Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us on the third and as yet final social network analysis webinar by the UK data service I'm German McDonald a research associate here at the University of Manchester with the data service and thanks very much again today, we're going to focus on Some of the core techniques and methods of analysis and measures that we can apply to social network data So some of you have probably joined us before and thank you very much You'll have noticed we've been running these series of training events Which are part of what we've been calling our new forms of data training series This is probably more accurately described as our computational social science training series So currently we've got one more coding demonstration. So this is this a live Demonstration of how to do text mining in Python. So tomorrow afternoon. We've got the final session with my colleague Julia Kazmaier tomorrow We've got some past webinars that you can view the recording and use all of the other training materials that we provide also So we have the previous two social network analysis webinars and some of Julia's previous text mining webinars also But if you go to the UK data service Events page you can look at the past events and you can gain access to all of those training resources for free But today we're going to focus on Probably what we're all most interested in when it comes to any form of social inquiry the analysis So very quickly for just two or three minutes. We'll do a refresher of what we mean by social network analysis Just so we're all on the same page when we start implementing some of the methods and measures through a live coding demonstration Shortly, so we focus on analyzing social network data So we're not going to focus on analyzing social media Data, even though that data is itself structured as a network And but the techniques and the measures we cover can be applied to any data set that captures the connections or the relational Attributes of a group of people a group of organizations or any set of units of analysis And we look at the analysis from two perspectives We look at describing the network overall so that what network is formed by entities and the connections and That network has properties and can we measure some of those properties some obvious ones would include the You know size of the network, you know, how many connections exist and plus we look at some more intermediate level analysis also We can also approach it from the perspective of the nodes So the nodes are the entities that exist in a network and we can look at the describing the nodes that form Our network so we can look at how central how important some nodes are We can look at whether no nodes play particular roles whether some are brokers some act as hubs within the network Whether some nodes are positioned closer and you know occupy a strategic position in the network Also, so that'll all form a kind of live coding demonstration where we can take our time working through the measures And I'll show you how you can implement those measures using Python and a social network analysis package in that language And then we'll come out. We'll take some some questions and I'll point you again to some further learning and resources I'll address this more at the end But while this is the final webinar in our social network analysis Web in our series that doesn't mean it's the end of our training provision when it comes to social network analysis So at the end if you have some questions and when we send you the feedback form It would be good if you could say, you know, what further training you would like to see whether it's relating to social network analysis Or the Python programming language, or maybe you want to see the same material But converted into the or programming language, for example So please be as honest and as forthright as you want at the end. I will do our best to develop some new training materials So very quickly why this training series if you're here for the previous two, you know Why we're doing this training series social network analysis, you know offers a lot of potential to social researchers It's incredibly rich and methodological approach and a lot of our Online lives especially, but even some of our offline lives are really characterized by our relationships and the patterns That these relationships form at an aggregate level The problem is social network analysis Derives itself from graph theory, which is a branch of mathematics Which itself informed network theory, which then informed social network analysis and theory Therefore what it means is social network analysis is quite a technical and mathematical and abstract Approach methodological approach. So while it has a lot of concepts that do map It's a sociological Phenomena and concepts of interest the language used is very technical. It can be very off-putting So our intention with this training series is to demystify and to clarify some of these technical terms and algorithms So a very quick refresher on what we mean by social network analysis So as I alluded to it's a methodological and a conceptual Toolbox, so it's a very broad and rich methodological approach and it allows you to measure and to describe and to analyze patterns in relational structures in The social world in essence people form connections those connections then aggregate up and form networks that we can analyze And of course, it's not just people so despite the name social network analysis You may be interested in how organizations and are connected I've seen some really good studies that we'll reference later that looked at animal networks food sharing networks among jack-tall crows for example as a really and Very instructive surprisingly instructive example of social network and analysis So this allows us to measure and describe and analyze Connections and patterns in the social world A relation itself is a distinctive type of connection or tie that exists between two entities We're probably all thankfully familiar with familial connections siblings share a familial connection parents and children cousins uncles and aunts Etc. But of course we can be connected in so many other ways. We can be colleagues. We can be gym buddies. We can be You know flatmates we can be spouses and Whatever else you can think of really with your imagination So relation is just a distinctive type of connection that forms between two entities and Thus those relations become the building blocks and of networks So a network really is an aggregation of all those patterns of connections to form some sort of overall coherent network and social network analysis thus is concerned with and most appropriate and For data that captures these relations between units of analysis So we can in previous webinars. We looked at, you know, Twitter data, which you know, by default And is structured as network data by that. I mean tweets are liked by different people tweets are shared by other people And I can follow other people's accounts on Twitter So, you know the very nature of the interactions on the Twitter platform give rise to network data But as we'll see in this example today and previous examples, I showed you and Traditional data administrative data social survey data will contain information on how units of analysis are connected And we can restructure that data so that it looks like a network and then we can analyze it using social network and Analysis again, that's best demonstrated which we'll do so in a couple of moments So to keep these kind of key terms and concepts in your head as we progress and a network is constructed from two main building blocks So there are the entities that are or could be connected in a network So these are the people the organizations the animals the countries the places and whoever the units of analysis are in your study and The connections that exist or could exist between these entities on a very Simple way and we can describe networks using two building blocks And a network then is an aggregation or a collection of these entities and the connections that are formed between them Very simple example a family tree is the type of network It contains individuals who are our entities and these individuals are related through some type of familial Tie so some type of connection This is a real social network that we looked at in the first webinar It's from my own research area of charitable organizations And these are Manchester based Charities and these are all the connections that exist Between them so I won't go into we won't be analyzing this network in particular But something reasonably similar to do with charities and But visualization is an insufficient, but it's it's an interesting first step in the analysis So just by even looking at this we can see that there's a central cluster or Aggregation of charities that are densely connected and then we have some on the outside who only have one or two connections to other organizations So let's get stuck straight into some of the analysis So what we have here is if you've joined us before something called a Jupiter notebook a Jupiter notebook is basically It's like a word document if you want to think of it that way But the document can contain more than just the narrative It contains code and it contains the output associated and with some code also And I find them quite a useful computational tool So for a lot of my research I use stata the You know social science statistical software package and you can you know have a Jupiter notebook which contains stata code You can have a Jupiter notebook as we'll see today, which contains a Python code It can contain our code Julia and there's lots of other Languages and but that's just so you have a little bit of context of what we're going to do today So the first thing we need to do to set up You know our notebook and Python for our analysis is we need to load in the packages that we need So I won't go through this but at a later date if you'd like we can have a coding demonstration Where we actually go through the meaning of each of these lines But in general what I'm doing is I'm just loading in all the different methods and functions that I need to analyze network data So I'll do that so I'll load in all the packages that I need and I will load in the data that I need so here's an example of some Funding organizations in the UK and the network that forms between them So here on the X are the Rows here we have different organizations So these will be individual funders So one of these will be children in need for example There'll be the Lloyd's TSB foundation So the banking organization has a foundation that provides funding to charitable organizations The big lottery will be one of these funders Etc. We have the same set of organizations Along the top here as a column and then basically each cell in this data set indicates whether these funders are connected to each other So for example this funder here and this funder here and Both fund the same for organizations So each funder might fund a couple of hundred of organizations each But there are four in particular that they both provided funding to The same organization here has funded thirty five of the same charities as this funder here for example We'll dip into the data a bit more when we produce the analysis I just wanted to give you a little bit of a sense of What the data entails and this is open data. So the underlying data set From which I created this network data is available on the GitHub repository, which I'll show you in a moment And so you could recreate this analysis yourself and or you could extend it and do do what you like with it But basically this data set contains all of the organizations funded by about 83 different funders in response to COVID-19 So there's lots of charitable organizations in the UK who thanks to the public health emergency Have been targeted with funding by these 83 funders and these funders are connected if they fund at least one of the same Organizations so there's at least one organization in common that they've both provided funding to So what we do is we load in that data into Python into the networks and Network analysis package and the first simple thing we want to do before we dive into Specific measures and methods of analysis is we just want to get a sense of The number of nodes in the network i.e. the number of funders And we want a sense of the number of edges i.e. the number of connections or ties in the network So we can run the code here Previous results and where they are already as you could see so we have a network containing 83 nodes And there are 640 connections between these nodes And on average and a funder is connected to about 15 other funder organizations So that seems like quite a lot But when you consider that there are 83 funders and there's about 10 or 11,000 different organizations That have been funded there's going to be some overlap between who they funded So that you can see that already just from such simple measures we can get a sense of well Either all of these funders have 15 Connections or there's maybe a couple of funders who are connected to lots of others And then there's a larger number of funders who don't have any connections At all and we're going to explore that as we progress through the analysis So let's first look at the network level measures So what kind of properties does our network of funders have and how can we analyze and describe these properties? The first thing we'll do is we'll just get a quick, you know overview of what the network looks like So we'll produce a network visualization You may have heard these referred to as sociograms in social network analysis Or just network visualizations or network graphs and there's lots of different terms for them Make that a little bit smaller Excellent, so the first thing we can do is we can say we want, you know a random layout of this network So here's how it looks like so we can see that all of these circles Our dots represent the nodes in the network and the lines represent the edges or the connections between these nodes so visualizing is Often a an insufficient and it's often unnecessary frankly when it comes to analyzing networks But you can produce one at the exploratory stage and we can still learn a couple of a couple of interesting things So for example, we can see that there are at least one two Three funders who have no connections whatsoever in the network. You can see that there are no lines coming to or from Three of these nodes so far So at least that tells us okay There are some funders who didn't fund the same organizations as any of the other funders in the network So we would call these isolates. So these are isolated nodes We can also get a sense that there are a couple of nodes who are really Densely connected so we can see lots of lines going in all sorts of directions from this node and here And we can see that there are some that have been positioned on the periphery of the network Which have one two three? Yeah, maybe three or four connections as well So we can see when we had our average measure previously of 15 connections between For each individual funder. We can see that that's you know Quite heavily skewed by a small number of organizations who have lots of connections And a much larger group of organizations who have very few or none no connections at all To highlight why visualization can act can be quite unrevealing and unnecessary is this is the exact same network Just vision just represented using a different Algorithm so the previous one was what's known as a random layout and in the networks Python package We can say we want a spring layout and you can see that this again shows us some of the isolates And we know the scaling is quite off is quite difficult to you know to distinguish what's going on in this clump here We can use what's called the Kamada kawaii layout as well to look at the network This seems like somewhat of an improvement over the random layout But again, it's it's not telling us very much that we didn't already know and there are four or five if not more And visualization Algorithms that you can use in the networks package. So hopefully that conveys just how Unrevealing visualizing so I'm sure we've all seen some excellent And you know infographics containing network visualizations and they can be quite good as public communication tools But for the hard graft of understanding the properties of a network and visualization is really insufficient And is really unnecessary in lots of cases So the first bit of analysis we want to do is get a sense of the size of the network and we saw some of these figures already Figure so we can get the same information again, we can get the basic information Our network has 83 nodes 640 edges or connections and on average a funder is connected to 15 other funder organizations But that's just a really basic stepping stone to more interesting measures of analysis So the next thing we're going to look at is what's called the degree distribution So this basically shows a histogram Of all the different connections in the network So as I said, we can clearly see that some funders had lots of connections, you know dozens of connections Some funders had none and a lot of funders had you know two or three or four or five Different connections so we can plot the degree distribution which gives us a sense of the Distribution of degrees in the network, so it's called degree what that basically means is connections or ties or edges It's just a different word for it So we can see here in our visualization that a very Well, let's say we'll start on this end so a very small number of funders so about two or three funders Have between 50 and 60 connections So they're very very small number of funders in our network and who are intensely or very, you know Considerably connected to other organizations, but typically what we see is you know the vast majority of funders have you know fewer than 20 Connections and that's still a lot. I think for a real world, you know social network to have so many ties or connections in the network and but again, you can see that they're about, you know, 26 27 Organizations who have you know one connection? So again, we can see that you know the distribution is heavily skewed Very small number have a lot of connections and most have you know reasonably few connections We can get a sense then of how many isolates or how many nodes that have no connections exist in the network By calling on the number of isolates and methods in the networks package So there are eight so there are eight funders in the network who are not connected to anybody else So that leaves us with 75 funders who share some connections between each other The next thing we want to look at in terms of the network is its density So what we're doing here is we know how many connections exist in total. There's 600 and something connections We've then looked at how those connections are distributed a very small number have lots of connections most have you know Few or none no connections Now we want to take that information and produce a summary statistic known as the density of the network So the question we're asking here is how cohesive or how dense is this network? Put another way how many of the possible connections that could exist in this network have actually been realized So there's lots of nodes these nodes could all be connected to each other It could be a fully, you know saturated network where every funder is connected to every other funder That's unrealistic. So we want a sense of compared to that picture How many connections did we actually see? realized So again, the networks package is very concise. This is really good. It's a good feature of this Python package We just call on the density function and it gives us our summary statistic So we can see that the network density statistic gives us a figure of point one nine if we round up to two decimal places We can interpret that as about 19% of all possible connections that could be formed in the network have actually been Realized and again, you'll probably agree with me that that's quite a lot for what some real-world data so funders this gives an idea of the fact that What's probably happening is funders are deliberately targeting the same organizations and again that makes sense It's a COVID-19 response fund It's a program to support certain organizations So we would expect to see some overlaps of multiple funders and providing grants to the same organization So again density is a really good overall summary It tells us of all of all the possible connections that could exist and how many have actually come to pass Taking the same, you know information again, what we want to do is have a look at how Clustered the network is so we know there's lots of connections and we know what proportion of those connections Have actually been realized and now we want to get a sense of To what extent our nodes in the network clustered together. So put another way what we wanted to say is Do we see groups of funders coming together? So is our network characterized by you know Pairs of funders, you know connecting to each other, but there's never more than two funders connected Okay, so we don't see any triangles or quad triangles or anything like that and if a connection is this it's between two funders And that's as far as it goes So we can get a sense of how clustered the network is using something called the transitivity measure So to give you a sense of what we mean by transitivity And as I said previously your network could be characterized by you know, lots of connections between pairs of nodes So here we have a kind of a fictional example here We have three nodes and we can see that two connections exist between these three nodes But what's missing is a connection between these two here So if that connection was realized we would see what's known as a triad in the network So a trio of nodes and who are all connected to each other So the clustering measure that we're going to Produce just now gives us a sense of the probability That when we see this situation here That this happens next so if two if there's a group of funders and there's connections between some of them What's the probability that they then say oh actually there's one connection missing let's form that connection So that's what our transitivity measure gives us Because it's an idea of how clustered are the probability of groups forming and in our network and it specifically Relates to triads so groups of three nodes What's the probability of closing you know of forming a triangle of closing those connections? So you can see our transitivity measure and our clustering measure is quite high It's a point four nine if we round it again What this means is forty nine percent of possible triads have been realized I'll just go back again So when we see this situation here Forty nine percent of the time This is what happened so essentially half of the time we see triangles formed and when we have this situation Just here so again, that's that's that's quite high and but as I said previously This is quite a targeted package of support and again, you know if two funders are supporting an organization There's a reasonable likelihood that the third one and would also come in and also support that organization So we can see already that our network is you know, it's quite you know dense. There's You know a lot of organizations are getting funding from the same funders. It's quite an interesting real-world network so far So the next thing we want to do now is if we think back to our visualization of the network We could kind of get a sense of you know, if you were to journey from one side of it to the other How far is that? journey So how many you know, how long would it take you essentially to go from the left-hand side of the network to the right-hand side? Or from the top to the bottom and it's not really important how we orientate ourselves with that It's just more important to think you know, how many steps does it take to go from one side of the network to the other? So diameter just like in Mathematics, it's you know, it's what's the what's the length of the network from one end to the other? So we can try and calculate the diameter measure For our funder network and if we do that in this case you can see we get an error term So what happens here is if we want to say well, how far is it from a node on the left-hand side to a node on the furthest right-hand side? The problem arises if we have isolates in the network and we've seen that we have eight So in graph theory It's just impossible to calculate how far a node is that's isolated from a node that's connected on the left-hand side Because if a node doesn't have a connection to another There's no way of getting to that other node. It's infinite the distance and that exists between them So we need a little bit of a workaround when we calculate the diameter of a network. We need to do something Which is basically breaking our network down into a component and I'll explain what a component is Just immediately following this measure. But now that we have a Component in our network now we can calculate the diameter And the figure we get back is four So what this captures is there's basically Four steps and on the longest journey in the network. So from one end to the other it takes four steps So basically that's four connections between a node situated on the outer Extreme of the network to a node at the opposite Outer extreme of the network and that's relatively few Okay, so if I'm a node at one end and I want to you know get information to a funder Who's over the other end of the network? It's going to take me four steps Basically, it's going to take me four other funders to go through to pass the message On so when you think of diameter and we're going to look at this in a little bit more detail in a moment You know think of six degrees of separation, you know, how far apart our nodes in the network I'm basically the furthest distance in the network. So this is the diameter is four So that's the basically the longest journey it takes to go from one node to the other So I just mentioned components in the network when we were measuring the diameter a Component basically is a subset of the network So it's a subset of nodes and it's a particular subset where every node is connected to every other Now this is either directly or indirectly and we'll see how that looks in just a moment Networks in the real world tend to have more than one component. So basically there's There's a handful if not more Of kind of subgroups within your within your network who are all connected to each other the key point with a component is By definition, it cannot be connected to any other component Because remember it's a situation that arises when that all of the nodes are connected to all of the other nodes in a component By definition that means they can't be connected to any other nodes in a different component So these are kind of subgroups that have no interaction So if a network has five components those five components are distinct and there's no connection Direct or indirect between those components. They're kind of like islands if you want to think of it that way So let's explore how many network and components there are in our funding network So we see that there are nine Different components in our funders and network But this is actually a bit misleading So this is a little thing you need to watch when you use the networks package in Python Isolates are counted as components when you calculate this measure here So as we saw previously an isolate is a node with with no connections So basically Python treats that isolate as a component, you know itself This would make sense in the small number of situations where a node, you know and Can be connected to itself. So there's something called a self loop in a network. That's where I'm connected to myself Somehow and I can't think of an example right off the top of my head, but well, if we think of Twitter if you're familiar with Twitter and You can retweet and you can like your own tweets So actually that's an example of a connection to yourself. So you can republish or repost something you've previously Written and if you do that that obviously makes sense then to say that you're your own distinct component But in many other situations, it doesn't really make sense to say well, I'm connected to myself. Therefore I form a component We can confirm what I've what my suspicion was that really what we have is one large component and and eight isolates and you can see here what I've done is I've taken out all of the components in my graph and I've converted them into networks themselves and I printed the same information and and as you can see There are nine components But all of them bar one Identified the isolates. So basically in my network, I have one large component where everybody's connected to everyone else and the exception are The eight that have no connections to anybody else So if you want we can visualize the largest component obviously it looks very much like the overall network Except this time you can see there's no isolates. So there's no dot on its own Without any lines going to it. Those have been removed and this is the this is essentially the network So if you were not interested in any of the isolates and this is really in the network We've got 75 funders and the you know, 600 and something connections and that exists So why it's important to identify components, this is not really an academic It's actually crucial as we've seen a lot of the network analysis measures and can only be calculated Using components because as I said, you know, it makes no sense to say What's the distance between an isolated node and one that's connected, you know over the other side? you know, it's just It's infinity the distance between a non-connected node and another and there's lots of other measures as well Particularly if you want to make comparisons between networks Usually those comparisons are made between the largest components in each network also Continuing with our theme of breaking our network down into sub groups And there's a term which you're probably familiar with in every day and language, which is a clique So a clique is very similar to a component in that it represents a subset of the network And so ie it's where every node is connected to every other But the crucial difference compared to a component is that all of these nodes and Share direct ties so each node has a direct link to every other node in the clique While as we saw with the components everybody is connected, but you know, there's not the same number of connections So we can see that this node is connected to this node But only by going an indirect route, you know to hear first somewhere here here here and then you know It has to make a journey. It's indirectly connected Clique on the other hand would mean that there has to be a direct connection for between these two For them to be part of a clique So again similar to what we did with components we can say right Tell me the number of cliques that exist in the network and there's quite a number So there's 251 which is quite a lot, but a clique, you know has a very low Barrier to entry, you know two or three nodes on their own if they were all connected like as we saw in a triangle Well, that's a clique. So every node is connected to every other in the triad. So that's an example Really what a clique is, you know, we want to look We want to look at larger groups of nodes. So are there groups of 10 12 15 funders who are all connected to each other So they all fund the same organizations So what we'll do is we'll now pick out the largest clique just like we did for the largest component and And we'll take a look at its summary statistics. So the largest clique So the largest subset of connected nodes in the network. There are 12 and there are 66 connections and the average number of connections is 11 and in this case because it's a clique that means that each of those 12 nodes has 11 connections Not that it's an average and it's skewed by some having a lot of connections and some having none By definition, it wouldn't be a clique unless they were all connected to each other And I think this is better conveyed, you know, visually and So as you can see compared to a component every single node in the clique is connected to every single other So there's basically 11 lines going from every single node to each of the others in the clique And obviously then using the concept of the clique We can start talking about, you know, that there are certain subgroups in the network, and you know who are You know a lot more densely connected. We can say then that that's conditions for, you know Very efficient information sharing or we can say that, you know, that forms a very coherent subgroup You know, or maybe that's a Homogenous group of funders. Maybe these 12 funders all target, you know, the relief of poverty or something You know, there must be some You know, connection linking them, of course It could just be as well random chance that we see cliques like this in the network also So we need to keep that in mind as well So that's a run-through of some of the most common, you know, kind of basic and intermediate Network level measures. What if we now focus on the nodes themselves? So we have funders in the network. Can we describe, you know, their properties as they exist in the network? So how connected are individual funders in the network? And we can look at some other Measures as well of, you know, how far apart our, you know Individual funders are some, you know, really close to most others or some on the outskirts of the network as well So what we want to talk about first is this idea of, you know, centrality So, you know, you can interpret this, you know, in a geographic, you know, sensor and in terms of geometry, you know There's a center point in the network, you know There's a funder who acts as a hub who's connected to the vast majority of other funders in the network Maybe some nodes act as hubs or brokers, you know Facilitating relationships between other funders in the network, etc So it's a measure of how important a node is in a network and there's different ways of measuring centrality We're going to look at three different measures So I gave one example, a node may act as a hub, so lots of connections run into that individual node Some nodes act as brokers, so some funders sit in between the relationships of other funders I will see how that looks visually as well And some nodes may just be Proximate or positioned very closely to most other nodes And being central in a network usually confers a lot of advantages to a given node So there's different measures of centrality, so we're going to look at three just now So the first we're going to look at is degree centrality I remember that when we say degree, we're talking about the number of ties or the number of connections In the network overall, but now that we're talking about nodes, we're talking about the individual number of ties per node So for a given funder, you know, does it have one or ten or sixty connections, for example And degree centrality is a measure of how popular or how well connected a node is in the network And it's usually standardised as well Because if you had a network where there were, you know, thousands of nodes and an individual node, you know Had a hundred connections, you could say, right, well, that's quite important But if you're, excuse me, if your network only had a hundred and ten nodes and a given node had a hundred Connections, clearly that one is more central or important Than a node in a different network with the same number of ties, for example We don't need to worry too much about that, just realise that, you know There's some standardisation or normalisation applied to a lot of these measures So what we do with our Python code is we basically, you know, we capture the number of connections per funder Then we sort them and I just ask, you know, Python to print the top 20 So here are the top 20 funders by the number of connections they have This is the official ID of the National Lottery Community Fund So this funder has connections to 61 of the other 82 funders in the network So this is an incredibly well connected funding organisation The second might be children in need, I'm not quite sure You could look all these up yourself, the original data set, as I said, is in the data folder In the repository, which I'll show you in a moment So here we get a sense of who is the most important node in the network Well, if we use our degree centrality calculation We can see that it is the National Lottery Community Fund But as you've noticed, this is the raw measure of the number of degrees Degree centrality, as I said, is normalised, it's calculated a little bit differently But we still get the same ordering of results So the degree centrality measure here is 0.74 So again, the best connected or the most important or the most popular node in the network Is this one here, which again is the National Lottery Community Fund And conceptually, the best connected nodes in the network can be considered as hubs So you can consider them as the most popular But you can also consider them as hubs where a vast number of the connections run in or run through a given node There's a different measure of centrality which we alluded to recently Which was this idea of brokerage in the network So this is the idea of whether there's a node in the network that facilitates indirect connections between other nodes So we know this National Lottery Community Fund is the best connected But does it also sit in the middle of all the other connections that exist between funders in the network as well So let's consider a very simple example before we calculate the measure Here we have a very simple three node network We've got three individuals here, Josie, Jane and John In this network, Jane acts as the broker So if Jane wasn't in this network, these lines here wouldn't exist So there's no direct line between John and Josie So if Jane didn't exist or removed from the network, this indirect connection here would disappear So this is a very simple example of how Jane acts as a broker in the network So we can apply the same idea again to the funders network We can say, you know, what are the top 20 broker nodes in the network And probably unsurprisingly, there's a lot of consistency between the degree centrality measure and the betweenness centrality measure Where again, we see the National Lottery Community Fund has the highest betweenness centrality score Which again, basically it's the proportion of times that the lottery funder sits in the middle of these direct ties So if you swap out Jane with the National Lottery, it's the proportion of times you see the National Lottery in this role here So there's a lot of coherence, we can see that basically the ordering of funders in the network by the betweenness centrality measure is much the same as the degree centrality measure also So again, so we've spoken about who is the best connected, the most popular node in the network Now we've seen the one that acts as a broker, the one that kind of facilitates the indirect ties that exist in the network And this is related to something you've probably heard before, which is this concept of a structural hole So this is a scenario again, where there's a lack of direct contact or a tie between two entities And therefore a broker can fill this gap and ensure a connection forms between two nodes Again I've just kind of referenced it a moment ago, what would happen if Jane right here, what would happen if she disappeared If she disappeared, there would be a structural hole between these two nodes here So again we can ask Python to calculate the structural hole constraint measure And again this just tells us which organizations act as a broker So basically if this organization here was taking out of the network we would see quite a few indirect ties disappear So again it's a related idea, it's almost the inverse of what we were talking about betweenness centrality This is where we see the potential for structural holes to occur So again if you were to remove these organizations what would happen, we'd see lots of ties disappear in the network And our final measure of centrality is known as closeness, and this captures the idea of proximity in a network So basically is there a node in the network that's situated to most of the others So basically there are very few steps from one node to a set of other nodes If one node is very proximate or very close to many others then it occupies a strategic position in the network Because that node will have a lot of influence over the nodes it's connected to And it allows it to diffuse knowledge or materials or resources throughout the network very easily Taking a simple example if you had one node that was at most two steps away from the majority of other nodes And then you had a node that was on average five steps away That would be less close than the node that is on average two steps away Because that node in just two steps like a friend of a friend can get information or materials or resources to those nodes a lot easier than the other one And again you can see there's thankfully a lot of similarities in both the terms of how we're calculating the different centrality scores And what they actually mean So again unsurprisingly the National Lottery Community Fund is also closest to most other nodes in the network Again that means it's in a position to diffuse or to spread resources to a lot of other organizations also But there's two others as well that fulfill this role again So basically there's a high degree of consistency in our network between the best connected funders which we measure using degree centrality Those nodes that have greater potential for brokering connections which is our betweenness centrality measure And the nodes that are most proximate are situated very close to lots of other nodes which is our closeness centrality measure also So the final thing we're going to look at as part of our node level analysis and it's the last thing we'll do in general is this idea of distance And we saw one measure earlier when we looked at the network overall we looked at the diameter so what's the furthest distance between a node on one side of the network and a node on the other side We can now calculate this measure basically for individual nodes themselves so for a given node how far away is it from every other node in the network And distance measures basically gives a sense of how reachable a given node is So again if we think back to nodes that share a direct tie so if there's a line drawn between two nodes we can say they're separated by a distance of one So there's one step between those two nodes If there are two nodes that possess an indirect tie then they're separated by a distance of two or more So this is again the idea of a friend of a friend you're separated by a distance of two It takes you two steps to go from you to your friend who then transfers the information to their friend And of course you can have distances of three or four or five etc So the measure of distance we're going to look at is something called the geodesic distance Basically this represents the shortest or optimal or most efficient path between two nodes in the network So basically it's the shortest distance it's the shortest number of steps that exist between any given pair of nodes in the network So the distance we can say you know what a path actually looks like between two nodes So we can consider a starting point up here so this is let's say that's a funder in our network and this is a funder that we want to reach Then we can say right well this funder needs to go here so that's step one, step two, step three, four, five, six, seven So we can see that the distance the geodesic distance between this node here and this one here is seven So lots of other ways of getting to that node you know not in this example but let's say this node was connected to this one and this one was connected back again So you could say we go from here and then we go here and we go back around and back around etc and that's obviously adding extra steps So we're not interested in all the different ways you can get between two nodes We're interested in the quickest shortest number of steps between a pair of nodes in the network So we can see if we were interested in two particular nodes so let's say this is one funder and it is this is one funder in our network Here is another and here are all the different ways you can get between them So there's no direct line between the two of them so there's no distance one between them so they're separated by at least two steps or more We're going to calculate what it is exactly in just a moment but you can kind of get a sense visually of the number of steps So this funder here has about five or six different connections so you could take this path to here and then maybe to here and here and here and then out etc But in all those different configurations all those different journeys there's going to be the shortest most efficient path between them And here it is so we can ask the networks to calculate the most efficient path between this funder here and this one here And here's the path actually written out so we start with this person Well this organization and then we need to go to this one then to this one and finally we reach our destination here And as you probably noticed I don't even need to actually calculate the geodesic distance We know that the shortest path is you know three so step one, step two, step three Well that is the shortest path there's actually multiple ways of doing that so there's multiple shortest paths between those two nodes So for example again here are our source and target funders so you can go to this one second and this one third Or you could go to this one second and this one again etc so there's basically eight ways of going between these two nodes That's we can consider the most efficient way But just in case you didn't believe me or just by looking at it visually you can actually ask it to calculate what's the length of the shortest path So the geodesic distance between these two nodes is three So I was going to cover this but actually I'm going to take questions instead because I see we're coming up to the end There's a couple of techniques that you've probably heard such as exponential random graph models, stochastic actor oriented models, relational event models etc In this notebook that I've put together we'll be sharing the link with you and I'll show you just now actually as well where the link is There's a bit of material on what one of these advanced approaches is It gives you a look at some data and a paper that kind of explains what's going on But as I said at the beginning if you are interested in more advanced statistical modelling approaches to social networks Please let us know and we can try and put those training materials together


Oh, yeah, it happens once a month, like that hormonal time during the month, just like, well, I'm fat now and I hate training, so let's change up everything. And then like six days later, it's like, I'm the best, let's do exactly what we're doing. Yeah. You're listening to Barbell Logic, brought to you by Barbell Logic Online Coaching. For each week, we take a systematic walk through strength training and the refining power of voluntary hardship. Welcome to the Barbell Logic podcast. I'm Nikki Sims here with Matt Reynolds and I have a new microphone and it's all set up and I'm super excited. Man, you sound so much better. Hopefully all my S's and T's sound a lot better. Sounds great.  Yeah, this is how when Matt does his video reviews for me, he uses his fancy setup and it's like, I'm just like a special one-of-a-kind podcast when you do my video reviews. It's really nice. You get that a lot on business calls or even if I do audio calls that are kind of important business calls or whatever, then I'll just call over the internet and do it on the microphone. So yeah, this microphone changed your life. It's a sweet microphone. It's actually kind of cool to listen to yourself on this microphone. You know how when you first hear your voice on recordings, you're like, do I sound like that? That's awful. Yeah. Because it's so full and you get a good set of headphones, you're like, ooh, I sound all right. It's good. So I'm going to re-record my voicemail greeting and maybe I'll like some of the books that I'm reading, I'll read them aloud to myself so that I can listen to them later. Perfect. My own audible. That's perfect. So what are we chatting about today? Okay, this is a cool subject that you, me and Andrew have actually been talking about where you talk about MED plenty of times, but sometimes an incremental change in volume, frequency, intensity is not the right minimum effective dose. Something else needs to change. And as you just put it, it's something that is demanded by the human element of training.  Yeah. Well, so that there's still a problem is the interesting part because that's really the subjective piece of this is that the way Andrew posed us, I'll read actually what Andrew wrote to us in kind of the private Slack message. He said, one of the things he's starting to encounter with the next level of programming challenges with our clients is that MED is wonderful for smoothing out the late novice to mid to late intermediate, but he's noticing a pattern emerging where some of our advanced clients are getting bored of the program even when it's working. Like it's working well. Yeah. Yeah. And I've felt this before. I mean, major first world problems.  Right. Come on. Yeah. So if everybody was a robot and was just and by the way, there are people that absolutely can do this forever and they're fine. It's the best way to do it probably. These are the same kind of people. By the way, I was thinking of this. I was thinking about the show yesterday. People can eat literally the same thing all the time.   I wonder if my brother is like that. I'm like, how are you like that? I'm not like that at all. And we're so similar in stuff.   Really? He's like, I don't I'm not a super taster. Yeah. He's just like, you know, like food just fuel and he's like, you know, he's like, I can tell the difference between really good wine or really good whiskey or really good coffee and not. But he's like, you know, it's just not like a good steak and a great steak is not like a life changing experience for him. And it is for me. I'm like, oh God, this is Wagyu Kobe A5 beef. I'm like, you know, do you think it's insane that some people like people like your brother are maybe a little bit more results driven versus some of us who are kind of process driven? That makes sense. Yes, for sure, for sure. Yeah, he is 100 percent means to an end. You tell me the means to get there, I'll do it. So, you know, I watch him, he gets his nutrition. He's a client as well. So you guys know him because he's been on the podcast a bunch, but he's a client. He's a paying client at block. I make him pay. It's even though he's my brother. And he gets nutrition coaching from Jillian and I see. So I see their back and forth. I can see what they're. And he is a robot. Jillian's like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to do some low calorie days at, you know, whatever it is, 2,200 calories. And then every third day, you're going to bump it up to 3,400. Because no problem. He's like, I got it. He's like, I haven't eaten. So he had this issue. We actually talked about it on a previous podcast episode where he was eating after dinner, he would eat perfect till dinner. And he would like snack and drink whiskey and stuff like that after dinner. And then one day he was like, I'm not going to do that anymore. He's like, I saw him post this week to Jillian. Sorry, dude, that I'm like, well, I wouldn't do this, by the way, or other clients as my brother. So I'm going to just family. We're just we're not subject to HIPAA. I don't think. Yeah. So he's like, I haven't had one thing to eat after dinner in seven months. It was something like that. I was like, what? Cold turkey like that. Wow. Yeah, he's just that's the way he is. That's what he is. And honestly, he's kind of that way with programming, too. I'm programming him. He is just like, he doesn't he's just like, tell me what to do. I'll do it. He doesn't care. And I, you know, I have clients like that. And we seem to attract people that are a little bit on the spectrum. And if they're on the spectrum, they can do MED until Jesus comes back. It does not matter. But if somebody is a little more about experiences and not just results, not just like I, you know, I want to enjoy training. Yeah. And at some point, the minimum effective dose is not the incremental change because it's not effective enough because at some point your client is going to get bored and quit. And then it's no longer effective. So even though it would be effective, it's not because the human element is they need some variability, they need some variance in their training. And so we have to start thinking about, well, OK, then how are we going to vary this? And it usually looks like a much bigger change. It might be an entire new style of programming, which doesn't feel at all like MED, but you have to do it because you understand that these people are human and they need a change. And this is something important that can happen here is you have to stand up as a coach and make sure you're not like switching frequently because the lifter just is like on board. I want something new on board. I want something new like you have to make sure as a coach, you're not responding to like shiny new object syndrome. But and then when you do make that change, it has to be because you think that it's the right thing to do as their coach and taking into consideration that it's still your job to still get them the right results. So be careful as a coach that you're not just being like, well, they got bored, I got to change it, you know, that's right. Yeah, that's a great point. So first off, you would be hard pressed to convince me that there's any reason to make a change that's not sort of orthodoxy, incremental, minimum effective dose change for anyone up to late intermediate. Yeah, there's just a simple system that works for almost everybody. And it's not always the same incremental change, but it is an incremental change. So for some people, you'll get them into intermediate and you might add more volume and some people you might add more frequency. But you're still just making the incremental change. Once your clients are advanced, advanced clients have to train for something. That's this is another important piece of this. They really have to train for something. Again, not everybody. Sometimes you get, you know, the weirdos are just like, I'll just do this forever. I have to train for something. You I know I coach you. You kind of have to train for something. I want to look forward to something. And so that might be a competition. It might be an online, an online meet, which we've got an online meet that just posted the next online meet. It's a push pull for the USSF, so you can go to the website and check that out at Barba Logic. Sometimes it's a vacation coming up. I'm going to Mexico and I want to get leaner and I want to look better. And that's a completely different goal than than getting ready for the meet. And so for advanced lifters, they usually have to be working towards the goal. And occasionally I've got an advanced lifter who decides to just pivot the sport. Like they're not going to do powerlifting or strengthlifting. They're going to do Olympic weightlifting or they're going to do strongman or they're going to do a mud run. And I don't care if they're in advance. Listen, if they're an advanced strength athlete, they're strong. If they want to do a mud run or they want to go do a Spartan race. Sure, let's do it. Let's train for that. Right. I got a guy right now that's training for triathlon. Yeah. You've paid your dues. Now it's time to have fun. That's exactly right. Right. And so usually that is where we end up making a larger sort of change. If the lifter still wants to make a change and they still want to pursue strength. I still think there are things that can be done. I was thinking about this. This is where a program, let's say they're following a minimum effective dose or a programming and they sort of slowly transition incrementally into sort of basic four day split block training, something like that. And they're just tired of doing, you know, five sets of five. The next week they do five sets of five a little heavier. And the next week they go five sets of four and then they go four sets of four.  So and it does sometimes.  They want to make a change. This is where a program like a five, three, one variant where you can add things like AMRAP sets. Like, you know what, let's just let's do an AMRAP. You got to get five, but you're going to AMRAP it. So if you can get 12, let's get 12. The next week you got to get three.  This is where adding like body weight accessory work works really good for somebody who wants to put on some more hypertrophy. So, OK, let's get really good at moving our body weight. So we're going to do a lot of push ups and pull ups and chin ups and different various grips on pull ups and chin ups and neutral grip and things like that. We're going to do dips. We're going to do glute ham raises. We're going to do, you know, all those sorts of things that that works really well, too. So you start to think about, well, what's the goal change and even something simple like changing the order of workouts during the week actually makes a difference, like, because maybe you're just like bored of squatting on Saturdays. So you know what, maybe I'll bench on Saturdays. That's a shorter workout. It gives me more time to not be in the gym. So even just a small tweak like that can actually be helpful. That's exactly right. We'll do a future episode on this. And this isn't unfortunately, this is not available to everybody right now, but we're beta testing these rep one devices, their velocity devices. That alone has really changed those of us who are doing it. It's made training fun because now we're training for velocity. So it's like the old Tendo units, you attach it to the barbell and it reads the speed, you put it on an app, you see what your speed is. And what it tells you based on speed, what your estimated one rep max would be for the day. And so if you need to train at 75 percent, it's OK, I'm gonna train at 75 percent of my one rep max. That's going to be sort of like the starting point, but it will start telling you what your little slow today or your little fast today. So we'll bump it up or bump it down a little bit and that's made it really fun. So you notice one of the things that's been nice. This is what I've been doing in my training is you move every rep with like clear intention. I'm intentionally moving as quick as I can that concentric face. And, you know, Andrew's doing that. Jordan Stanton's doing that. Carl shoots doing that.  And it's honestly the programming hasn't changed that much, but that variable change has made it really interesting and fun to kind of pursue and Brett McKay is going to start doing that soon.  And so here's the thing. If you are walking through the process of LP, late, you know, late novice sort of programming, you start to transition out of novice intermediate, early intermediate, mid intermediate. You've got to kind of pay your dues with that stuff. There's really no reason to ever change the programming there. And as you get out of intermediate stages and into late intermediate and moving into advance, where you would do programs like block training or DUP or even like a five, three, one, like a month long program where you're kind of setting one rep max new PRs once a month or longer. Then that's the point where you might end up occasionally making a larger change. Now, shouldn't happen more than maybe a couple of times a year? And this comes back to your question, where as a coach, if your client is kind of always going, I think I want to do this. I think I want to do this like it's, you know, shiny objects sort of thing. Here's what I do. I had a guy, one of my best clients, shout out to Justin. I've talked to him before. He's a great client, does exactly what I say.   Or for the next 10 weeks, let's do hypertrophy. And that's fine with me. He's an advanced lifter. He's a good lifter. But here's what I do. I write, I send him back an email or a DM or whatever. And I say, here's what your program is going to look like. If that's what you want. Here's what the effects are going to be. Here's the trade off. I want you to sit on it for 48 hours. And in 48 hours, come back to me and tell me if you still want to do it. And so far, every time I've done that with him, he's like, yeah, let's keep pushing strength. Like, okay, it's fine. Right. So I mean, it doesn't matter to me. So yeah, I think that's the way you do it. Cause people, you know, here's what happens.  You're like, I'm so out of condition. I need to add a bunch of conditioning to my prayer. And it's sort of this emotional thing that you reach out to your coach and you're like, yeah, all the time. Oh yeah. It happens once a month.  So let's change up everything. And then like six days later, it's like, I'm the best. Let's do that exactly what we're doing. Yeah. Yes. You know, and for guys, it seems like so many things affect testosterone levels for them. Some guys are just naturally higher, naturally low testosterone, but a lot of guys, most of the guys are in that kind of middle of the bell curve. The more stress they have outside the gym, right? Life stress, work stress, or even physical stress. Like if they're doing other stuff like the guy that's that I'm coaching right now that's doing triathlon training, he has to have a bunch of cortisol in a system.  Multiple hours, basically six days a week. Like it's just it's a bunch of work. And so, you know, the fluctuations for men as well with testosterone and cortisol and stress and those sort of things make a difference as well. I've noticed the same thing, right? When my I know I can tell when my testosterone is kind of getting low, I can see what's going on.  I should start like doing trail running. It's just start, you know, like, yeah, stuff I would never want to do.  I just want to do trail running and watch Hallmark movies. There you go. I don't mind trail running. People would be surprised about that for me. Yeah, I have no desire to ever run on a road ever.  It's beautiful. It's gorgeous. And so I like, you know, running on a trail. I like like mountain biking trails, especially ones that aren't super popular. So there's not mountain bikes all over the place.  Like I'll run like one or two miles, not like five miles. Like I can five miles. It's crazy. I would never do anything ridiculous like that. That's fun. Or like, you know, I like hiking or rucking. So I'll do that stuff sometimes. But, you know, like I've paid my dues for 20 years as a strength athlete. Yeah. If that's what I want to do, that's what I want to do. And part of that might just be that like you want to be outside. Just like, oh, good, go be outside. Yeah. It's not going to affect your training. Go do that. I feel good. I feel good being in the sun. You know, you're in Southern California. You've got the like the best weather in the world. It's perfect all the time. I know it's a big deal for you going out, going to the beach, getting in the sun. It just changes that. Yeah. You know, I don't know what Andrew does up there in Washington, where it's just, you know, dark all the time. It's just cloudy and gross all the time. He wears his down jacket every day. Yeah, we do. We do these zoom calls. And here we are. Like you're in a tank top. I'm in shorts and a t-shirt. Andrew's in a down jacket and like a took, like a beanie on August 24th. This was on Wednesday. He said, my garage is still a little chilly in the mornings. I was like, my garage is 130 right now. I think it's awful.  And so what we've been doing is we've gone to, we train a four day split. We put a real significance on the first lift. So we squatted this morning and then we go out to the garage and I've got all these accessory pieces now that I've bought. So I have a, I have a vertical leg press from Titan. I got the leg extension, leg curl, which you now have to. I've got the reverse hyper. I've got a glued ham raise. I've got an echo bike and we'll just do circuits through that. Like we'll do us literally like five or six movements, 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off. And it's our version of conditioning, but I only have to ride the echo bike once in every six exercises because so I'll use stuff like glued ham raise and reverse hyper and and leg press as conditioning. So it's not super heavy. I knock out as many reps as I can in 30 seconds. So you're knocking out maybe 20 reps of a lot of that stuff. The buzzer sounds you get up, you move to the next one. So what was going on in your programming or not going on in your programming or in your life that made you want to put that circuit in? I just want to leave and I don't want to do any more than Jim. Yeah, there's there's sometimes you just don't want to be in the gym anymore. That's fine. So I didn't want to do traditional. Yeah, I just didn't want to do the traditional supplemental movement. And then the normal like kind of hypertrophy stuff in the gym. This is in my garage. We open up the garage, you know, the neighborhood's nice. You get to watch people walking by walking their dogs and stuff. And it's just, you know, I don't mind doing some basic conditioning in the heat of the summer with the garage door open. And we get I can go through 18 sets. So like six different exercises for three rounds. So you get through 18 sets and we're knocking it out in like 30 minutes. So you're doing like a 30 minute session, 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off. And you're just hammering this stuff. You're like, it's an easy 30 minutes. So you come in and we squat, it takes 40 minutes to squat.  And in an hour, hour and 10 minutes, you're like, you can't get a better workout than that. Yeah. Like, you know, you get done and you're like, I feel great. Yeah, it's toasty. You know, and I feel great the rest of the day. And so it's so, yeah, that those are the times when I think that minimum effective dose, there are times when that very small incremental change, while it will work and it is working, you have to be in tune with your clients enough to know they're getting bored. And even though it's working and they're still set in PRs, you need to make a change for them to give them some to freshen up. And, you know, again, this is sort of heresy in our world, right? So it's not, it's not CrossFit. It's not we're not putting stuff in a hopper and pulling it out like random sort of stuff. And I don't think, you know, we don't believe in muscle confusion or anything like that's ridiculous. But I do think there's a time when people just need a mental break. The same way, I think I said this before we started recording, the same way is when people are following like if it fits your macros on a nutrition basis and they're everything fits the macros. And the nutrition coach is like, let's say they're trying to lose some fat.  And so we're going to go from 70 grams of fat to 60 grams of fat.  And then they pull a couple, they pull 10 grams of carbs and another 10 grams of carbs, bump your protein up a little bit. And you just do this incremental steps like all the time. And eventually you're like, yeah, I'm done with this if it fits your macros for a while. I need something different. Yeah. And you go, OK, I'm going to intermittent fast or I'm going to do keto or I'm going to do carb back loading or carb cycling. Like you pick some kind of completely different diet that's not at all what you've been doing. So you don't have to weigh and measure and count macros because you just need a mental break. And it's it's the same thing. I think we're training our free will just like we want to exercise our free will just like, please, let me choose. Let me let me not do what I'm supposed to do today. Yeah, that's exactly right. So, yeah, I mean, that's I think that's the big gist of it all. So do you ever make pretty big programming pivots where you have someone on a MED approach that's working and let's go someone who's like pretty will go with her like early advanced. They've been running a program for like six months and you notice that they're like they're just like skipping their second or third lifts or exercises of the day. And they're just like straight up not doing a session or they're just not posting videos. What do you do when something like that occurs? Yeah, great question. So the first thing I'm going to ask him is, do you want to change the goal? Do you want to keep pushing for strength? And let's say the answer is yes, because that's actually where it's harder, right? Because if they say, yeah, let's focus on fat loss, let's focus on hypertrophy, let's focus on conditioning or that's an easy pivot then, right, because the goal is different. But let's say they say, man, I'm just getting kind of tired of doing the same thing every Thursday and Friday and Monday and Tuesday, but I do still want to get stronger than what I'll almost always do. It depends on what they're doing. But let's say they're doing kind of a traditional again, kind of block or DUP or they're kind of moving in that direction. What I'll almost always do is I'll do my version of a Westside split or a five three one type. So they'll come in and just let them like hit PRs every single session for about six weeks. So we pick a new movement will come in. So if it's if it's five three one, it's not a new movement. You stick with the normal movements. You're all right, let's let's try to set a new PR with. And a lot of times I'll do PRs even with five three one. It's fun because you can do PRs with a specific weight increments.   Let's see how many times you can squat three fifteen or four or five or whatever. And so it doesn't have to be for five. And so, you know, they did the four or five for eight. You're like, all right, we got a new eight rep max, which you never really had an eight rep max. Now we have one and we can try to beat that in three more weeks or whatever. So I'll do that or I'll do the West Side style split, which we've talked about in the past in the podcast. If the person has access to a handful of kind of various bars, maybe a box for box squatting, maybe bands and chains, and you can change the movement up. Then I just give a new movement every week. So all right, let's do close grip bench press this week. All right, after that, let's do floor press. After that, let's do reverse band press. Let's do chain press. Let's do board presses and you just cycle through that and let them hit PRs. And I'll pick I usually pick four or five movements and rotate through those four or five and then do them again and let them try to beat all those. And so you get through eight or ten weeks of training and set new PRs on all those different fun lifts. And it just is sort of a mental break. It's fun. Now, if someone is like I had this not that long ago with Brett, Brett had lifted heavy for so long. And he needed to break. I'm going to go to volume. I'm like, let's do a high perpetuity stuff. Let's not do anything that's Uber heavy for the barbells. Let's do lots of body weight stuff and just get in. The goal is to get out of the gym and feel good, feel better. So instead of doing sets of one to three or heavy sets of five, we're doing sets of six to ten. Yeah. And it's not that heavy. It's like, you know, RPE six or seven somewhere in that ballpark. And it's OK because we're moving good weight and they're getting good volume and tonnage. And then they're doing a bunch of body weight stuff and it's just they don't have to chase numbers. Yeah. So that's kind of where that's the way I do it. So it's usually the opposite of what they've been doing. So if they've been chasing numbers, they don't chase numbers. If they've been following percentages, four sets of four, four sets of three, then let's let's hit some PRs and let's have some fun. That's the direction I go. Yeah, it'll likely get to a point where after, you know, six or eight weeks, they ask you, OK, I'm ready to chase numbers again. And that's great. That's right.  Like you get to this point where you're so like your presence, your training, you're relaxed and you want more. It's a great spot for a client to be in where they just like love that thought of like really pushing themselves again. And it's perfect.  It's like, OK, I respect what your mental kind of state is now for your training. We're still going to keep you strong. But let's like relieve that other pressure that you're feeling. That's exactly right. And remember, we've talked about this, you know, beating a dead horse. But what's the most important thing for our clients? Consistency. Consistency. Compliance. Like we want them to continue to train. And then the four and then form, right? Like those two things like technique and consistency, the program, it matters. The point doesn't matter like consistency and form matter. Yeah. And so what I'm trying to do and again, you can go back to that. There are these people for me. It's mostly guys, although that may not be entirely fair. They're just that sort of robot mentality. It's that idea of, you know, training is always going to be that sort of spoonful of medicine. I'm never really going to enjoy it, but I'm never really going to miss it. I'll do it all the time. And those guys can do MED forever. But most people at some point, they're like, well, I'll say this for everybody that's not that I as a coach want to get my clients to enjoy training, to look forward to training. And so if training feels like a grind, we need to change something, right? Now, if it's a grind on week 11 in LP, sorry, bro, you're still doing it. We're doing LP or not making a complete change. It's like a buttercup. That's right. But that's a pretty short. You think about like if you really, if you really focus on training and you don't miss and you do everything you're supposed to do, you're kind of in this point that we're talking about six to eight months in. It doesn't take that long.  And it may take two years or three years. But if you really stick to it, you don't miss, you're consistent. I mean, a year in, you're probably an advanced lifter. Yeah, we can create these sort of changes. And so that's that's to me, that's the right thing to do is like make a change. It's a little bit different from what you've done and what you've chased. I'd be really careful with what I don't do is I don't do a massive. So if somebody's been doing, let's say, heavy and low volume. Yeah, I don't crush them with like I need to change. Let's do some hypertrophy. Perfect. Your four sets of eight, five sets of ten. No. Yeah. Oh, no, we don't do that, right? Because so sore their body. So you can still make incremental, minimum effective dose changes, transitioning them into the new programming. If they're not ready for that sort of volume, I do this all the time when that kind of traditional Texas method thing that goes from three sets of five to five sets of five, I always move people to four sets of five first. Yeah. Why would I go from three sets of five to five sets of five? Let's go four sets of five and get used to that. Then we'll go five sets of five or whatever. So you can do the same thing here with them. So for people who are wanting to do volume, maybe I'll go two sets of eight the first week, and I'll go three sets of eight. And then, you know, so there's no reason to hammer them with four sets of eight or four sets of ten, five sets of ten. That's crazy right off the bat.  And then it's again, the goal is to get them to enjoy the training. And they'll be like, wait, this is not what I wanted. Never mind. No, no, no. Yeah, exactly. You want them to enjoy the training. That's that's the deal. Yeah. I was just going to say, I feel like this is like the emo side of MED. That can be the name of the episode. You got to be careful with it, like we said. And then here's another thing that's actually really, really helpful. These two things. You can change where you train makes a huge difference. So, you know, if you've been training, it's COVID. We are very pro training at home, trained by yourself. Like that's great. But at some point, you're like, man, I've been training by myself for eight months.  And go in there for a little while and train and get a change of change of scenery.  So you'll come back to your home gym. Like, don't worry. Yeah. And you'll quit. It'll bother you. So you'll be back in your home gym. Just don't worry about it. That's exactly right. I think it's fun to when I travel to go to a gym and train a gym I've never been in before. Just a fun change of pace. And the other the other option there is to get a training partner, get a training partner, get a new training partner. Yeah, they start training.  Somebody to kind of push you and do the different things and especially if you can find one, which is this is rare, but especially if you can find one that's relatively close to you and strength, you can compete. And that's one of the things, again, that we're doing right now with with the guys using the velocity devices. We're competing with each other to see who can move fun, three, 15, the fastest or whatever. Like that's fun. So you're like, yeah. Is there like a tender for lifting partners? So even though none of us are actually training together, we can post our stats. That's what we need to ask. You know what? I think Nikki Berman, actually, she actually developed yeah, a tender for lifting partners. Yeah. And when COVID happened and then, of course, you know, she just had a baby, it got put on hold. But she was telling me the day that the app is done and she's going to re-release the app. So that's awesome. Look forward to that pretty soon. So it's basically it tries to come. It tries to find lifting partners for people. Yeah, that would be cool if you could like list what kind of music you're into when you lift, like whether you'd like to be slapped or not. What kind of what kind of barbells you need? Just like to be like the e-harmony. Yeah. There you go. Yeah, it's it's fun to train with other people just to get just to kind of get out of that scenery. And I've I've sent a lot of my clients before when they're just kind of grinding it, especially in the heat of the summer or the dead ass cold of winter if they're training in their garage. I'm like, just go get a gym membership for three or four months and just have fun over there. Like we can sort of the same stuff. Most cities now and this is not at all that was not all the case for years. Most cities have a gym that's pretty solid, right? And you can go find it's relatively close. Now, if you live in rural America, then good luck. You're probably going to the better idea is probably to get a training partner and help train at your house. But, you know, it's not bad, not a bad gig to go find a place to train. It's great. I love doing that. It's one of my favorite things. Yeah. Me too. So there you go. So, lest anyone says that we are dogmatic to the point of saying that MED incremental changes are the only thing you should ever do. And by the way, I do think it's the best way to program. Yeah. Really the right way to program for novice through intermediate training. We do have to always take the human element into consideration as coaches to say if someone needs a change, let's give them a change. It's OK. If it's occasionally not an incremental change, that it will actually be more effective to make a bigger change because they'll be more compliant with the new programming, the new thing that they're doing, whatever is changing that thing for them so that they they start to enjoy training again. If training seems like a grind to your clients, that's a good place to go. Mm hmm. Yeah. There's a time where. You know, you can't let your feelings overwhelm what's working in your training, but then if you start to become non-compliant or you're not consistent, that's the time when the variables that you're used to using that are working.  Absolutely. Cool. Awesome. You have been listening to the BarbiLogic podcast. Thanks for tuning in. We'll continue to hammer out new episodes with Nicky and I and now with Nicky's great new microphone. Andrew got a new one, too. So we probably need to do a. We'll do a trio. A little three-way microphone actually, a trio. Trio sounds way more PG. Yeah, I know, right? And we'll continue to come out with a series. Really excited. I think I can go ahead and pre-promote this. Dr. Sullivan is doing a series that'll come out in the next probably in October for us on sort of BarbiL Health and. Oh gosh, that's so good. All of the stuff that he is so great at. So we're excited there with. Oh yeah. We'll be able to start releasing some new series as well as some of continued the best of the stuff in the past and digitally remaster those and put them in good chronological order. And so I was looking, I think, I don't know, three or four days ago. I think we're at like 950 reviews and we're at five. So we're so close to a thousand. Oh my gosh. Get on there, folks. Please go on iTunes. And it's weird. I think it let me do another review and I know I've done it before. So I don't know if it's just cleared my cookies. It's been long enough. So go in and leave another one. If you like, see if it'll let you. It's okay to double dip. There you go, double dip. Let's put us over a thousand. Yeah, we've got more reviews than anybody in the strength training world. And so we'd love to go to iTunes and give us a review. That's the best one to do it. But you can always do it on Stitcher or any of the other places you listen to us. And so thank you for doing it. Pass this along to a friend or family member that needs to hear it. And we will catch you next Monday. Yeah, see you next week. See you then.


All right, we go to the next talk and this is one I've been Really wanting to see because there's a lot of him going on around open project these days. So we land welcome. This is the Yeah, thank you. So, yeah, I'm Villand I'm the CTO of the BIM edition of open project open project is a project and issue tracking Management software also open source and it's actually feels pretty familiar to be here and having and hearing all the stories and the Teams and the stuff that's going on the next cloud I feel super excited Another there's a reason I'm super excited to be here is because in the last year we've been working on the integration of next cloud with open project and Talking to our users and to our clients and customers They usually come to with us with with one question That they face in their organizations. Let's say you have green peas or Siemens or to Japan Whoever they always ask the same questions Where are actually the files that we need to work on when we get a task assigned? So when you have a task like you say an issue that is assigned to you It usually doesn't come alone. It comes with files, right? So what is your work actually are doing on it comes with a file a file it or files that you need in order to start your work files that you need to add it files that you need to Hand in as a result of your of your work. Yeah, but then you also want to Process these these files and give it over to your next co-worker So how does the co-worker know where the files are? So you come up with all sense cause of sorts of stuff like having default I having a career like Rules like put it always in that folder name it like this and all that stuff implicit knowledge or you share it via a Text chat why what's up a lot via email and it's all like it's a hell That's a hell and this is why users come to us and say if we need a solution for that and The interesting thing is we have tools for managing files like next cloud Google cloud whatever call it And we have tools for tracking work to organizing work like open project or Jira or Trello or whatever But these two systems are not integrated Right. There's this barrier in between like they don't mesh up and actually it's the same thing we want to get our shit done and So let's give it giving an example so Employing a new person to your team While you collect a CV you could get the collector letter letter of a recommendation At some point you need to template for the contract somebody feels and fills in the hard facts Somebody signs off the contract at some point You want to register the person so there are many people involved step by step You have your business processes and you have many files involved and yeah, you need to hand them over and Integration is hard integration of especially so big systems like file management systems like next cloud or something Such such big as open project or for managing work But fortunately both systems are open source so as you can might see this is the open project logic Logo with the next logo that was a joke from our designer And yeah, you can try it now by yourself just grab it open project instance Just download it install it in your server or get a instance from our cloud And also on your next cloud instance just install the the next cloud app open project integration And off we go. It's already there What it brings to you is This is actually open project and this is a task or a work package What we call it and what is new is this site on the right hand side It actually lists all the files that you need in order to do that task, right? So so when you click on that thing here you get to that file in next cloud you can edit it You can change it. Yeah, and and you don't even notice, right? You don't have there's nothing nobody needs to tell you there's the file. Here it is You can also set up a folder Where you should present or hand in your results? Of your of your task, so there's no communication involved extra communication. You can enable people to do their stuff What's actually really cool is right from the beginning we Made sure that we can connect multiple next cloud instances to open project So imagine you're an agency and you're working with multiple suppliers or multiple clients You can connect to multiple next cloud instances at the same time On the next cloud side with the help of Julian, thank you Julian And the team in NEPA Yankati Tech and they've built an integration The application on in next cloud. What it actually does is You can create the connection between the files or the folder and open project I can also see which work packages in open project are connected to that file So you can always see okay before I delete that file. Let me check first Where's this where's it is relevant? What state is it in and so on and so on as We're using direct references. We're using the file IDs in next cloud Whenever you move the file or you rename the file, don't worry. You're safe, right? The connection still work But we won't stop here this year. We will release in another version Where it's getting even easier to connect those integrations to connect those files So because you usually start working on a on a task in open project We will enable you to drag and drop files directly on the work package in an open project And we you can select a place in next cloud Where you want to store it and it directly creates that link between the files and the work package But it's not that not not just it Next year we will release a version where we attack the next question is Okay, now I know that the file exists But it's not shared with me So how do you get access to it? So in the next version that the Open project 13 what we are going to do is having shared folders for each project an open project So that every member in the project no project Will automatically have the rights according to the roles in the project To open files their share files reshare depending on the on the permission settings in open project because an open project Is where the team resides and we will map that over to to next cloud Yeah, there's one to take the opportunity to to thank everybody involved integrating this up this This integration is actually quite some people and we've been working this like almost a year already And also a big shout out and a big thank you to our sponsors from the public sector Which is the University of Duisburg-Essen and the city of Cologne. Thank you very much doing You're awesome. You're doing a great job and you really embrace the model public money public code. Thank you


What is going on guys welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here today I've been doing an Anthem video. Now guys this video is presented by EA Game Changers and a massive thank you to them for allowing me to take part in an Anthem Early Access Capture event. Today guys I bring you an exclusive look at the level of customization you will have at your fingertips to customize your javelin suits for all classes when you get your hands on the full game the range of Colossus interceptor and storm but before we get into that guys I am giving away a few copies of Anthem the full game to be in with a chance of winning simply make sure you're subscribed to this channel drop a like on this video leave a comment down below more details and the giveaway in the video description. Also guys if you've already got the game pre-ordered but still want to show you support you can by hitting that like button and if you are new around here and Anthem videos are what you want to see be sure to subscribe as I have many exclusive videos which you will not want to miss. So guys as you may know I was invited by EA and Bioware to play the full game of Anthem and I got to do some really cool things some things you may have already seen on my channel but I also have plenty of things to come so stay tuned. Today you're witnessing my first hands-on with the Forge area of the game where customizing your javelin suits happen from weapon loadouts to component loadouts to the way your javelins perform and look and damn the depth is real here people now I've seen and you've probably seen the stream Bioware and EA did about a month back showcase in the Forge and the character customization but today I will try to explain it for those who haven't seen it or for those who will still left a little confused by that stream a month back so you guys can understand the level in which you can customize your javelin suits. Now I have a video coming explaining exactly what and how leveling your javelin works so stay tuned for that as you may have saw this was me unlocking the interceptor for the first time so the first instance you are seeing is me literally going into this area for the very first time but later in the video you're going to see me customizing different javelins and then customizing the same javelins with different armor but guys as I've said yes this is me unlocking the interceptor and going into the Forge for the very very first time so bear with me I mean I changed my mind on the ideas as I unlock new things it's just ridiculous the level here of depth is just craziness people it's crazy so what you will first notice here is the interceptor has eight nodes you can select which one way or another changes your javelins appearance and actions harm it torso arms legs vinyls wednesday animations and paint obviously no arm at this stage was unlocked but later in the video like I said you will see me customizing a newer armor set but for now after checking out the things which only affect your actions we will then check out this basic armor set and what you can do with it so animations within this tab we have victory poses arrival animations and standard emails important to mention obviously nothing here again has been unlocked quite yet but you'll get the general gist of how these things will work basically using left dan and right on your d-pad drops a email you've picked and then the victory pose is obviously a victory pose and the arrival animation is when you arrive somewhere looking absolutely badass okay so let's move on to the wear state now this tab allows you to adjust the overall finish to your javelin suits you can have your javelin suit looking super super shiny to almost as rusty as an old beatdown car about to fall apart but hey that style of finish does suit certain looks then we have the vinyls tab this applies a certain design to your javelin finish if you want that extra detail I prefer to not personally have these I mean I like that basic and simpler look it's kind of like a car with stickers all over it to one which is just fresh clean and basic but hey the option is there for you if you choose so on to the paint and this is where most of fun happens guys you can see here there are six sections each representing certain areas of your suit some sections cover main areas while others handle those sub to highlights which can make all of the difference what really surprised me is not the fact that you can obviously change the color of each certain area of your suit but you can also change the material look of every individual section there are many varieties of material look you can pick and use from basic painted surfaces to metals rubbers leather fabric gloves and even patterned fabrics but it goes even deeper than that people with different varieties of materials you can find unlock and even purchase with in-game earnable currencies now I first thought when seeing this that no matter the material I choose when it's colored it would look the same whether that be a rubber material or a chrome one once I apply that bright yellow color to it you won't be able to see the difference while people I was indeed wrong each color will showcase much differently depending on the material you choose to use on said part of the armor metals have their own selection of colors from silver gold to even rose gold and many more and they look great certain fabrics usable from the get-go like the fabric ring called cloth dominion hex when selected has two options for colors you can use with it one for the pattern and one for the background color and like I said guys we are seeing basic stuff here this isn't any of the things you can unlock as you play further into the game I mean it might look a little bit confusing for some now but I guarantee you people five minutes of hands on and you'll be creating some amazing looking javelins spending a lot of hours in here getting that perfect look and I can almost guarantee you won't see two javelins looking the exact same I mean if you do that's a rarity for sure as the possibilities here are truly endless some of the best customization options I have seen of a game in this genre now you're going to see within this video me customizing all javelins suits available the interceptor with two different armor sets the ranger colossus and the storm which I know is a lot of people's favorite now I will make the video as short as possible so you ain't kept away from your lives all day but it's really just me playing this getting sucked in and just going full throttle with this thing changing my mind when finding something new that I liked but it gives you an idea of how amazing this customization is and on that note guys I'm going to leave you to enjoy the rest of the video now I have many many anthem videos coming gameplay using every javelin suit loadout guides missions contracts what they are how they work how to level up and much much more so definitely make sure you subscribe if you are new around here and if you never want to miss a video I upload make sure you turn notifications on by hitting that bell button if you have any questions about the game you want answering you can always follow me on twitter at dpjsc08 or hit me up on facebook or discord everything is linked within the video description guys but guys stay tuned much much more is to come now I hope you enjoyed this video and hopefully guys I will see you on that next one