreams. They're dreaming about finding information, dreaming about being whatever they found being transparent and clear to reuse. Dreaming it will be complete and not start a difficult search to grab all related parts on cloud services. Dreaming it will be interoperable with their own systems and workflow so they actually can get to work. However, little surprise, we already said this. If they actually do find data, it is most of the time packaged into some form or format that looks like a treasure box. It's only willing to disclose its value to the original owner. And the more striking part of that observation is the other side. It is that the very same people are also daily working towards sharing the artifacts of their own research, but are packaging them in similar closed boxes, and they do this despite the best of their intentions. Do my feeling it's not due to a failure on their part? They just like the tools to do a better job in this area. So, even further, despite the uptake of RDF semantics, knowledge graphs, I honestly do not believe that the two-dimensional table approach towards data is going away soon. If you think about it, if you consider scrolling, sorting, plotting, comparing, calculating, even scripting, you name it. All data manipulation assumes data today being in rows and columns, rather than in mind maps or graphs. And the good news is that we know how to mob the one to the other, but the tooling to make that as accessible as the common spreadsheet is simply not there. Another challenge is that more and more data sets are, in essence, scattered around in a number of places. Consider big data systems. You can't contain all the data there, not in your set.  And then you have the workflow systems in the cloud. You keep on having a lot of local stuff. You have your mapping files, actual instrument measurements, what do you have? And keeping track of that complete combination, keeping track of all the relations between all of that, it always turns out to be solved by some invention on the spot. A highly custom, personal fit, mostly without any documentation, absolutely without any formal semantics. And the result is that we introduce obscure layers of wrapping that turn that well-intended glass box into the dreaded treasure box. And I know up to now I've mostly been talking about the lack of tools. And yes, this slide as well, it does so when it suggests there should be an ecosystem of supporting tools. But the elephant in the room is that we don't have a common data package standard to capture and share the three parts of the Trinity. And that's not entirely true. There are a number of standards emerging. And I'm choosing today to share my personal favorite in this field. It's called the research object crates in short the RO crates. And I like it for a number of reasons. The first is simplicity. We all know how to structure files and folders and then group them in an archive like zip or put them on a versioning system like it. So let's just do that. Second, it embraces semantic web technology. So yes, it has this RO crates metadata JSON file, which is a JSON-LD file that next to the tabular CSV files you put in the package, while it allows to, through the JSON-LD, you can add semantic statements about it. For instance, you use the CSVW CSV for the web vocabulary to express what the meaning of the fields in the CSV are. Third, it doesn't care if the described data is in your data package itself or in some external repository. So it deals with this modern reality of being half in the cloud and half working on local data. Third, the backgrounds of the people behind it, the people that are making the standard, their backgrounds is a mix of alpha and beta sciences. So actually by design or by coincidence, I don't know, but this group is forcing themselves to be explicit about the meaning of what goes in. So do have a look at it. If you take the link on top, you will end up on their website and the specification, and the links on the bottom are a fast introduction slide deck and a YouTube movie delivering that. I really can recommend the last for a fast entry. Of course, yeah, we all know about XKCD slides or cartoon 927. I am a fan of XKCD and every fan knows that Randall Munru is always right. And I think in this case too, when it comes down to standards, we all have our own pet peeves and we are more than happy to translate those into the motives to stick to what we have already been using. Definitely the middle panel here, one universal attempt to replace them all. I think it's totally recognizable. Most of the time, however, the resulting pile of standards resemble the image on the left, which is the ancient Indian model of the universe, half of a sphere, carried by four elements supported by a big turtle. And then below that turtles all the way down layers on layers that are never actually achieving completeness nor consistency. But allow me to replace cynicism with optimism.  The first link here is one that points to the design principles written down by Tim Berners-Lee about the web, I think roughly 20 years ago. It's definitely the kind of web archaeology you could find. I dig it up every three years or so, and each time I get extremely inspired by it. It also introduced me to the old Chinese wisdom on the slides claiming that the usefulness of a teapot comes from the fact that it is empty. And you have to think about it, right? The emptiness is the thing. The emptiness of the teapot is the thing that allows it to hold your tea. I think this probably is the first incarnation of the modern marketing slogan, Liz is more. To be honest, that modern version never really made sense to me, but this original one, this one I feel. Anyway, back to standards. Just like teapots, they allow broader usage by limiting themselves, by being concise and focused, by removing all assumptions, by allowing extensions, evolution, embracing a collaboration with other good solutions and standards. And this is the kind of thing that made the web as fabulous as it is. And to my feeling, it's the same kind of meta-properties I can also recognize in the design of the arrow create standards. Anyway, with the semantic package standards like the one of arrow create, we can go back to our work zone. So actually, whatever glassbox standard definition we end up using, we will need to face the remaining challenge. We will need to revisit all our treasure boxes from the past and convert them into their transparent counterparts. At Liz, we have drafted up a process that switches between, on the one side, automated detection of the fields in a package and then allow a human, an expert assistant, to narrow down and actually decide. Actually, again, assign the correct vocab term to describe those fields, which is indeed linking back to work zone one. For that, we sponsored last year an open summer of code project also 2020. It was called the ShimDoc. We can argue about the name, but it made a first attempt and prototype of precisely this. In all honesty, it needs quite a bit of extra love and attention, but the original design plans and prototype are available and linked from this slide. So if you have any thoughts, while these or wild ambition in this area, we are very open to discussion and further tinkering. Remember, leave your notes in the shared documents. And just to conclude, think about having a system that can convert this treasure boxes in glass boxes. If we have such a system, we can rethink our repositories and archives for science data as well. We can actually give it this level, extra level of smartness. If you look at the current repositories, they are content of adding a limited set of metadata fields, and those then get attached as a meager discoverable label to the treasure boxes. But with this new approach, okay, helped through some semantics discovery, we could have the repository equipped to do the conversion into the glass boxes. And by doing so, we would make the packages discoverable and interoperable on a semantic level of the data and not only on the level of the metadata. So I think that's really important. Actually, the same line of thinking can bring us even a stage further. If we adopt the IDs of working zone three, which I called the machine actionable DMP. Again, a term I have to introduce because myself I had never heard about the MPs before starting at this DMP stands for data management plan and the top level way to look at them is you consider them being a contract. They list the expectations and agreements, all of them concerning the handling of data. And they are shared between all stakeholders of any specific research product. At this stage, many organizations or funding agencies in the research are requiring you to have these. And I think that testifies to the growing importance of data and research. And you'll find there a link that's only one examples, but if you need to build one for yourself, you have services out there that help you cover all the needs, then all the needed aspects. The platforms here are typically things that guide you through a set of templates and questions. So you don't forget anything. Definitely, these DMPs are important and useful. They're also formal. And more and more, they're following these template structures, but still they're free form text. And so they're only understandable to fellow humans. So again, people have been thinking about applying the trick of semantics also to these documents. And the big question is, can we have these structured so machines can read them too? And the hope is that through such efforts, it will lead to automated processes, robots, if you like, that help you out in applying the rules of the DMP. And for us, actually to fit it into this talk, which is, which definitely is about tools and support. We read that ambition to automate more as a way of assisting and enabling, and not only as a way to automate, automate policing and validating, which is the classical and easy approach. So here is our thought a platform we should think about having a platform for for building automated data management assistance. Okay. These would essentially learn from the DMP what needs to be done inside the project and then produce a handy user interface to help you with it. As such, it could become the helpful guide nudging you into the right doing the right things from the start. And it will definitely tie in with work zone two, because I think in the end it will produce arrow create packages. And those will hold the data trinity. But again, it will probably reuse vocab loop look up widgets from work someone in a scenario like this, I think we should be able to completely avoid avoid the treasure box trap, right, not getting into that. Anyway, without limiting your own imagination about such a platform. This slide is only offering some personal suggestions on what it should try to achieve. It's an assistant. So in my mind it should be close by it should have a desktop like user interface, but it should also embrace the best of the web. And it should be browser based. So I think some kind of a local host service would be best. After all, it also needs to seamlessly integrate with the cloud platforms that are listed in the DMP. And internally, it might be totally relying on knowledge graphs, but it definitely should have a natural presentation of the data that that look like tables and spreadsheets. And finally, yes, it should support a set of API API hooks. So it can be tied up in scripting languages, but also be used in workflow engines. Good. I'm glad we are you already made it here. And I hope you were too. We have two more to go. I realize I'm stretching your attention and I'm not giving even giving you a break. Let's let's do that now. Okay, let's take 15 seconds. gymnastics actually stand up. I can use it to stretch a bit drink a glass of water. Bend your neck, loosen up. Okay. The good news is that the remaining two zones are quickies. I only have some early principles and IDs. And I hope you guys will take care of the details. Okay, everybody ready. This is the final stretch work zone for is about linked data publishing. Now, the first three zones hopefully brought some uplifting positive vibe. Okay, we've covered all these nice things we can do with semantics. I hope I did, because now is the time to tune that back just a little bit. I'm already sorry for that. But the sad truth is that only working with vocups and data standards is really not enough to achieve interoperability. We cannot overlook how these vocups and standards get applied in web services and protocols. On this slide, you see a number of systems mentioned that are used in our marine research domain. And the observation is that despite the common belief in using shared vocabularies, even adopting them in some semantic aware data packages. And we are all using this wonderful lab. Still, they end up not being interoperable out of the box. We still face the fact that the inside our own domain subsets of data are closed up and thus hidden from other subsets. Of course, they can be converted, but that always requires additional coding and that implies cutting some corners and the outreach to other domains is limited in an even bigger way, because many of these standards only make sense inside our own community. Speaking for myself, only WFS was known to me. All the other ones were new and I'm active in the web domain for the last 20 years. So there's really stuff that is only used inside this community. Personally, I think we have been focusing on the wrong preposition. And I mean preposition as a player of words, because I want to target the preposition in Dutch HUT4 zetsel, as well as the similar sounding proposition, the guiding ID HUT4 style. I think all of us, the developers, we have all spent tremendous and well intended efforts to link a vast number of existing data systems onto the web. And in many cases, we have been adding layer or layer or layer stack turtles to achieve this. Often though, we have neglected to really embrace the web design principles and let them influence our legacy backend systems. Those systems and the layers on top of them do not still do not confirm to the beautiful design properties we need. Going back to the less is more Chinese teapot. This is my conviction. We should aim removing layers, aiming for less layers. Actually stop publishing data on the web, but seek for ways to have our data be truly in the web. Follow the nature of how the web works. One practical example I see is about blending away the arbitrary differences between data sets and data services. People don't even question the clear difference between both. Nobody even wants to think about them being the same thing, but we have to realize that any distinction between both only lives on the side of the producer of the data. Because in either case, the customer view is identical. The consuming scientists just sees a generic data provider. It sees an accessible URL. He doesn't or she doesn't care about that URL holding parameters or not. It is just there to produce some response. And in both cases, the response should have these glass box transparency. That's what we are expecting. So the transparency rules we talked about should be applied to our services as well as to our data sets. They should be equally semantically described. And I only mentioned here Hydra CG as one possible standing.  I just have this list of elements that I think that are part of the solution. And I have to admit when adding all these links to the slides, it did kind of feel like this QR ID ambition was starting to look a little bit silly. But the real silly thing here is that all these pieces of work are coming from the same single research group based in Gantt. So I really have to urge you to go and check out their work because all of it is highly inspirational and ready to be used. Most notably and to some extent it's a lot like the work zones I am suggesting today. All these elements all live kind of close to the actual users. They assume some close by assistance. They take for granted a more peer-to-peer distributed nature of the web. They actually have working technical answers to the big federated search question. And all of that is often in big contrast to the very centralized approach of many of the EOS projects for instance. All of them in some way introduce a central hub rather do that than provide open source code that allows anybody to set up their own hub nodes. They draw you to new big investment cloud infrastructures and often neglect providing the tools for local and distributed participation into that. And this allows me to make another observation. You see the fact of the matter is that a computer science department like the one I'm mentioning here. Those are not directly involved in any of the ongoing open science projects. None that I've seen funded by the EU. Maybe it's a funny story but last year I was at my first conference in the domain of life sciences. So that's doctors and I end up listening to smart medical doctors. Contemplating computer architectures that are actually a challenge even for the engineers. And to me it made me think about the room filled with programmers that are deciding yes we are going to solve the cure to cancer but we're not going to talk to any of the medical professionals. So maybe we should actually even extend the rule zero. Remember it says open science is not only for the scientists. Well I am convinced the open science platform should not be entirely built only by the scientists either. Right one more to go. The fifth and last zone just to keep me in time is named usage tracking and metrics for this. I have to come back to my honest now really honest appreciation for the fair acronym. After all it is the only torch lighting a pot for all followers of the open science procession. It is no coincidence in my mind that this acronym landed on the word fair. Somebody crafted to be here. It's landing on the concept of fairness on being fair. Really you just hustle the order or replace findable with something like discoverable which would be the more tech variant of the word. And the result doesn't end up being a word. Actually the word would also not easily apply to what people would call the better angels of our human nature. But this one does and that is truly useful. We should not joke about it. It is useful because it is tapping into one of the four main ways to drive human behavior. And that number four comes from the book shown on this slide and I can really recommend it. It covers intellectual property rights and the ongoing cat and mouse play with digital piracy. But here is the exercise. Let us apply these four influencers of behavior to the open science topic. After all we hope to convert all stakeholders to become active contributors. So the first one law and enforcement points me to the funding of research projects. There you have some leverage to shoehorn the independence of research groups into adopting new rules. A new rule like you must have a DMP from now on or you must follow the fair principles. The second influencer is architecture and the previous four zones I think we covered those four and they all fall in this area. The idea is to develop tools and techniques that make what I would call just doing research should be naturally feel like the same thing as doing open science. All the rules applied out of the box by just using the correct tools. There is some work to do there but I think it can be done. Third I already mentioned we have the magic of the fair words. It sells the idea that the open science way is the morally right way. But the last element is the one for this work zone and it is where it is the important missing one. The question is what are the tangible effects and payback streams. The scientists that are adhering to this new set of rules. They see the effort and the cost they need to do but they hardly see any gain. And noting that the currency in academia is counted publications and citations. Naturally there is an ongoing work to extend that approach. People are searching for a similar count to have some valorisation and appreciation of data production and data sharing. Opendatametrics.org that looks like a web domain but it's in fact a book if you follow the link you end up at it. And it gives a very good understanding of the current state of affairs about data citation and usage tracking. I definitely recommend to read it. It is very complete but still it left me craving for more. The point is that the tracking we need is a lot more complex than the classic track and trace of orders and physical packages. It's about digital media and we know digital media. In digital media you have error loss copies and they are cheap and thus abundant. We also see mashups. That's all the rage in science too. There is a lot of repackaging. The point is that data sets are not only published and redistributed via repositories. They also get loaded into aggregated services and those refragments and regroup all that data. And yes, we all know assigning a DOI to every data set is an important first step. But the new questions are spontaneously bubbling up. To what level must any possible fragment be identifiable on its own? Should data services attach full provenance trails to any service response they provide? You could even go further and question should those responses, when you think about those provenance trails, when they are made up of fragments, should you have a provenance trail for each of those fragments? So there's a lot to be thought about. And yes, I think we need some shared practice of publishing statistics in a semantic way again. Something that can then be openly harvested by anyone. And I obviously see a bridge to the DMP assistant from Workzone 3. You can envision having an assistant that would, when you use it to obtain download and include data in your research, it could automatically add the usage tracking statistics inside the package and then publish it together with the data. So there's a lot to think about. Actually when I, only this funny coincidence, it made me think when I was looking for an image to put on this slide, I just entered the keyword tracing and I got the second result here. You have to admit this is an interesting contemporary interpretation of the track and trace problem when you think about viruses and exposure. And it's just a vague ID, but maybe that's the kind of new kind of tracing that could open our minds also to find a better solution in this area. Good. That's it. We made it. Thanks for sticking around. I almost just not completely ended up in time. So I hope you're still here. From my side, I'm really eager to shut up now and listen to you. So if you can open the mics, please do. Most people join this call and listen only mode. So if you want to talk, you have to reconnect to the audio and do the echo test. Marek, there was already a question in the chat about frictionless data. Yes, yes. That's the good typical candidate that gets mentioned as a counterpart for, well, in competition with auto-create. I hope they find a way to match. I have looked into frictionless data. They also have this great vision of helping out to be a tool that is close by to the researcher and that is helping out. What I like less about it, actually in the history, they were, at the beginning, they were collaborating with the CSVW group.  So they actually kind of chosen the non-semantic routes, assuming that was way too complex for people. Maybe it's just a matter of timing. Auto-create is maybe a little bit later. I don't know. They are now in a time where something like JSON-LD exists. And JSON-LD is typically, I don't know if you know this famous quote, but some RDF gurus saying, I'm really fed up with RDF. I'm not going to use it anymore. It's a pipe dream. From now on, I'm only using JSON-LD. The joke being that JSON-LD is just RDF, is a serialization for RDF. But it really, the joke shows that JSON-LD is mostly approached as being JSON and not as being linked data. So I don't know. Maybe if JSON-LD was around when frictionless data started, it could have been more aligned with semantics all over. So I don't know. Maybe there is some combinations from possible marriage, possible in the future. I like frictionless data, but I kind of like auto-create more. Anybody else? More questions? More questions in the chat at the moment. Just a lot of thank you and top presentation and that kind of comments. But if I understand it correctly, Marc, you want people to write their suggestions in the document, right? That you put the link up top. Yes, yes, yes. If you didn't have spare bandwidth during the talk, that document keeps being available so you can come back to me. Also, people have found my email in the slides. You can contact me. I'm definitely open for more discussion on this. Good. Sorry for going over time. And if nobody else is speaking up, I think I'll like to call it a day and stop the recording. Marc? Yes. Oh, there is Lukas? I will try my luck. Yeah, now I found the unnecessary. I wanted to ask you, you are showing us a great framework that looks applicable. And you are displaying yourself as a person with knowledge that could be contacted how to apply it. I wonder when there is like EU funded projects and you listed that you are like involved in many initiatives and projects. Is there any mechanism to ensure that they apply this framework? That they are really like not trying to reinventing the wheel, but really like that there is some incentive mechanism in the whole system. All actors are in to apply what you just presented because it makes so much sense. Well, thank you for that compliment. I am up and around in open stuff for the last 20 years. I used to have my own open source company. So that's how it all started working at Apache and stuff. And actually, I don't know if we should expect in a number of ways. I don't think we should expect distributed approaches from a highly centralized organization. That for one. And I also don't think we have to wait for top down decisions. I see a lot of good and interesting things happening on the floor. And maybe we could just assemble this as a bottom up counter answer to that thing. The good thing about the top down is that there's a great way of distributing the taxpayer money into the direction of reaching the correct people. And I have to say last year I've only met either smart people or extremely smart people. So I think that the distribution mechanism should be keeping on top down. But I really think the real solutions will come bottom up. And it will be from actual people on the floor seeing what problems are arising and finding smart solutions to do that. So yeah, maybe I was a little bit critical about my observation on there are not including computer science enough, etc. But I am quite optimistic that the intellectual potential on the grassroots level is there. And we will definitely reach solutions in a number of years or days. Good question, Lukas. Thank you. Anybody else? Anybody struggling to get the mic working? You could also put it on the chat. There's also a question from Bruno Mark. He asks in the document, do you think that public administration funding, scientific research and innovation could or should enforce the use of their results through ROC rates? And what would be the smallest step in that direction? Well, my previous question, I don't really believe about the enforcement. So the first way to modify human behavior in my list of four, law and enforcement, I don't think that's the one with the longest. It could be a smart way to kickstart it, but not the easy way to get it in the long run, to persist and keep it useful. Sure, local investments could be added up to the more European ones or the more centralized ones. I definitely agree there. And I don't know, was there another element of the question? Where was it? It's in the Google Docs and he also asks, can we as public administration offer them to foster the adoption? Fostering the adoption is just adopt, just start doing it. It would be nice that, and my previous job was in local government. So I definitely see how we could collaborate on a number of these smaller elements that could be then rejoined. I don't know, maybe having an ROC rates solution is over the top for local governments, but the elements like having a vocabulary search, that's definitely useful for them as well. DMPs, again, that's very research oriented, but having semantic frameworks, and maybe ROC rates could be a useful addition to, I have to think about it. Could be, in fact, used there as well, because indeed there exists the same problem. You have data, you have metadata, but people forget adding the semantics. And that's definitely something that a package structure like ROC rates could help with. I hope that answers the question. Okay, I see that Leonard added to my understanding that frictionless is not yet adopting linked data, but still has an open issue with it. So yeah, there you go. Good. Close to the one hour mark. Shall I stop the recording? Yeah, and we could still leave it open, but I think since nobody is speaking up anyway, I think we could just stop the recording and close the session. Thanks. My name is Mark Portier.


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