Welcome to the tutorial on R-Package.net meta. I'm Guido Schwadze and I'm the maintainer of the package. You will find the R-Script that I'm using here in this tutorial on Xenodo. There are two versions of the R-Package, the CRAN version and also a development version on GitHub, where we publish bug fixes and newer features. I would like to start by having a brief look on the overview page, of NetMeta. It provides frequentist methods for network meta-analysis and also supports chapter eight of our book meta-analysis with R. Here is then a listing of all the functions that are available in the package. I only would like to mention here that NetMeta providing methods for frequentist network meta-analysis is based on this paper by Gerta Rücker from 2012, which is seen here, so published in the research center of these methods. What Gerta did there is she has shown that graph theoretical methods that are routinely used for electrical networks that they also work well in network, meta-analysis, that you can get consistent treatment effects, which are estimated via the more penrose-solidol inverse of the Laplacian matrix, and this leads to the usual fixed effect or common effect model estimates. What Gerta also did here, she discussed problems of heterogeneity and consistency and provided a random effects model and described how to include multiarm trials. There is another publication on NetMeta, which has just been accepted for the Journal of Statistical Software, so in this paper we describe the workflow with NetMeta in more detail, and here I only would like to show you this diagram, so you would typically start by importing your own dataset, afterwards you would calculate all pairwise comparisons using pairwise, and then you can conduct the main analysis using NetMeta, and afterwards visualize the results in forest plots, in network graphs, and also use some functions to rank the treatments, so and this PDF file will be vignette for NetMeta, but it's not yet available at the moment. I will use in the following an example that is available in NetMeta, it's an example of a network meta-analysis on antithrombotics to prevent strokes, the patients have a non-velvular atrial fibrillation, there is a list of eight interventions, treatments that we are interested in, and the outcome of interest is the occurrence of strokes. Here I load the data and have a look at two studies, and what we can see here is first of all, the second study here is a two-arm study comparing VKase, VKase are vitamin K antagonists with placebo, and the other study is a three-arm study also comparing VKase, but also to aspirin here, and this data format is somewhat typical, so we call it the long based format, and what we can do now using pairwise is we can transform into the contrast based format that is needed by the NetMeta function, and as we have here a binary outcome, we have to see what are the mandatory arguments for a binary outcome, and we have to provide the argument treat with the information on the treatments and with the number of observations for a treatment arm and event, so in this case here the number of strokes, and those are all provided here in the first line. What we also have to provide are the study labels for a long arm based format, because otherwise we would not know which rows belong to which study, so okay. Now let's have a look here again at the same studies as before, and what we see now is let's start with the Barthov study here, we only have one row here for the two-arm study, and we still have three rows for the three-arm study, but what each of these rows contains is a pairwise comparison, so for the Barthov study the pairwise comparison is VKs against placebo, TE here is the log odds ratio, SETE is the standard error of the log odds ratio, and for the three-arm study we have all pairwise comparisons that are possible or available, and if we have a look here for example at studies with four, five, or six treatment arms, then the pairwise command would generate six, ten, or fifteen rows respectively for such studies. For some other analyses people would not like to extract or calculate all pairwise comparisons, but only comparisons to a study-specific reference, this is often called the basic parameters, and you can do this here by the argument keep all comparisons equals false, and then we can also specify a reference, and here the natural reference is placebo, if we run these commands here then we will see that now we only have two rows for the first study, and these two rows are always the comparisons to placebo, so what's missing here is the comparison VKs against aspirin, but in the following we will not use this pairwise object, but we will use the other one with all pairwise comparisons, so in the next step we will conduct the random effects network meta-analysis, first let's here define that all treatment estimates and confidence intervals will be shown with two digits, and here is then the net meta command, the first argument is our pairwise object, and we use the other arguments to define that we do only consider the random effects model, so we say the common effects model equals false, our reference is placebo or control, and we already say here that for our outcome that small values are desirable, that means we would like to to reduce the number of strokes with our treatments, and this information will be used for treatment ranking later on. If we run this command you get a warning stating that there are that comparisons with missing treatment estimates or standard errors will not be considered in our analysis, and here is also a message stating which study does not provide a treatment estimate, and if we look here at the data of this study, then we see that this is a study which had zero strokes in both groups, accordingly the odds ratio is not defined, and accordingly this study will be excluded from the analysis. So now let's have a look at the results of our network meta-analysis, the printout starts here with information on the number of included studies, pairwise comparisons, number of observations, number of treatments, and number of designs, one design for example is S-Prim compared to placebo, another design is S-Prim compared to VKAs compared to placebo and so on, so in total there are 10 different designs. Then comes the result for the random effects model, and here as we said before we are interested in comparisons to placebo, and so we have here the odds ratios for all our active treatments compared to placebo, and what we see here overall is that the treatments reduce the odds for a stroke. The largest effect is observed here for W-Gatran 150 milligram, yes okay, then let's move on and have a look at a forest plot, which contains the same information basically, and it's shown here. Later on we will present another little bit more informative forest plot, so it will not spend much time on this here. But next let's have a look here at network graphs, and the function for network graphs is the net graph function, and the standard network graph would look like this, so we see here all eight treatments in our network, and the lines correspond to where we have direct comparisons, and the thicker the line the more studies compared the treatments directly. We have here several crossings, so if we use here this Seq argument we can reduce or optimize the number of crossings, and here in the next step we say okay let's let's add also the number of studies that we have for each of these comparisons, and then we see okay there are eight studies comparing vitamin K antagonists with aspirin and so on, and then here the final, not the final, the second last command here would generate a network graph where we indicate here by the size of these points how many observations are available, how many patients are available for the individual treatments, and then in this last command here, so and we did this here with this arguments CX points, this defines the size of the points, and with the offset argument here we can specify that we would like to add some space here between the treatment labels and the actual graph, and this would be then a plot that already looks quite nice. This offset argument can be tweaked more or less easily by assigning the the net graph to a new object here called TMP, so here we go back to the first network graph where we could also do this with any of the other commands here, if we look here at the names of this new R object we see it has information on nodes and edges, nodes are here the treatments, edges are the comparisons that we have here, and then for the nodes for the treatments again there is a list of variables that we can have a look at at the current settings and also change them, and for the distance between the treatment labels and the points that we have seen before or here in these these corners, therefore we can have to look at offset X and offset Y, so the distance into the horizontal and the vertical direction, and by default we can see they are always the same, so what we could do, we could change here each value according to our needs, but here in these two commands what I only do is in the first example here I say okay add some space in the vertical direction, in the second command I say add some space in the horizontal direction, and I do this here by defining a matrix with the offset in the horizontal and in the vertical direction, let's have a look on what happens if we run these commands, so the first one adds here this this space in the vertical direction, the second one would add it in the horizontal direction, so then let's move on to the next topic and that is ranking of treatments, and the first thing is what we will do is we look at all individual ranking probabilities, and what we are using here are resampling methods, accordingly I'm using here a seed in order to get reproducible results, and if I run here this command or this this rankogram then what I get is the probabilities that any of our eight treatments is the best treatment, the second best and so on are the worst, and we immediately see here that placebo is ranked here really at the worst in almost 97% of the cases and the rest is only the seventh place, but placebo is never ranked here as the first or up to the sixth best treatment, on the other side W. Gatran 150 milligram is here clearly ranked most often as the best of these eight treatments, and okay then the next thing we can do is we can then look at cumulative ranking probabilities, so we see or look whether what is probability that a treatment is the best or the second best, the best or the second or the third best and so on, and this can be done by using an argument cumulative or cumulative probabilities here, and if we do this then we get according to the cumulative ranking probabilities, we see here in the first column the same values, but the others are then just the sum of these individual ranking probabilities here top and so on, and what is clear here is for example that our best treatment is with a probability of 100% one of the first five best treatments, we can also plot these ranking probabilities and here they are already ordered by the the surface here under the curve, so here we already can see the the ranking basically of our treatments, so this is one is the best and that one is the worst of our treatments here, and a summary of these curves is then the so-called surface under the the ranking curve, under the cumulative ranking curve, and we can get it by using the net rank function and apply it here to our rankogram object, and then we get here these values and they can be interpreted as the average proportion that any of our treatments is better than than all others, so this means here W-Gatran 150 milligram is about 94 percent on average 94 percent of the case is better than any of the other interventions, and placebo here is rather close to zero, this is the sucran, we could also do the same here not with a rankogram object but directly with our network meta-analysis object by specifying the method argument here, so this command here if I run this I get the same results but here I would have to use the seed again, okay here as you can see these are just the same results, and here the piece course this this is a ranking without resampling, we get very similar results here to the sucra values yeah which is also quite nice, and then finally as promised before we can also have here a forest plot which is sorted by decreasing sucra values, sucras are added here in this on the right side of our plot, and we compare here the best treatment with with the others this is defined here in this with these two arguments, so let's look at the plot and this would then then be yeah the final result here of of these treatment comparison or one possibility to summarize the result for for the best treatment compared to the others for example and then finally we can also produce a net leak a leak table using net leak here I will not run the command but show you this excel file which I formatted a little bit, so here in this leak table what we have is in the the bottom and the lower triangle we have the network estimates and in the upper triangle we have the direct estimates and that's it for my side thank you for your attention


Some neat cats and dogs here that we're a little slow this time of year but we've never run out. We definitely want to get them into homes and it's an awesome deal because it's just $14 in honor of Valentine's Day and it's going to be the whole week of Valentine's 11th and 16th so we hope folks will come out. You can't beat a deal for $14. The animals are already spayed, neutered, vaccinated, tested for heartworms with their dogs and just all that good stuff so we hope folks will come see us and provide a new fun, loving home for a pet. Come and visit because sometimes you see a number of animals and not sure which one.  We're here Monday through Friday from 8.30 to 5.00 and 9.00 to 4.00 on Saturday so if you can't get here during the week come visit us on the weekend or on Saturday rather and come see some of these great pets.


I am Milka Jagle working as assistant professor in Department of Mechanical Engineering, Wolchen Institute of Technology, Solapur. Today we are going to learn about block diagram reduction rules. We have already seen why block diagrams are used and what is the use of block diagrams. So, today we are going to see how to reduce the complicated systems by using block diagram reduction rules. So, first in this video we will see about what are those rules. Let us see learning outcome. At the end of the session student will be able to understand the rules to reduce the block diagrams in the control system. So, these are the content canonical form rules for block diagram reduction and references. So, these are the rules. There are total 10 rules. In this video we are going to see four rules. So, rule number one blocks in series or cascade. Rule number two blocks in parallel. Rule three eliminate feedback loop and rule four associative law for summing point. So, before moving forward I want to ask a question. What is series connection or parallel connection? So, I want you to pause the video and think about what is series and parallel connection. Have you heard series connection and parallel connection like resistances connected in series, resistance connected in parallel. So, what is series connection? Let us see series connection is a connection where blocks are arranged one after the another or blocks are connected one after the another. That is known as a series connection or the things are called to be in series connection if the blocks are connected one after the another. Now, parallel connection. The system is parallely connected when the blocks are connected one below the other like the same signal flows but they are connected one above the another or one below the another. Let us see further. So, rule number one is blocks in series or cascade. So, why these rules are used? Let me tell you these rules are used to simplify the block diagrams. First rule is blocks in series or cascade. These rules are used when the blocks are connected in series like if you see in this figure number two that is G1 block and G2 block are connected one after the another then they are seriously connected. Now, if the blocks are connected in series that can be optimized or that can be concluded in a single block simplified block that is G1, G2, R of S. If you see the definition that is blocks in series, the blocks which are connected in series may be algebraically combined by multiplication. Whenever you see two blocks connected in series then the gain of two blocks are to be multiplied and an equivalent block is formed. But remember that if two blocks are connected in series there should be no any takeoff point or summing point. We will see what is takeoff point. We have already seen actually in the before in the previous video we have already seen what is takeoff point and summing point. If there is a takeoff point here then this rule is not applicable. This rule is applicable only if two blocks are connected in series and there is absence of takeoff or summing point. Let us move forward. Now, rule number two, blocks in parallel. The blocks which are connected in parallel get added algebraically. Now, what is blocks connected in parallel? If you see here G1 block G2 block and G3 block are connected one below the other and the same input signal goes through all and they are given to this summing point. So, the signal flowing through G1 block is the output of G1 block is RSG1. Here it is RSG2 whereas it is RSG3. These are given when blocks are connected in series then they can be algebraically added just make sure that what is the sign of the output. Here it is G1 plus G2 minus G3. If you see here G1 is plus G2 is plus and G3 is minus. So, these all complicated this complicated system can be converted into a single block that is this one. So, these were the second rule. Now, moving forward third rule that is eliminate the feedback block. This is the feedback control system where R of s is the reference signal E of s is the error signal B of s is the feedback signal taken from this output and given backed and then this is the takeoff point. Now, let us see how to eliminate this feedback loop. These complete feedback loop is converted in only one block that is this block G of s upon 1 plus or minus G of s H of s. What is this? How it can be converted? Let us see this. Here in figure you see here error signal is nothing but R of s reference signal plus feedback signal that is B of s. Now, what is this B of s feedback signal? Feedback signal is nothing but the signal with the output signal C of s and then H of s. And what is C of s is nothing but error signal into gain. What is this gain we have got? So, from these three equation we find that error signal is nothing but C of s upon G of s. But equation 3 states that C of s is nothing but error signal into gain of that block. So, in conclusion we see that this complete feedback loop is converted or transformed into a single block that is G of s upon 1 plus or minus G of s into H of s. Now, let me tell you what is this plus this is plus or minus. So, just ignore this one this is plus or minus. When to take plus sign, when the feedback is negative, when the feedback is negative then you need to take here plus sign 1 plus and if the feedback is positive then you need to take here negative that is 1 minus. So, this is how we can eliminate the loop that is feedback loop. I hope it is clear whenever this feedback loop is given which consists of one summing point, one takeoff point, one G block and H block that is one forward block and one backward block. We can also say it is forward path and reverse path. So, whenever this loop is given that is thus can be also known as a complete loop. This is given that time you need to write this equation that is converted into this equation G of s upon 1 plus or minus G of s H of s I repeat plus sign is taken if there is a negative feedback and minus is taken when positive feedback. Next rule. So, as I have discussed here you see here G 1 G 2 are multiplied here they are seriously connected and then there is a feedback loop. This is what we got these are converted into a single block. This is the output when we have input given is this we have the system. This system is converted into single block. Next associative law for summing point. This states that this law states that the order of summing point can be changed if two or more summing point are in series. Let me tell you if two or more summing points are connected one after the another without any block or without any takeoff point in between them then the position of summing point can be changed. If you see here in figure number 5 a here it is a b 1 summing point and b 2 summing point. The output of this is R of s minus b 1 minus b 2 and if you see in figure number 5 b you see that b 2 is interchanged and b 1 is interchanged according to the law of associative law. If you see here figure number b b 2 and b 1 are interchanged but the output remains same that is R of s minus b 1 and b 2. So, this equation and this equation both are same it states that summing points can be changed. So, what is the need of summing point? Why we need to change the position of summing point? Because when complicated block diagram is given to you when a complicated system with many blocks then the main motto or the main focus is to reduce the block diagram to a single block. So, in that case according to the condition according to the you need to judge whether the system how system can be simplified. We can there are many rules like shifting takeoff point shifting summing point we are going to see in the further videos but for time being this is the law which states summing points can be interchanged. There is no change in the output if summing points are interchanged. So, these are the references. Thank you.


Hey Jeff, I'm remembering your name a few minutes ago, are you going to do watch the work or does anybody want to have a watch the work explained to them, everybody know what we're doing, Jim knows what we're doing. This is your last week, Joanne, I'm still at school. Okay, so does anybody have any, would anybody like to explain to them what we're going to do? I'm jumping in, so. You're jumping in, I read the writing page online. Cool, cool, cool, it's real simple, it's real simple. All I do is I, it's basically about you in your work. It's, but you can participate as much or as little as you like. I'm going to set my timer, we're going to work together for 20 minutes, so you're going to work on your own thing. Okay, and then we're going, when the timer goes off, I'm going to answer your questions about your creative process. Okay, so the main title is you, watch your work, that means we're talking about you. Okay, all right, easy, easy. So I'm ready, Dan, or somebody. Okay, because we're also streaming online and a post-partum contact. So I'm just going to tell them, and then you go to me. And now I'm going to answer. Miranda. Miranda. Oh, like in the textbook. Yes. There you go. Okay, I got it. You missed your phone, where are you? Where are you? Turn up the microphone. Miranda's been telling you how to get the coffee. Yeah, go for it. Yes, so you can go to howaround.tv which is where we're streaming live right now. And there's a little comment section where you can write in questions, or you can tune in on HowlRound's Facebook page, or you can write questions on the Public Theater's Instagram at Public Theater NY, or you can go into it. And tweet a question using the hashtag, watch me work SLP and the hashtag HowlRound, H-O-W-L-R-O-U-N-U. Thank you. Miranda, I've got your name in the box. It's really good. Okay. This is my brain. I don't have your name. All right. So, Brady, you're going to set the timer? Yes, sir. And I will set my timer, too. Oh, okay. Here you go. You usually use a typewriter. I'm not going to do it today. I'm going to read some papers. So, hopefully, we got some work done. Someone got a TV or some monitor or something. They went downstairs and I came up to the box. Oh, wow. That's cool. Anyway. So, somebody got something. So, now here's the part where I listen to your questions about your creative process and offer up some answers. Anybody have any questions, thoughts, problems, difficulties or exciting things are happening in your work that you want to share? Do that, too. I'll just sit here and balance. It might be. But we have a question on Instagram. So, what is it? Anastasia. Anastasia wants to know. Anastasia is a famous person in Anastasia. They want to know if I have any advice for someone who's performing their work, writing their work and performing it. Advice like what? Good. Yay. Great. That's really great. The only time I do that is when I do music in my band. So, I don't know. It's very difficult, but a lot of people do it well. So, it's definitely worth doing. What's great about writing your own work is you get to, you know, you have more creative control. She can also have more, like, she doesn't have to wait around for the perfect circumstance to do her work. But I don't know. Does anybody here write or perform? Oh, yeah, singing. Oh, gosh. I hope she shows up and there you are. Does anybody have any thoughts? Does anybody here perform their own work? Yeah? Right. How are you? It's great to see you. No? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe if she could come back with a more specific question, you know, you know, if she's watching, she might, because it would give her lots of encouragement, but I'm not sure what to tell her other than write it and perform it and, you know, try it out with her friends. I'm sure everything I have to say about that she's probably already done. That's my opinion. But I'll write this back with a more specific question and we'll drive back into it. Anybody else? I have a super big question. What are we going to do? No? You're just stretching. Oh, it's on. It's way to big. It's on. Great. What's your name? Ben. Ben. Okay, Ben. It's your cue. Ashton. It's about images that, like, affect you when you're writing. You'll write something. You'll write an image that you are affected by. But then it takes you to a place that you start judging. I guess, like, do you balance, do you have a way of dealing with that judgment that comes with, like, finding something that you feel like might not have anything to do with what you're writing, but you're still affected by it? Like, do you have a place where you take that and put it, or do you accept it and then let it change the course of what you're writing? So you're, so let me just go through it. Let me make sure I understand. So Ben is writing something. He's writing, writing, writing along. And then he includes an image. And then so far so good, right? You're writing, you're writing, and you include an image. Good. But then comes some judgment about the image, because it doesn't really have anything to do with what you're writing about. Okay. Okay. Judgment, like, what does the judgment sound like? Can you just, like... Yeah, so the judgment, I guess, like, what the judgment sounds like just now was, I was, like, writing along, and like, I think this is a poem. Okay. But it was like, wait, like, this sounds like it might be from another poem, an entire poem. Like, maybe this is something that doesn't belong here. Okay. Well, that kind of judgment. Like, maybe this is something that doesn't belong here. Kind of judgment. Yeah. And maybe it's not actually serving. And maybe it's not actually serving what I'm writing as a story. Right. Okay. Okay. Yeah. That kind of judgment. And what I suggest, something that a thousand people down the stairs, it's like a conventional saleswoman or a man. Super fine. What I would suggest is, like, keep writing. So, you know, but it's like, if you're driving along, or you drive then. Yeah. Okay. So you're driving along and you see, oh, look, there's something. Stop the car. Get out of the car. I don't know if that tree is really supposed to be there. You stop the process. Right. That's not a great analogy, but you stop the process. The idea is to keep going. Okay. Maybe it's going to take, maybe you come to a fork in the road and you take it and you go. Okay. Post-its are also handy. If you really think, oh, this seems like it's not part of, you can write it on a post-it or a separate notebook. You have a notebook there. You might have a separate notebook for just random things that don't belong. Thank you. Great. Bring it down there. What? Is that, could that be helpful? Yeah. Post-its are fun. You can just, I mean, get ones in the color that you really enjoy. You know? Because the judgment thing, it sounds like it's stopping you. And then, yeah, and then, and then you're not writing. And then you don't get to cross the finish line. Are you? Yeah. Start writing slowly. Okay. Okay. Okay. Post-its are great. Or just, yeah. Yeah. But those, the sort of voices that question whether or not you're on the correct path. Those kind of voices need to be, you know, where writing fast helps. You know, writing, that's why we write with a timer, you know, in this workshop. And this is, I finally remembered to bring this. It's a timer. And you know the difference. I'm going to show you two things, and you're going to tell me. Okay. Because the following is like, I am your B all in all. Look, I'm even pink-sparkling on the back. And a friend is texting me. Wrong. This is the timer. This is really good. Because it only does, you know, a couple things. And they're all related to county up or down. And you set it for 20 minutes. And then you can focus and get your work done. These are really good. And they're not that expensive. You've got to be operated. I bet you can get a solo power at work. You know, so. Okay, that's a good question. We all have that. A lot. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Anybody else? Yes, Abana. That was really simple. Oh, good. I love simple questions. I actually don't know what you're writing. What is my writing process? Yeah, because I don't want to feel right today. What's your writing process? You type out as much as you possibly can. And then you go back to where you were. You type out as much as you possibly can. And then you go back to where you were. Yeah. Or just, like, get out the box. I don't want to really have the bad structure of it. Okay. No, no. I don't believe that. But yeah, you try to, like, blur it all out. Right. Go back. Right. So you outline after you've written a draft. For me, it's, like, more about, like, getting specific themes I have in my head out. Right, right. I love, like, dialogue and, like, writing characters. Right. So I try to get that out first. Cool. Because that's, like, the way of it. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I kind of did the same kind of thing. I am only, I kind of try to combine the two things more. Yeah. Because my favorite thing about writing is being in the flow. You know, her girl felt that. Yeah. You're like, we were just, like, cruising along. Woo-hoo! You know? And to do that, we were talking to Michael about that in class today, right? To do that, you have to combine the sort of organization with the stuff you really like. You know? You know? You want to be organized. It's like a road trip. Again, just driving. If you're driving on a road trip, you know where you're going. You're going to California. You're going to get there to the Santa Monica Pier. You know? And you can just kind of relax and enjoy the scenery. Because you know where you're going, kind of sort of. And you can enjoy your trip, you know? Sometimes if you don't have a plan, you just kind of, yeah. You kind of wasn't around. No, in writing anyway. Maybe not the road trip, but in writing sometimes, you know? You might be just avoiding something that you don't like to do. Which is, it might be structure. Not that you don't like to do that. But so I would say when you're thinking of scenes that you like, put them down, type them down in outline form. What's wrong with that? Like, oh, I've got an idea for a scene. Cool. I know where it's coming. I don't know. I'm going to put it on the page. Number one. Oh, I've got another idea for a cool scene. Again, great. I'm going to put it on the page. There's a couple of four after that. Number four comes with four. Oh, so that's number one now. Oh, I've got another idea. It comes after the two of them. Oh, it comes in the middle of the two of them. Oh, great. Then you start to see the structure. See, so it's fun, you know? I'd say hold off on the dialogue.  Maybe then save it.  But I'm a parent. I don't, I don't think so. I think that.   So do the things that might be a little difficult, maybe. And then you can get into your fun flow with the confidence that you've got to kind of figure it out. You've done the hard, you've done the difficult work. Does that make sense? It's a lot, you know. Is that a ball of overtime for you, or is that? Is that a ball? Did my practice evolve over time? Yeah. Was that way, sort of how you approach playwriting, or it's like writing, you know? I know. This is about you, though. I know. Watch me work. This is about you. Yeah, but watch me work. This is about you, though. I'm coming for the preamble. I'll let you tell you. See, this is what happens. I don't bought it from, like, outside, from the street.  And I need it. You missed the preamble part. Watch me work. It's kind of like a weird title, because it's actually about your work and your creative process. But I can talk to you. I can talk to you. Sidebar. We can sidebar on the corner, on the streets. Am I standing on broken glass? Yeah. Talking about it. Anybody else? I don't know. We'll figure out. And we'll tell us if they relate to each other. She'll tell us. So be right back. Like, relatable, like, real. Like, what is that even? What's relatable? Maybe you know somebody explain it to me. Somebody knows. Relatable. Yeah, tell me. Relatable character. Yeah, what's a relatable character? Well, after that, we see that we... because it doesn't feel like they're so far from us. So a person that we feel like we can see on the street. A person that we feel like you can see right here that we can talk to and not someone that has been so crafted that they're not a real person. Not a real person. A person. Right. A relatable character. It's such an interesting concept. Because I think, like, like Meghan Markle, for example. I know. She just had a baby. Which is great. All right. Is she relatable? Do you think? I know. Some people say yes. Some people say no. But she seems relatable, doesn't she? This is a long way around of acting out of the stage. It's a really good question. Because what you want is something that seems relatable. Like, Richard the Third in the play. You know, not the real Richard the Third. But Richard the Third, the character. Is he relatable? He is in relation with other... I think what we do is we get these concepts in our mind that make it difficult to write, you know. So what you want to do in a stage in everybody's, we want to fill our characters with specifics. And maybe the character is relatable, like Meghan Markle. She seems relatable. And maybe the character is relatable, like Richard the Third. He's in relation to other people and other things. I would just say, get real specific about your character's story. Get real specific about what they want. Why they're in your play, for example. Get real specific about what your character wants and whether or not they're going to get it by the end of the show. Just get specific. And... Because relatable, it means different things to different people. There's a joke in White Noise where the character rouse a white guy. So, yeah, yeah, I changed all the characters. Black characters, I made them all white people because I made them more relatable. So for this white guy in that moment, a white character is more relatable. Some people don't find people of color relatable. So it's tricky. I just say make them good. And, you know, but it was a really good question. Does that make sense? Yeah. You know? Cool. Anybody else? What's your name? Nell. How are you? I'm well. Nell? So, yeah, I came and I thought, okay, I saw online that you... And I didn't show up the first two because I didn't know about it. And I thought, I'm going to try to give some structure to my... I have a goal. I want to write a musical theater. I want musical theater. Okay. So here I thought, okay, I showed up with nothing, right? I have notes in my... So I looked, okay, let me search for this. And I realized I put together... I'm trying to blend structure to things a lot. So I feel, oh, it's going to motivate me. So you're kind of answering, chiming into it. Like, my creative challenges, process challenges along these questions, right? So I see, my calendar was two years ago. And then things took over where I had to... I made money on other things and nobody's paying me to do this. So I guess I'm going to kind of get down to brass tax. Like, I feel like if I'm on a job and I have to deliver for somebody, I, man, I deliver. And I write that piece or I write that thing. I hear you. And now I got to impose that on myself. So it's a mind-blowing thing and it's historic fiction. Right. Right. And really I can sense the whole and I get these, you know, really magnificent, you know, images, sense, feel, hear, see. But then when it comes to, man, I have to chip away at this. That's where I get, like, wow, a little overwhelmed. Right. So I guess that's relatable because maybe... Totally. Yeah, man. Right. Break it down. Yeah, so you've got, see, isn't that great? You know exactly what to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In theory, then I got to sit there and actually write it. And imagine, like, I love that you say, get real specific. What do they want? Who are they? What's the package? Right? That's what I want to be in that world and I want it out. But I guess, you know, I have a question for you, but it's about my process. It's almost like, okay, somebody's paying me. I'm under deadline. I got to deliver. So now I got to give it structure. Right. And nobody's going to pay me just yet for this because I might show some evidence. Right, right, right. So I kind of want to ask, like, how did you go from once nobody was paying you, then somebody's paying you? Right. And that's still the thing that nobody pays me for. I don't pay commissions for plays. Oh. And I write, so when I write songs for my band, people don't pay me. I just sit down and write. So there's lots of things that I do that people don't pay me for. Right. See, that's correct. Yeah. I can be legal. But I think underlying everything for me anyway is this organizational structure of things.   Uniforms your own. Like you just... Yeah, structure it. I don't know.  The contradiction of liberation is... Light speed. Yeah. What I want to say is underneath everything, I have structure through this. That's mad. That's really... This is medical. And it doesn't cost a lot of money. And it's not your phone. I'll just say that again. It sounds so silly. But that phone, which is a great, wonderful device, hooray! We love our phone, hooray! It's, you know, it's crack, right? It's not, it's... So something like this, which is just what it is, crack is simple, simple, right? Yes. And it only does the thing that you need it to do. That's cool. And you can watch the numbers go down, which is kind of fun. Yeah. It's a little game with ourselves. Exactly. Exactly. It's not like tomato. Someone says, there's an app. You can do it on your phone. It does the same thing. It's not the same thing, because it's on your phone. So this kind of thing, what you do now is set it to 20 minutes. That's a nice amount of time. That's what we just did here, right? Set it to 20 minutes.  Your project. Your wonderful, loving project that you love so much, right? And 20 minutes seems too stressful. It's like you're married. You're going to be a marathon runner, right? Right. Then you start out with a little less. You run for, it's right 10 years. We lower the bar. We just lower the bar.  You put in your 20 minutes. And it accumulates. Right? Like compounded interest. Yes. Over time.  And it doesn't matter what, you can have a notebook and write longhand. Ideas on my project. You can have, you know, oh, I see. She got excited by scenes. I'm sure we'll maybe put them in outline form. You know? Yeah. Bonnie, you can even, if you like scenes, get index cards, the small ones, the three by five. And write your scenes on index cards and then organize them and you're outlining them without actually doing them. The chronological, right? The outline thing. You might, it's like, man, somebody don't like that. So, right? Yes, really. And you just, small, small steps. Incremental, like when kids learn to walk. It all starts out very slowly. Yeah. You know? And then, yeah, we still might get overwhelmed, but, but, it's only 20 minutes. And if you want to turn on your timer and go, for 20 minutes, that's okay too. That's perfectly fine. Or go, for 20 minutes, that's fine too. Or the, like this, the down creeps in. This may not be good. This may not be good. Well, let it come in. I know. That's kind of what's in here. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well. So what? I'm going to keep going. Right. Talk back to it.  So, you know, have a conversation. Not too long.  Talk to the hand conversation. Talk to me after I'm done. Or write down what is going on in your head. 20 minutes. Because I don't like being motivated by fear. I don't want to do that.  Okay. Chip away. 20 minute increments. Sure. And if that takes too much, 10 will also, 10 minutes will also work. Pick a time during the day that's going to be your writing time. Do you have a time during the day? I have a lot of swing time. So that's what I, part of my equation, like I have to, okay, when am I going to dedicate time to that versus, you know. Great. So prioritize your writing and just wait time. If you're a morning person and afternoon person and night owl, answer it. Okay, great.  And just try to see what happens. Right here. So, and at some times it seems like five minutes. Right. But today I was like, really, set this up. So, what I, what helps me is to start to doodle. So that I, I don't want to just stop. Right. Right. Because then I feel like I can't get it going. Right, right, right, right, right, right. So then to just keep going, I start to doodle. That's good. You know, and then the doodle got me into the next thought. There you go. Right. That's great though. Doodling is also encouraged. You know? Or you can just write the same, I mean, it sounds like the shining, but that, you know, you could do that. You know? I mean, you could write something like, you know, I'm waiting for the next word on that. I'm waiting for the next episode. Where is it?  I love doing that. When I don't know what to, you're like, what's the next scene? I don't know.  Like, oh gee, yeah. That's cool. And then I get to do the scene that I really like.  Ha!   Okay, keep going. You know what I mean? And then, you might look back when you rewrite or you look at the outline or whatever, and you go, oh, you look exactly what's supposed to be there. You know? Yeah. Okay, yeah, that was last night. You were dancing last night, weren't we? Right there. Yeah. And that was the worst. I think that Oscar did dance. He's like, he'll never give you a dance unless you're in it. Five minutes. You're going to look happiest. In half a month. He was, he was, he was a good dancer for somebody who said you can't dance. Okay? Okay. Oh, good. To know if you had any advice for young writers who are struggling with blank pages. Get out of the blank page. Get out of the blank page. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I have the same answer to everything. Just at the time. You know, because I think that people, we have blank pages because we're telling ourselves that it's not any good. Right? I mean, it's not like all of a sudden, Carl, having lost the ability to, you can't type anymore, you know? You know what I mean? Is that, oh no, I broke all my fingers, you know? Or you forgot how to form blank pages.  You know?  You know? Because I think the word that's missing from that is not just blank pages, it's blank pages that I think are really good. You know? So write some blank pages and aren't you good.  Come on. Right? Yeah, right. Go. Question from Howard? Yeah. How do you start working on a play that you get out of the drawer after a long time and what's finished and rewrite that? Oh, that's great. That's a great question. How do you work on a play or anything that you, that you wrote a while ago, you put it in the drawer and you want to rewrite? I say read it aloud. I would say, and just to, put yourself, I say, stand, stand up.  And stand at whatever you're writing. I mean, I would not suggest doing this in Starbucks or whatever, because this thing might call the police. It's part of what those guys are doing. We're doing a play, no. But you stand at your desk and read it aloud or walk around the room and read it aloud. But definitely, I would say read it aloud. You can start to hear it and start to get into the bodies of your characters and think that's super stupid and helpful.  It doesn't have to be a special occasion. It doesn't have to be a play to read it aloud. You can start to hear it, you know. Feel it. You read your work aloud, don't you? Okay. Okay. I'll tell you to read your work aloud. Read your work aloud. Your sister tells you to. That's her, like, number one advice every time. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's true. But reading it aloud helps you feel it. And if it's a play, it's going to help you take one more step toward what it's been doing, what it's produced, something that said, well, my son came through production of how he knows your work last week and he said, and he looked at me and said, mommy, they're saying all the words that you say. Why are we doing it? They're copying you. And I was like, yeah.   Yeah. So, yeah. You're allowed. And it's okay. That's why we're here. I guess this is sort of, like, okay, this happens to me, but I'm asking you if you do it too. Okay. So, the things come to you that you start, it actually starts out loud. Like, it starts, you're saying something or you're, like, moving and you find something that you want to get down on the page or maybe, or you find something that you, like, think about, like, wanting to perform at some point. Right. It just happened to me yesterday. Okay.  Yeah. But I think about it. Yes. And then you went, huh. And then what did you do? I recorded myself. Good. And then what did you do? I sent it to my partner. Good. And then... And now I haven't talked about it. Okay. Well, you can listen to it transcribe it, right? Yeah. Okay. And it can be the beginning of something. Yes. That's a loud. I guess it just, but it, um, it felt like a one-person show. Like, when I was just, like, in my apartment doing it. Okay. But it's a stay that way. Okay. Why don't you start writing and sing? Because a lot of plays start with just one person on stage. I was wondering about this content. Right? Which I'm a third.  You know? But it starts, I think, pretty much. That is, right? I'm pretty sure. Um, so you don't know. It could just be the beginning of it. You know? Or it could be a one-person show that you can perform. You know? Yeah. It doesn't have, I mean, you know, ideas come from all over in all sorts of ways. So any way is valid and good. You just have to take the next step. Because it's not going to write itself. You know that.  You have to do the work now. You know? That's exciting. Yeah. Anybody? I have to figure out how to do certain, um, habits. No, no, I said today I think we should check right because last time we really got funny. And then I spent too much time discussing with the rhythm. So I just did my little book today. She's working on stuff. I do, you know, like structural things and I'm trying to figure out how to do this. It's like, blah, blah, blah. It just can happen there, there. Very good. That's really good though. That's a great, that's a great idea, that's a wonderful idea for the person, Carla, or some of, Carla Minstone was talking about the blank page. That's a great idea, a great thing to do when you're sitting there with your blank page, your blank, and you're thinking, I don't know, you know. What's right? Right? Gratitude list. That's a great idea. Just list all the things that you're really grateful for. That's a wonderful way to sort of fill that page. And that can also maybe just sort of reduce your anxiety about where you are in your life and then make some cool thoughts and ideas that could come from Mom. Out of that which is really lovely. I really feel it too. Great. Poets, poets, poets. Yeah, a lot of them. There's a great book by who's a poet, Donald Hall. He's written a book called Lightwork, which is, it's not a poem, it's a book about his, well, his working life, which is, I love books about working life where they talk about the process, which is probably why I do this, because I love reading about this. I just love talking about the process. But, you know, people like, I'm trying to think, Susan Howe. I love language books. Susan Howe, Emily Dickinson, Ann Carson. Those are, she's really great. She has a wonderful book called Eros, The Better Suite, which is about desire and language and probably all sorts of things. Eros, The Bitter Suite, Ann Carson A, and E, Ann Carson, great writer.  The Lost Poets, you know, jazz musicians. You can listen to a lot of jazz and sing it back. That's like at home, you know. Beep, beep, beep, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee. Just for rhythm and timing to get that into your body is really invaluable, and you can do that just by walking or driving a car or riding a subway or whatever. It's really important.  At the time, anybody have a brilliant question, you go home and you go, what did that ask her? The answer to everything is keep writing basically. So if you don't have, keep writing, keep writing. Get one of these if you feel like splurging, you know, 10 bucks or whatever they are on Amazon, you know, and I don't own the company, so I can't make money from them. But just keep writing and just be brave enough to write in cheerleading.  Just write something, you know. If you feel happier having written something than having written something. So are we back next week? We are back. Did you have next week? Sorry. So we're back on the 13th at 5 p.m. Anything else I have to say before we go away? Okay, thanks for being here. Thank you. Thank you.


Yeah, so my office door looks like this and it shows my schedule and I also travel around Taiwan to talk to people and connect back to this space, that's why. Ah, okay. Cool, how many people are? Drop in by. They're very, very variable but usually maybe 10 every Wednesday. Which travel party is mine? I think this one, this one I think is mine. Okay, that's it. You got the one to write. That's correct, you'll get one, please. Okay. You're the one? Yeah. I'm the one. Okay. Um, get up. I mean, Taiwan has a digital ministry. You, so what's your job exactly? Okay. What do you do as a digital minister of Taiwan? Okay, do I talk to you or do I talk to the camera? Talk to me. Okay. Okay. All right. All right. So, and if I introduce some concepts, do I introduce you to the front or to my screen? I think better to you. To my screen, so I'll move it a little bit here. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, as a digital minister, my work is to further the sustainable development goals through digital means that connects the economy, the society, and the departments together and through enhancing reliable data and encouraging effective partnerships and opening innovation. And I wrote my own job description three years ago. You did? Yes. Yes. I'll read you my job description very because like this, when we see the internet of things, let's make it an internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear the singularity, isn't it? Let us always remember the plurality. It's like a poem. It is a poem. Would you today like write the same job description as like three years ago or would you change something? Yeah. I just wrote a new poem yesterday. And how does it go in your poem? Yeah. Also job description. Yeah. It's also job description-ish. And it goes like this. It says, whirling ocean, beautiful islands, a transcultural republic of citizens. Okay. This sounds like those Japanese high quotes. Yeah. Do you have any meaning of it? Yes. Taiwan, of course, is not only the land part of it. It's also our surrounding ocean and sea that has 10% of the total ocean biodiversity on earth. And so it's always important to begin a view that it's not just on the land but actually through climate actions and sustainable goals to expand our horizons toward the ocean. And so that's why it's begun with whirling ocean. And then it's not just one island, but many islands. We have the Pescadora Islands, the Arquit Island, the Green Island and so on. And so it is not just enough to take care of Braben as a human right on the main island. It is now also very important to get all the smaller islands also connected to the Braben as a human right to make telemedicine education and so on. And transcultural means the freedom to move from culture to culture, just like the freedom to move from country to another. Because starting this year in Taiwan we have more than 20 official languages. We have more and more languages from indigenous nations. We have the Taiwanese Olok and Hakka and Mandarin and many other languages as well. And they're all equally official. And it's a new thing as of this year. And so to make machine learning, for example, learn not only from people who speak English or Mandarin, but also from all the different lineages, all the different cultures and traditions. And be able to communicate through those cultures, that's why I'm named Transcultural and the Republic of Citizens means that starting next year our referendums are in different years than the elections. Ah, yeah, because up until now it has always been like you said, new elections. Yes, yes. So there used to be, I would say, capturing of agenda of the deliberative part of democracy by the representative part of democracy. But now because there will be alternating years, there will be one year of presidential election and then one year of national referendum and then one year of mayoral election and one year of national referendum. So it allows an entire year of deliberative action outside of party politics and outside of representative politics. So it's a new design that allows for more direct participation in the agenda setting by the citizens without a political setting that captures them by the political parties. And so that's what I'm named by Republic of Citizens are meaningful. I know the meaning in those three lines. Yes.  What worry are the most? Well, again, in order of sequence, right, if people don't care about the ocean, if they don't care about the climate, if people work on only furthering one interest at the expense of the islands. So like economy, if it's done in a linear way at the expense of society environment or innovation at the expense of social justice and privacy and things like that, that would worry me. Okay. And what about like the upcoming elections? What role does social media play in the elections? Yes, so social media is a great amplifier of people's both pro-social tendencies but also anti-social tendencies. And so it's social, but it doesn't say whether it's pro-social or anti-social. And in Taiwan, what we've seen is that it tends to reward mostly the more extreme voices so that they amplify more. So there may only be five divisive ideas among all the possible ideas that concern the society. But social media, when it's done in a design in an anti-social way tends to over amplify the voices of the divisive and give less room for the consensual. But how does social media work in Taiwan? Does it work a little bit differently from other countries or is it like the same thing? Well, in Taiwan, because we have broadband as a human right so no matter where you are in Taiwan, you have 10 megabits per second at 15 euros per month and because of that everybody is very much into video producing and video sharing. And so I would say that it is not only text-based, a lot of it is image and video-based and people very easily start their own broadcast stations just sharing their views through live streaming. So there's a lot more live streaming going on compared to other jurisdictions mostly because it's unlimited data for everyone. And I would also say that the use of end-to-end encryption is maybe more inside one through an app called Line. A lot of people are using Line for end-to-end encryption not only among individuals but also among groups of people. But what does this mean if you have more streaming and not only text-based solutions? Does this have an impact then, for example, on all those topics like fake news that it's like you have less fake news because everybody is more streaming because it's like I don't know. Less possible. Do you think it's extremely streaming? So nowadays it's also easy to synthesize video. So it's for deep fakes. Yeah, I forgot about you. So it's not exactly like that it's harder. The problem actually become bigger because people would believe it more if they have seen a picture or a video as compared to text. Text is open for interpretation. Text is usually very final in its presentation. So I would say that it actually amplified especially the feeling of anger and helplessness if people show you an image of, for example, I don't know, it was this image that says during the Hong Kong protest the payment for the rioters is such that at most they pay up to 20 million dollars I think Rimming B for murdering a police, which is a piece of disinformation. Is this also something we should viral in Taiwan? Yes, and that was a photo. And this is a kind of comic drawing that caused for basically so-called suicide deaths. And again, this is a piece of disinformation. There was no such event going on in Hong Kong. You can very easily see because it's not spelled in Cantonese. It's spelled in Hanyu Pinyin, which actually no Hong Kong protesters would use. So you mean Hanyu Pinyin is like Mandarin, not Cantonese? Yes, well, it's written in Cantonese to make it look like Cantonese. But actually it uses Hanyu Pinyin, which is Mandarin Pinyin, actually only used in PRC because in Taiwan we use the Juin system. And it also got some Cantonism as well. Okay. Yes, but what I'm trying to say is that if it's only this text, it would not be as provoking anger as a drawing or maybe a synthesized image or AVU. So is that the fake news problem bigger in Taiwan because people are using more picture and more video? I would say it incites more emotion. And it also makes clarifications more important. So the website that I'm showing you here is actually clarifying this as false and because they can cite from the video and from the images. It also makes clarification more pertinent to the message because you can then compare where the image came. It was from the royalties, but they changed the caption and so on. And what does it mean for the upcoming election? I mean, everybody is extensively using social media, not like the people from the Hans party but also like everybody is using social media. And does it also mean that like the whole presidential elections are going to be quite partial and also angry because I mean, we have like those people from Hans party who are using the opposite of fake news and also vice versa. And I get the impression that it's quite heated. Well, we're a young democracy, so elections are always heated. But I think social media is unique in that it allows the turning the helpless anger into a outrage very easily by clicking share. So whenever people feel anger, they may not have the mental capacity to check the veracity of the image or video, but they can very easily turn it into something more positive subjectively by clicking share and sending a message of outrage so that people are angry about the same thing together instead of an individual anger. And so that tend to spread. Okay, so anger as I was just showing you was also equally people devote their time to fact checking to commit it to respond to each and every of those messages within 60 minutes. I think the deadline from each ministry is two hours. So within two hours, they have to produce the clarification cards that are also visual that within two hours within like 200 words at least two pictures that clarify this. But how does this work? This is like one of the means how you protect against the fake news. Every ministry is only having a look at the... The trending distribution. Just like the trending ones or just the trending ones concerning their ministry? Of course, they can only respond to the ones concerning their ministry but the trending one also is a volunteer basis. People either reported underlying system directly to a public dashboard like flagging us by email or people can just work with the time fact check center and say I see this trending, would you like to check it? But one way or another, it will end up on the ministry's pellet and they will look at whether it's a intentional harmful entry.  And for example, but like so the people from the ministry they just have to do the monitoring, the people are doing the monitoring and then they will respond to it. Do you have like a good example from the past? So this is actually a very humorous one. This clarifying rumor that says, tell me your hair many times a week will be subject to a million dollar fine starting next week and that's not true. And then the pellet which is less than 200 words says I may be bought now. So it's a younger version of the prime minister but would not punish people with hair. And then the fine princess what we've done is introducing labeling requirements for hair products starting July 2021 and then a prime minister as he looks analysis. However, while prime minister hair many times a week will not damage your pocket, it will damage your hair when serious you may end up looking like me. Okay, so and then what is then also like approved by the minister himself and like this team? So of course the image would have to be pretty clear to use. So it's actually a very tight pipeline. You can think of it like a kind of sitcom producer a mimetic engineer team that can very easily and swiftly put the clarification messages from the ministry into this mimetic packaging so that it goes viral. So now if you, for example, search on search engine like the keywords that we just show or something like that then you will actually the first few hits will be this clarification messages and it's their relatives. Can we also have a closer look at this picture? Anyway, I will go through the whole thing again just with my camera on the screen so that we can just remember it. Sure. So after that we are doing it afterwards or shall we already do it? I would say afterwards and we don't interrupt you. Okay. Just make it out that then you have the hair, the hair thing. The hair thing, yes. Yeah, the hair thing, the whole thing, maybe your poems in the beginning just that they have a bit of close-ups and everything and you can capture it. And how many people are doing this for you? Like five? I'm at some of five people. Yeah, so they're not doing it for me, they're doing it for their minister. Yeah, so I'm mostly just advocating this way of a swift, open and structured response but the actual coaching is by our spokesperson, Vulasio Takkar and in each ministry they have a team of five people or more, but five is a kind of basic. And do you also have another example? For example, something which is also connected to the elections? I would say one of the important things is that our clarifications are not fact checks.  So we don't directly deal with election. This would be from Han or Tsai or Song's office. But they are doing it themselves. They are doing it themselves, but that's not our purview. Our purview is common to the administrative functions but we're not doing it for the elections. Okay, so when it comes to fake news, this is like one of the main tools? You have a lot of other tools? Well, and also when I said that our fact check centre, actually every piece of fact check that they do, that they combine information from various different sources, for example this one, the Hong Kong one, once they clarified it as not correct, it's actually dialed down on Facebook. So Facebook, when people share this piece of information, they will no longer reach people's newsfeed. That easily, you'll have to scroll two hours to see it. It's exactly like moving a piece of junk mail from your inbox to your spam box so that people by default don't look into it. But it's not a takedown. So if you look specifically for it, it's still there. Okay, and how big is like in general trolling a problem in Taiwan? Especially when it comes to China and foreign countries? Strolling, if you mean automatic or semi-automatic posting of messages to elicit negative emotion, to distract from public discussion. Then we have evidence, of course, there are hundreds of thousands of fake accounts. For example, on the Hong Kong protests alone, there's 200,000 fake accounts on Twitter designed to trove discussions and they're all semi-automated from the same block of computers within the PRC that doesn't need to bypass the great firewall. They're blessed by the great firewall to directly troll Twitter and Facebook and Google. And are there also such trolling forms and kinds of questions concerning Taiwan? I think so. I think there's just recently people discovered that there's a set of content forms that republishes in traditional Chinese language, script, whatever the simplified Chinese messages that's pushed out by the PRC or something kind of just instantly or even before they post in simplified Chinese. And so that's kind of an instant translation of the messages as pushed out. For example, this Hong Kong one, which is a good example because it's also posted on the way of the Chang'an sword, which is the official weight law of the Zhongyang-Zheng Huawei in the PRC. And so it's not merely spreading this in Taiwan, it's rather taking something of a kind of official propaganda and localize it in Cantonese and traditional Chinese and spread it in the social media. But is there something that it comes like to report like propaganda and we just really targeted, let's say, for the Taiwanese market by China? For the Taiwanese market. Yeah, like for the Taiwanese market. It's like, who would buy this? Maybe in a different sense of buying. Right, so as you can see, there are many pertaining early to Taiwan messages. Some of them are not disinformation, they're rather mold information. What's for you the difference between disinformation and mold information? So disinformation is untruth with the intention to do harm. And mold information is information spread with intention to do harm. They may or may not be true, but they are intended to be framed in a way to do harm. So, for example, there was a protest back in 2016, actually. And there was a kind of real video of that protest that is almost three years ago. But then there's a reframed message of such a protest as if it's happening right now. And what's like the message behind it? So it's trying to discredit the institutional media. The framing is, there was such a very loud protest in front of the residential office building, but the media turned a deaf and blind eye to it. So that was the framing. And did, for example, such kind of a message, did this get to the people or to the Taiwanese? Well, of course, it's only after it's shared by many people do they get flattered to the attention of the town fact-checking center. So they, of course, kind of by default, have to reach at least some volunteers, their flackers, for the town fact-checking center to get noticed. And, for example, the Hong Kong 160 and Shenzhen? When it's reported to the TFC. So it's maybe only within one hour. But while it's spreading, the TFC is in parallel doing its fact-checking work. So this comes like to this whole fact-checking work. How many cases are you people or like the people in the other ministry and dealing with the conflict in China and Taiwan? Is it like a lot or? Well, if you main China as in kind of the land, the territory that it currently governs, and there's many about, for example, this was about epidemic in, I think, rat. And there's also a kind of virus in pigs and so on. So there's some, of course, concerning to that area of their jurisdiction. But I would say it's not a majority because all what they want to do is to serve the sport. So a local topic actually makes more sense to do so. For example, this one is a disinformation about Dr. Tsai Ing-wen and a dialogue with a, allegedly, a small vendor from a kind of change the name from Li Keqiang to Tsai Ing-wen and we spread on social media. This was also one of the posts you already trended before? Yes, yes, trended before the TFC looked at it. Do you have an example of what's the post which trended the most? No, I don't. Maybe you can ask the TFC. Because it depends on how early they intervened. Because once they published this as a disinformation as false, it will stop the virality. The virality, as determined by Facebook, will be dialed down to less than one-tenth of the previous. So the earlier this fact check appears, the slower it will trend afterward. And so we could never predict what would happen if not for this fact check. But can one say that China is trying to interfere with the social media and Taiwan? Because maybe like the election, the general and the point of view of people? Well, we know for sure that they have these hundreds of thousand fake accounts. And some of them, of course, gets deleted by Twitter and published there. Metadata corroborated by Facebook and Google. And so just based on the fact that there were this amount of bots or fake accounts that are blessed by the firewall, I think it's safe to say that there are some still remaining, even though some of them get suspended. So is it a big problem or not so big a problem? It depends on who you're asking. To me, I think comparatively, it's less a big problem for this election than the previous one. Why? Because the previous election is also a referendum. And so there's many different places where you can so discord. Basically each and every referendum topic is one in which this information, more information can operate. But for this election, because we've decoupled the referendums with the presidential elections, so there's less room for this information to navigate. It's not to say that they're not serious. It's just to say the surface of this information is narrow. Do you have this? I don't have your question. If you want it, maybe not it on it. So in general, it is a problem of fake news and malinformation, disinformation from China. So what can you do against it? I think working with journalists is by far the best way and to revitalize people's participation in journalism. Because as I said, everybody is a YouTuber and livestreamer. So it's not just about media literacy, which is about readers' literacy or viewers' literacy, but about media competence, like when everybody is a media broadcaster. What kind of competence do they make to make sure that this kind of viral angry messages can spread but rather something that's more humorous, that's more to the point and so on, that may spread easily and that is the kind of competence education can play a large role. And also we see a lot of institutional media now working with us like social media, as well as a lot of participation from the volunteer group to voluntarily type in all the presidential candidates' public speech into transcripts, and then do a fact check to each and every part of what a presidential candidate has said. And just by participating in the process, it shows everyone how institutional media does fact checking so it's checking in journalism in China, which is why we always say disinformation in Taiwan is fake news because unfortunately in Taiwan news and journalism translate to the same word. And so there's no way to say fake news in Mandarin without offending journalists. What's that again? It's like the same word. Yeah, so news is Xing Wen and journalism is Xing Wenbongzuo. The Department of Journalism is Xing Wenxi and the journalist is Xing Wenbongzuo.  But journalism by definition is the opposition of fake because it's a process to determine reality, if not truth, but at least reality from different perspectives. And so by combining these two together, in Mandarin, it is a front to journalists also. And because my parents were both journalists out of video piety, I cannot say that. Okay, so it's information then. But disinformation Jia Xing Wen has no such problem because it pertains to the intentional harm by untruth. Of course a journalist would never do that. But so in the end, the main tool is fact checking. And the fact checking can be done hard by the government, can be done by the media, can be done by the people going to you. But also the product of fact checking need to be clarified in the sense that are humorous. That stands alone. Why has it to be humorous? So it's catchy? Yes, it's catchy that it can spread more than disinformation because joy spreads further than anger. But also if you feel a helplessness in the anger, humor turns it into joy and that blocks the psychological pathway that turns it into outrage. And so people actually have more mental capacity to look into the thing together rather than being in a very divisive mood. When the time on start is this whole... Humor sign.   Exactly, you can say it. It's one of those chivalrous words. It's like one year, two years ago or when the time on start? So I remember that I started proposing this idea I think early 2017. And that's when I outlined using my own experience in working to counter spam those almost 20 years ago. So I proposed that we keep it swift, open and structured. And the structure is a mimetic structure that is to say to make it humorous and it spreads faster. So that was the... an idea that I raised in the cabinet meeting that is gradually realized by spokespersons Shibuya and Nakulasu Daga in the past couple years. So it only took... also did you think like this has already changed a lot during the... I would say so, I would say so. Especially for this election because of the surface is more narrow. The referendums is out of the picture. I think a lot of disinformation necessarily then pertains the administrative functions. And so the clarification from the ministries play a larger role on this because the referendum agenda are said by the people. Often this disinformation pertaining a referendum, there's nothing a ministry can say. But presidential candidates are representative.  And so these are something that ministry have something to say. And so also the people already got more educated. And more aware that this is going on. So quite a fast process. Everything has a magic that it doesn't change so fast. People change so fast. I would also like to credit for example the Line media system where they have a dashboard that just showed the latest trending clarifications. And they arranged to work with many different fan checkers as well as the Executive Yuan, the administration. So that they give a section of their popular media called Line Today. And they can show how many, every day how many people flag messages as disinformation for fact checking. And how many people eventually got around to share or read the clarifications instead of the disinformation. So it shows kind of this pipeline. And I am grateful I think that online today if you can look at the top news it's below the gossiping and entertainment. But then it's the second section after the gossiping entertainment the clarifications for rumors. And because of that it's very funny. And then after that it's world news and social issue like everyday issues and online video and so on. But it's good that we're on the second section, the clarifications. I sometimes tell our ministerial colleagues that that's because we're not funny enough. That's why we're on the second section. If we're funny enough we will be above entertainment and gossip. Do you have an example of like the, it can be like from your ministry which really went trending because it was so funny? Okay, yes. I can show you a short video.  I'll show you a short video that I did. So like if you just talk about virality this video went somewhat viral. It has more than 140k views but it's also syndicated by various different thumb pages that all together bring it I think to more than one million views. And it's just a very simple thing. So I can show you first the original and then the remixes. I have seen like the, not this one, just the five minutes, five minute interview on DW. That's the five minute one. Yeah, right. So the first few sections went viral. Hong Kong has been protesting for democracy and against what they perceive as a growing influence by the mainland to the government from China. As an official from Taiwan, an island which Beijing considers a breakaway territory, how do you view these protests? The breakaway was at a neolithic age, I believe. So just after it went viral. Yeah. And then people started remixing and adding a lot of kind of rap coaching and things like that. Do you have an example of that? Yeah, the remix. I think the first remix was from Taiwan One Power basically just captioning and just highlighting that particular perspective. And that also went somewhat viral. And I think there's then a lot of Photoshop versions that started to come. And then the mainstream media took notice of it. And then it went viral again on mainstream media. And then let me show you the remix. And just go to one of my friends, V, and look it. It was a while ago. So you can see, for example, a Photoshop. I love this. I love his classes. And then it shows the fan page, the mimetic engineer that's responsible for it. And then, of course, then we can go into here and then look at how the Photoshop went. And then we'll see that people are actually then supplying the neolithic geographic information and explaining how exactly the plate pictonics use. So as I said, humor brings a curiosity in people. And creativity. And creativity. And people actually wanted to learn how to break away exactly what happened 8,500 years ago. And when it comes to this other platform, drawing the government and TW, as I understand, this is also an initiative. Yes, this one. What's the most popular topic nowadays in this platform? We don't have to guess. So from the petition part of it, there's, of course, also regulations and budgets. But the petition part, which is more popular, I guess, then you can search in it and you can easily sort it by the number of petitions. And then you can see all the historically trending ones or just the newer trending ones. In the newer trending ones, you will see that animal rights and animal welfare is by far the largest topic. For example, this one concerns larger dogs than, I guess, very large cats. And whether there are, frankly, transportation options in the Taiwan rail system for them. Why do you think... It's cute. It's cute. Not because Taiwanese have such a special relationship to cats and dogs.  That's our first family. That's our first family. You cannot corrupt them. It's very briefly by catnips, but you're directly corrupt. So Taiwanese have a really special relationship to cats and dogs. Yeah. Well, there's also a petition going on on companion birds in public transportation options. And also one on animal welfare, seeking alternatives to competitions by weight for pigs raised for ceremonial ritual purposes. And so animal welfare, I would say, is by far the largest. And there's also many ones concerning the rights to excess nature. For example, this one is about amateur fishing in the harbors. And there's also a similar topic that people participated on mountaineering and hiking, because previously these were forbidden. The sea and the mountains were forbidden for ordinary people to access without permit, because it's a martial law legacy. Maybe the mountains are dangerous because people at that time thought maybe we're a real warfare going on if you allow too many people to access the deeper mountains and so on, which is no longer a problem now. And so we're systemically using the joint platform to engage people, relaxing the rules and increasing the self-regulation of mountaineering and amateur fishing and all the sea activities and mountaineering activities. And how successful and how successful is that initiative? Previous and successful. You know how it affected policy change? Yeah. So of all the cases that we work with directly, almost 60 cases now, half of which resulted in decisive regulatory policy change. The other half get maybe something different, but I would say not necessarily worse. For example, there was one petition, wow, nice number, 8,000 people strong that says Taiwan should change the time 72 GMT plus now. For some reason. And then there's an equally strong petition. Also 8,000 people strong. That says we should remain GMT plus 8 without changing to GMT plus 9. So obviously you cannot please those petition subjects. For example, also if it comes to China, I have several petitions. For example, once we're saying we want a department against China like influence on the joint platform. I haven't seen that. This one? Do you have a key word or something that I can search for? Because it needs 5,000 petitions for it to raise to our monthly meeting of participation officers. Are all they happen? Why just them, I think, those are the ones which happens? Yeah, it's the Star Flag. Yes. So yeah, that's a really good one because you can see how the Ministry of Justice answered it. I think this one is the flag and this one was something else. Classical. Text. Ah, I know. So yeah, the flag one is actually very very nice because we actually changed the regulations around the petitions because of this. When in its first incarnation you can see the response from the Ministry of Justice. That says this according to the constitutional ruling, a number of 3 to 8, the constitutional definition of the original territory is a a political question of the most serious level. And so it is outside the judicial branch and indeed the Ministry of Justice should not be done by the court or indeed the Ministry of Justice to make such a decision. And so they basically said that this is something that concerns a presidential and exclusively presidential purview and it's outside of the administration, the Ministries to tackle it. And right after that, this is I think the one that you are referring to, and right after that we changed the regulation, saying that the petition must pertain only to the Ministry of Functions within the administration. So saying that issues pertain to diplomacy to defence that are specifically presidential purviews is not for the joint platforms administrative section to deal with. How do I have it? So this is the administration and this is the National Auditing Office and this is the CDC's Yeah, sure, sure. We just tied in here. You know, I think as much because one of them do you remember we had like, we looked for people and suggested they want to have like a ministry about this information This one? Yes. So again, it's rejected because it is the presidential purview. It's because of this Yeah, there's a clause. There's a clause. Right, so basically we look systemically at what is the presidential purview that the administration should not touch because those are political questions pertaining to the President and we said that it is basically issues pertaining to the Chinese continent issues pertaining to foreign affairs issues pertaining to national defence and these are the things that you can buy to the President about but it is beyond the ministers to respond and because a minister cannot respond and the opposition calls for ministerial response so it is falling outside of the ministry of the administration of the joint platform I suggest because it's already 9.50 when we start with the shooting of the screens. The last answer I think Yeah, I can say it again I think because the reason we have it already before when he explained it about the flag scene. Yeah, it's the same answer. Just before or true before If you think it's important then just be careful to do it again because in the end I was more focusing on your hands. How can I frame it then? Not every question not every petition will be subject to this 5.000 signature collecting. For example, we have one people who want to have a new ministry or department against the China interference for example this wasn't approved. But after the original petition about the flag we took a systemic view as what are the presidential reviews for political questions and these are issues concerning the Chinese continent foreign policy as well as national defense. And because these are by constitution something that the president have to say but neither the ministers nor the administration have to say about our petition system basically demand early responses from ministers so we've changed the regulation pertaining to the petition says if we propose something that is outside of the purview of the administration then we would not enter the collection stage of the petition. We're back. Let's start with perhaps the screens of the joint government and I hope I can decipher my opinion. It was really good. The very first one already with the this is like the the original one the one from 2017. And like the important thing is that it's a response. It's a political question. So here is where it sites the constitutional courts ruling saying that this is a major political question and according to the separation of powers constitutional idea the branches are not in line to answer this directly. Neither the judicial branch can determine a political question directly nor should the ministry of justice do so. And then to the top again to the top again where you see the proposal. Okay, here is the proposal. Or like way up so we only have like the title. Okay. Or just like this, maybe here. And so we change the regulation shortly after that. Okay, and then let's go to the hair picture. Oh yeah, the hair picture. So I'll this one as well, maybe. The protest video. The protest video. Could you even start it? Hmm. Well, I can search for it. No, that's fine. Yeah, but you can search for it too. No, if we did not see it before. But it's fact-shared response. Okay. Well, I can show you more details. But these are the same. Just remixed in various different. Yeah, it's fine. I really want to show that. Okay. Like the hair? Yes, the hair thing. So maybe it's good if I just move over again. Okay. And then we switch to pictures. You can see the clarification cards. Can you? These are the two clarification pictures. One from our premier and one from our deputy premier. And so this is our deputy premier getting a haircut. So maybe they were trying like different ways of tackling this. But I think this one went more viral because as you can see, this is on the top of the search result. And just... Focus on this one. And I can also show the English translation. If that works. Okay. As I said, this is the English translation. But I didn't translate this part. Where it says if you premier hair, you would damage your hair. Okay. That's the point. That's the point, yes. Also the Hong Kong? The Hong Kong. What would you like from the Hong Kong one? We have like the example of the 20,000 to 2000. Yes, yes. So let me just search for one. Yeah, there's quite a few Hong Kong ones in the tele-effect check center. Very interesting. Yes, so that was the picture. This is the picture again? Okay. So that you don't see it and then back to the picture? Okay. So also another picture. Back to the picture. What do I have on my list? I have your quotes. So just from the very beginning like this is not true and then it shows the picture and then it shows the source of the picture and then it shows the kind of false flag comic of this supposedly call for suicides. But then it's written in Cantonese that are not really white and spelled also incorrectly on the screen. Okay. And when you actually join the group you'll see that it's mostly spun. So somebody probably trolled. Okay. You know, then you have the poems. You know the poems? Yes. The first one. So I'll just go through it. Maybe it's easier for the camera. Everything I can. When we see the internet of things let's make it the internet of beings. When we see virtual reality let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience let's make it about human experience. And whenever we see that its singularity may be new that it's always remembered. That's the reality. This is what we talked about yesterday. Yeah. But this is new. I just wrote yesterday. That's for us? Yeah. It's actually for you because I was thinking about Switzerland actually and how this transcultural Republic of Citizens is a pretty good description of people from coming together by direct democracy. The back. Maybe I say it. Yes. World in Ocean beautiful islands a transcultural Republic of Citizens or maybe in Mandarin. How long did you think about this poem? All day yesterday. The first eight words are commonplace like everybody in Taiwan above my age or even a bit under my age learns it from I think it's high school textbook because it's part of the the forward of the Taiwan history. So it talks about it. And so what I really did yesterday was just through those eight characters. So literally Republic of Citizens between flowers. I think we have all and also I would like to have if you could like also film a few life of her gadgets.  Of course the metrics we is at our notes. So are we on time? Yeah we are on time.


The role of external actors in peace building and post-conflict state building has been a subject of much debate. How effective is the current international peace building architecture? How can development policy be better used to help countries recovering from wars? The United Nations has been one of the major organisations to have peace operation around the world. The role is to try either to stop a conflict or to maintain a ceasefire. You need large deployment of troops in different locations of the country with a mandate to actually not just observe but also be able to enforce the resolution of the United Nations. In the public discourse the United Nations in terms of peace operation seems a waste of money, seems that are ineffective. Actually UN peace operation are cost effective and they stop the fighting. The lessons on sustainable peace actually are harder because one thing is to stop the fighting, the other thing is building the peace in a long lasting way. Countries emerging from conflict need aid, they need technical support, they need knowledge but ultimately is about understanding what the citizens of the countries want, are willing to fight for and need and sometimes those wishes are not aligned with external views or the aims and purposes of international donors and international assistants. We can't just think of putting institutions in place, expecting them to work in the same way in every context. We need to craft the institutions to fit the cultural context. There is a role for external intervention but that role is to support autonomous state building and internal processes rather than impose views that may not matter for people that at the end of the day are just trying to survive and rebuild their countries.


More and more Super Famicom games that never left Japan are getting English translation patches these days and thanks to hardworking folks like Optorock, Super Famicom Wars can now be played in English. That's right, it's the ancestor of the Advance Wars series that gained popularity on Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. The series actually started all the way back on the Famicom before getting two more releases on Game Boy in Japan and later on the Sateleview peripheral before finally getting a full cartridge release in 1998. So Super Famicom Wars is actually the fourth game in the series. In case you're unfamiliar, the Wars series is military style turn based tactics and strategy with some role playing game elements like experience points occasionally thrown in there as well, but it's mostly tactical maneuvering and planning. If you've played Advance Wars, you'll be right at home with this game since the gameplay basics are mostly the same. You control an army with the goal of course being to destroy every enemy or capture their headquarters and there's four countries to choose from. There's Yellow Comet, Green Earth, Red Star and Blue Moon, not to be confused with the beer. You choose between seven commanding officers and go up against other commanders and they more or less act like difficulty settings. There's Mr. Yamamoto, Billy Gates, Vaan Rosso, Caroline, Juan the Delta, Rogensky and ...Hetler? Really? So yeah, you can play as or against friggin' Hitler. Three of these officers have special abilities so to speak. Caroline, it increases your luck stat, Billy Gates gets 10,000 extra gold every turn and Mr. Yamamoto's army all starts at level 2. Everyone else has playable characters is just an avatar more or less, but as opponents they all differ in how they fight you. There is no story mode or campaign mode in Super Famicom Wars for better or for worse.  However, this game is two player and four player compatible which is a nice bonus but I'm honestly not sure if you actually need the four player adapter or if it's the case where you're just passing the same controller back and forth since it's turn based. I would guess it's the latter. Still, it's a really cool option to have since it allows you to set up teams or just have it be a free for all. Anyway, the gameplay functions on a grid based map. You just move your cursor over a building until you see the wrench icon. Press A and create a unit and to create a unit you need money. You typically start out with something like 7,000 gold and more gold is generated each turn depending on how many buildings you have under your control. So you're going to want more money so you can start creating bigger fancier stuff for your army. So the next step is to capture neutral and enemy buildings. Only infantry and mechs can do that but the problem is they're pretty weak so you gotta devise a plan and strategize how you're going to protect them while navigating the map and increasing your resources. And Super Famicom Wars does a decent enough job giving you enough options to make it interesting. Granted, what's here is obviously limited compared to later games which is going to be a deal breaker for some people but there's still a good amount of depth to dig into here. It reminds me of playing SimCity for Super Nintendo as opposed to playing, say, SimCity 4 for PC. You can eventually get tanks, battleships, missile launchers, all that good stuff as well as artillery trains that feature a wide range of movement and pack a huge punch while transporting up to two ground units at once. And there's also what's called a proto tank or a neo tank which can only be obtained by capturing a neutral laboratory. The battle structure here is similar to the other games in the series. It takes one day to create the unit. Then the next day you can move them around depending on the terrain in front of you. Then you provide maintenance for fuel and ammo, and you're rewarded for protecting your units because they have the ability to level up after a while. But bear in mind, when you attack in this game, you don't get first strike unlike later games in the series. The units always attack at the same time, so you can't be too aggressive. There's certain game options you can turn on and off here like Fog of War, for instance. That option hides units outside your vision range so you gotta send out recon units to go scout so you know where the enemy is. There's 15 brand new maps here, 15 classic maps from previous games, and 10 foreplayer maps. And you might recognize some of them since they were used in later games like Dear Harbor and Royal Channel, which both show up in Advance Wars Days of Ruin. But the maps bring me to the biggest flaw in Super Famicom Wars. Sure, the functionality and gameplay is fine, but the map design is limited and lacking in a lot of areas. That's where the game shows its age the most, since a lot of maps are really time consuming and take forever to do even the most simple navigation. Other than that, Super Famicom Wars is a perfectly good game for what it is.  Oh, and big time kudos to Optorock for this translation. It is really well done and extremely player friendly. If there's anything in the game you don't understand, the game, and by proxy the translation, does a great job of explaining. But the game itself is a bit of an oddity because it's one of those cases where it's just a little weird to go backwards in a series that's, um, advanced, as much as it has in the 20 years since. Some people are going to be driven baddie by the sheer number of animations you have to sit through over and over and over. And yeah, the map design still needed a lot of work at this point, but still, this is a fun game that still holds up reasonably well today, especially against a second player. And I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.