While perusing the many perplexing sites we are yet to cover on our channel, we stumbled across something which could quite possibly be a massive clue, evidence left as to the method of construction of many ancient sites found all over Earth. Our channel has, for a long time, put forward the hypothesis that a highly advanced worldwide civilization once flourished here on our planet. We believe that many of the ancient sites which display unexplained architecture were left by this lost people placed far within our distant past. And once one begins to investigate these ruins with this possibility in mind, you start to notice some compelling things regarding these amazing sites. For example, the metal clamps we have previously covered, often created using impressive mixes of alloys and somehow poured molten, could now be seen as earlier architectural examples less than the mortarless, mysteriously notched stonework, also found in similar areas all over the world, with the more precise and thus more impressive stonework, seen as a later, more sophisticated method of construction. What's more, although virtually all ancient sites have been dated to the most convenient suspects within known taut history. There also exists the numerous caves and temples, hewn from the solid bedrocks, carved with such accuracy and vision, they allude recreation even by our modern-day technology. And while looking at an amazing rock-cut cave within the site of Mamala Puram, India, a site we are now convinced was left by this same civilization, a curious piece of evidence seemingly presented itself. Upon the roughly finished roof of this ancient cave is evidence left by the same technology used to not only cut the astonishingly hues Long Yu caves, but also the abandoned Lanshan quarry both in China. This discovery, we believe, is only just the beginning of a realization that these telltale signatures are present at many other unexplained sites around the world. We have long stipulated that many of the ancient ruins claimed by our more modern-day ancestors are most likely not their actual creations. If the structure does date to this more recent age, they are usually found to be sitting upon the telltale remnants of a highly precise ancient foundation originally left by this elusive group. Who were these amazing people? When do they flourish here on earth? What happened to them? Why did they never record how they created such wonders? Although it is easy for skeptics to argue that the caves in architecture were merely created through excruciating hard labor, any practical demonstration of this has eluded us for many centuries. Furthermore, many of the extensive cave excavations found all over the world, presumably dating back to this bygone age, are all absent any waste, as if the machine task with creating these underground labyrinths turned stone to dust. And although the technology and or possible machinery tasked with the job has evaded modern archeology to this point, it is clearly another piece of evidence which takes us one step closer to unraveling the true history of our planet. Phoenix Hill, Xi'an Big Cume, China In 1994, an extremely mysterious discovery would be made. Considered by the Chinese as the ninth ancient wonder of the world. A series of 24 ancient, artificial caves were discovered, specialists have been quietly astounded by them. And the more we learn, the more of a spectacular and mysterious achievement they are seen to be. The first thing that struck explorers were their size. Each cave has a minimum floor space of 1000 square feet, an unimaginable undertaking at the time they were thought to have been constructed. It dated prior to the dynasties of China, which began 3000 years ago, meaning they are very, very old. The walls of the caves are scarred with strange uniform tool marks. The weird thing about the markings, is that they are all set on a 60 degree angle, every single chisel mark within the cave system without exception, is on an exact 60 degree cutting angle. This has led many to suspect that the caves must have somehow been doubted using advanced machinery. However, because this feature is unique within our current knowledge of ancient structures, the angle of cutting could indeed have been made by hand, with the purpose of decoration, that this would have made the job of cutting them out even more laborious. Additionally, once the caves had been assessed and explored, a remarkable thing was realized, although the caves with the result of excavating thousands and thousands of tons of rock, this rock seems to have vanished from existence. There is no trace of a spoil pile anywhere to be seen, it is as if the caves have always been there. No traces of their construction has ever been found anywhere, no cave writings, drawings, tools, or human remains, and nothing within historical records. The caves construction simply doesn't make sense, and any evidence for their construction doesn't exist. Add to this the fact that the cave systems prelate Chinese civilization by some time, and show evidence of being cut out by machine. And the long new caves undoubtedly become a curiosity to scientific explanation, and historical understanding, to say the least. These remarkable caves, are a very strong and solid piece of evidence to suggest that advanced cultures have already been hanged on on this planet, or that visitors of extraterrestrial origin, visited the planet, prior to human development. As far as I am aware, these are the only two possible scenarios for the builders of such a construction. The caves systems are well over 3000 years old and still intact, whoever was capable of constructing them, was also capable of disposing of the huge mountains of rock that would have been excavated, without leaving any evidence of how they did this, or indeed built the caves anywhere. The caves are known as one of the largest underground complexes ever discovered. The fact that more is not heard about this wonderful place, is testament to their extraordinary existence, meaning no one within the scientific community, can, or want to try to explain them. Also, which I found highly interesting, when they were discovered they were completely filled with water, whether this was once salt water, has not been disclosed, but I have personal suspicions as to how this water came to rest within these underground cabins. No fish were found within the caves, which many found odd. However, if you suspected that the waters be residual leftovers from a great flood. Water from the great seas of earth, then over time, salt levels would plummet and fish accustomed to sea water would have died. Who do you think built the long new caves? The caves existence hint towards a hidden history here on our planet, a history that we must unravel if we are ever to fully understand ourselves, and our home. In 1938, an expedition was conducted, led by Dr. Kaiputay, an archaeologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, into the Beiancarola Mountains of China, looking for evidence of ancient civilizations. He was trying to find shelter in the Kunlun Ket Mountain chain, when a team member entered a cave and found strange inscriptions on the walls.  Buried with the skeletons over 700 stone discs were discovered. Not knowing what they were, the team collected the stone discs up and took them back for study. The discs are around one foot in diameter, with two spiral grooves moving out from a center hole. They ended up in storage for over 20 years, before Tsumungwi, found out about the discs, and was given the permission to study them further. This is when something amazing is discovered to be contained on the stone discs, an amazing story which would cost Tsumungi's reputation, and ultimately his life. The Chinese Academy of Sciences tried to ban the publication of these findings, but eventually the story of the dropper tribe and their stone discs was released. What he discovered were tiny hieroglyphs etched into the grooves upon the discs, the hieroglyphs tell an amazing story. By 1962, Tsumungi had successfully deciphered the writings, stating that they told the story of a spaceship crashing on the mountains some 12,000 years ago, the ship contained the dropper people, who were unable to fix the craft. Stranded on earth with no hope of returning home, this story tells of their short lives here, they explain how most are killed by the local human population, in the end the last remaining members die in the cave. Russian researchers requested the discs for study, and allegedly several were shipped to Moscow. Once there, it is said that they were scraped for loose particles and put through a chemical analysis which revealed that they contained large amounts of cobalt and other metallic substances. As recorded in the Soviet magazine Sputnik, Dr. Vyacheslav Seyaziv describes an experiment where the discs were supposedly placed on a special turntable, whereby they were shown to vibrate or hum in an unusual rhythm, as though an electric charge is passing through them. However, fast forward to present day and no evidence survives of the discs, nor Tsumungi himself, nor the ridicule he received which cost him his life. It appears as though the discs have been skillfully transformed into an apparent hoax. Ben Kerola remains one of China's most remote regions, its mountains reach as high as 5,000 meters, a new expedition is being prepared to this remote place, largely funded by Chinese media companies.  Ancient U-parts are undoubtedly one of the most interesting subjects in regard to lost antiquities. Many of these artifacts, due to the locations in which they are found within, or the immense age displayed within the erosion seen upon the object, makes them one of the most controversial areas of study. How can one answer the question of how an iron pot is found within a solid lump of coal within a seam over 300 million years in age, or how the clear imprint of a chariot wheel is found fossilized deep within a mine in Russia? These artifacts, found at hundreds of feet deep in sediment, or displaying a wooden handle petrified into coal, display an undeniably immense age, and as such, are solid pieces of evidence to support our posit, of there having been a series of now lost civilizations stretching far into the past. Nature is infamous in being cyclical. Why then would we not be permitted by mainstream academia to presume this be the case for the climates of the Earth as well? Regardless of this digression, however, the subject of tonight's video is an incredible artifact which we believe to be that of an ancient U-part. However, due to its incredible characteristic, is being masqueraded as that of a much later creation by a far more recent ancestor. Known as the Sword of Gougeon, this intriguing artifact has somehow resisted the effects of time, and although it is enormously old, is seemingly as sharp and as shiny today as the day it was made. This remarkable characteristic, although unexplained, is not the only interesting thing about the sword. It also features an incredibly old form of writing. Eight characters are written in an ancient script, now known as Bird Worm Seal script, literally Birds and Worms characters, owing to the intricate decorations of the defining strokes, it is very old and is attested to be a variant of seal script. In 1965, while an archaeological survey was being performed along the second main aqueduct of the Zhang River Reservoir in Zhengzhou, Ubei, the series of ancient tombs were discovered. A dig started in the middle of October 1965, ending in January 1966, eventually revealing more than 50 ancient tombs. More than 2,000 artifacts were recovered from the sites, including the sword, having been found inside a casket together with a human skeleton. The casket was discovered in the December of 1965 at the Wangshan site No. 1, 7 km from the ruins of Ying, currently called Jinashang, once the ancient capital of Qiu. The sword was found sheathed in a wooden scabbard, finished in black lacquer. The scabbard had an almost airtight fit with the sword body. Unsheathing the sword revealed an untarnished blade, despite the tomb being soaked in underground water for over 2,000 years. How did this sword retain its incredible condition? Why does it seem as if it is resistant to aging? What sort of metallurgy did the swordsmith once use to create such an amazing object? It is clearly an ancient upart, and one we postulate has an origin now hidden within the bowels of history. It is a remarkable thing, and as such, is highly compelling. In our previous video, we presented a hypothesis, a theory believed by many, one of a now lost or possibly hidden race of ancient giants. Surprisingly, however, recently, although China is seen as an infamously secretive country with many tombs and ancient pyramids of gargantuan proportions rarely aerial photographed, let alone explored. It seems that they have, at last, stolen the archaeological world stage, with the announcement of a discovery which we may relish, but those whom these remains rest just beyond the clutches of. We would presume rather get a hold of themselves to study, and then store away at hidden archives, far from public view, an ongoing effort we have personally read of, dating back to the early 1900s. An ancient graveyard, complete with over 500 giant human remains, has not only been accidentally discovered but publicly exhumed and most crucial of all photographed for all the world to see within China. Could this be a retaliatory move with other motives at play? If our previously mentioned theory is true, it would enable man to explain the inexplicably seemingly impossible size of many of the world's megaliths, and indeed still standing megalithic structures of the world. How a pyramidal, treasury, and many other ancient architectures, lintels, and topstones, often weighing many hundreds of tons, were not only transported from quarries many hundreds of miles but placed aloft many meters, with seeming ease. Furthermore, we have in the past not only postulated and have also presented reams of witness testimony and photographic cooperation, still to be found in newspaper archives across the western world, describing these finds, but also the Smithsonian's efficiency in not only dealing with the matter, but disappearance of any further reporting, thus exploration. It's also supporting the reason for lost pieces of the puzzle which is inhibiting us from unlocking the secrets to these sites' construction. Perhaps we may never know the true motivations for such a controversial exposure in China, but nonetheless, the resulting fallout of proof presented for our community is a step closer to the truth, the untangling of a tired and tangled web of lies in which many have weaved. For at the bottom of Pandora's Box, there is always hope.


Good afternoon. My name is Glenn Vanderberg. I am playing the role of the Enterprise guy today. I decided to dress the part. So Rubyists have an awkward and strained relationship with the Enterprise. Well, actually, before I get into that, I want to quickly get the blatant self-promotion stuff out of the way. I work for Relevance. We do a hosted program called Run Code Run. We think it qualifies as not an enterprise-y tool. So Rubyists have this awkward, kind of strained relationship with the Enterprise. And some of us want, and in fact, quite adequately, want nothing to do with it. And others want to break in and sell to the enterprise market and sell our services there and cutting in and out. I've noticed some clicking and stuff, I guess. You don't touch my side either. So someone to break in and sell to the enterprise market. Some want nothing to do with it. Some of us in the Ruby community are in the enterprise and want Ruby to break in and be able to play there. And it's happening to a greater or lesser degree. And some of us are outside the enterprise, but we would love to be the saviour and help our enterprise brethren throw off their chains and be free within their environment. So a couple of years ago, there was Joe O'Brien, who I don't guess is in this room, and Edgecase hosted a conference in Columbus called E-RubyCon that was focused on Ruby in the enterprise. And I gave a keynote there. Why is that relevant? Well, the talk I'm giving today, I actually gave there earlier this year as a sequel to that first talk. And so in order to set the stage, I need to talk about the first talk for just a little bit and kind of let you know where I was coming from. The first talk was called Enterprise-Sham Enterprise. And the thrust of the talk, the conference as a whole was, is Ruby ready for the enterprise? And so, I'll stand just like this. This is why I don't like microphones. So the talk was called Enterprise-Sham Enterprise. And the conference was about, is Ruby ready for the enterprise? And I had developed this idea that the problem with Ruby in the enterprise, the mismatch between Ruby and the enterprise, is not Ruby, it's the enterprise. And furthermore, maybe even that's not the case. Maybe it's that the enterprise, maybe it's that the enterprise doesn't really know what they need. And they've been sold a bill of goods, so to speak, about what enterprise software is and what enterprises need to build software. And so that was really the topic of my talk. And so the enterprise tool market summarized. Here are tools that will let you build software quickly, cheaply and with below average developers. That's a bit cynical and overstated and oversimplified, but that's not too far from the truth. And, but really, if there's anything that enterprises need to know about their software is that most of the challenges of enterprise software are about the enterprise and not the software. And if there's anything, you know, big enterprises or more commonly big enterprise tool vendors, when they talk about enterprise software, they talk about high volumes and scalability and manageability and this and that and the other. And, you know, none of the stuff we work on has any of those problems, right? In those respects, enterprise software is generally no worse than little startup software or some of the kinds of things we do. And in often case, the challenges are much easier in enterprise software when you're in a constrained environment building intranet applications and things like that. So the common enterprise idea of what is different about enterprise software I think is dead wrong. And really, if there's any one characteristic that enterprise software has that the rest of the software we build does not, it's that if you're writing enterprise software, you have to assume your code will still be in production in 30 years.  And maybe 30 years is an exaggeration, but I think you get the point. And if there are tools that are really well suited to being enterprise tools and solving more problems than they cause, then those tools need to help us solve that problem and not the typical problems that enterprise tools are aimed at. And finally, I closed with this great quote from Kent Beck that I just always pull out. Listening, testing, coding, designing, that's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something. So then, now it's time for this talk when I'm talking about existing enterprise tools and big tools for the enterprise and exactly why they are bad for the enterprise instead of as they are sold being just what the enterprise needs. I'm gonna talk about the enterprise tools. This isn't a particularly Ruby heavy talk, but those of us, well, in fact, it's a Ruby agnostic talk more or less, but for those of us who are doing Ruby work and working in enterprises or trying to sell our services into enterprises or in some cases trying to build libraries and tools that help Ruby meet enterprise needs, I think this will be valuable. I think most of us are in a position to care about the relationship with Ruby and the enterprise even if we don't actually want to be playing in that space. So by way of giving credit, a lot of this work came out of a project that we did with Verizon Business, which boy, if there was ever a big enterprisey customer, that's it, and we learned a lot from this project and I wanna make it clear. The way we learned this was not by watching what Verizon Business did and saying, boy, you wanna do anything but that. They've actually been a really good customer force in a lot of ways and the group we're working with is not very enterprisey, but they have a big concern about how their enterprise works. They see how we work compared to the way they work and they wanted to talk to us about how maybe they could learn some lessons from the way a small Ruby shop develops software and improve their efficiency and responsiveness and things like that and we worked together with them to think about it. They actually, there've been a lot of companies that have looked at bringing agile methods or agile tools or lighter weight tools or whatever into big enterprises and they tend I think to usually have the wrong focus and Verizon had just the right focus which is, which was, they didn't come at it as how do these tools and methods need to change to meet us? It was how do we need to change to meet them? So I wanna tell you a little bit about what we've got and part of it, one of the guys we were working with there led me to learn a lot about the way American manufacturing changed in the 1970s and some of the roots of that movement and how we might apply it to not directly to software today but to thinking about software today. And of course a lot of people are doing this but I'll give an overview. This is a picture of the United States factory in the 1970s. Well maybe not, but so manufacturing in the 1970s was in the doldrums in the United States and our butts were being kicked by Japan and Germany and other countries that kinda had a better view of what manufacturing was all about. And a lot of things and a lot of people went into kind of changing this to the extent that it changed and it did changing it a lot better. But one of the key insights was a complete change in the way inventory was treated for the purpose of accounting. At that time inventory was treated as an asset and it's easy to see how this might be, right? You had raw materials coming into your factory and you were assembling them and thereby adding value to them and the inventory was a completed product ready to sell or in some cases a partially completed assembly that was much further along towards being ready to be assembled into a completed project. Therefore it was farther along the line from raw material to generating value for the company and it was treated as an asset. What people began to realize is that, or was, that that way of thinking about inventory put a lot of the wrong incentives in place for people in a manufacturing business. If inventory is an asset, we want more of it. And so we'll ramp that up and there are all kinds of hidden costs that go and as I'm telling this story, I want you to think about software development in enterprises. There are all kinds of costs that go along with having a lot of inventory and some of them are obvious and some of them are not so obvious. The obvious cost is storage of this inventory, warehouse space. A less obvious cost is sort of clogging up, especially if you have partially assembled inventory, clogging up your factory space and making it difficult and more time consuming for raw materials to move in and out and people to get from one place to another to get assemblies from one part of the line to the next part. An even less obvious effect of having a lot of inventory is that it really puts a negative pressure on your R&D department. If we introduce something new and improved now, everybody's gonna want that and nobody's gonna want these last generation products we have sitting in the warehouse ready to be sold and so that'll mean we have to take a huge loss on that eventually, so we've gotta hold these new developments and new products back and not announce them until we can sell off this inventory. But meanwhile, the factory's still generating more of that inventory because the incentives are made on a departmental level rather than on a whole company level and your competitors perhaps are going full speed ahead with their research and development and introducing new products. And so, shockingly enough, some people were able to get this idea across and generally today, inventory is treated as a liability and there's been a lot of work put into just in time kinds of inventory management and supply chain thinking and completely retooling factories, but not just factories. The entire enterprise, the manufacturing enterprise, including the bean counters and how they keep track of things on the books and which part of the balance sheet inventory goes on in order to set the right incentives in place and change the way manufacturing works in manufacturing enterprises and make them profitable. So, we started thinking about how Agile would work in large enterprises and tools like Ruby and things like that. And we looked at it in both ways. How might the enterprise change to meet Agile methods and lightweight tools like Ruby and faster ways of building software? And we started with the Agile manifesto, which is always a good place to start when you're thinking about these things. And we noticed something kind of interesting and I buy this and I strongly suspect most of the people in this room buy most of these values made of gesture. We noticed this interesting thing about the very first, notice this very interesting thing about the very first thing here, which is we value individuals and interactions over processes and tools, which is a good point. But we love our tools, don't we? We pay a lot of attention to tools. I'll go with the hand mic. We pay a lot of attention to tools. We love our tools, we're devoted to our tools, we're passionate about our tools. To say that we don't value tools is ridiculous. So there's something deeper going on there. And as we went into this effort, we considered the fact, the kinds of Agile practices that we follow in most of the small businesses and startups that a lot of us work for are sort of how these principles get manifested in a particular environment, in a particular context. But maybe in a large enterprise, these principles are going to generate slightly different practices. So Agile might reasonably look a little different in that context, but at the same time we wanted to think about how the context needed to change to meet Agile tools. But we focused a lot, there were a lot of insights that came out of this project, but we focused a lot on the tools aspect. And we focused on why it is that many of, or if not most of the best and most passionate developers in our industry care a lot about little tools like this and big enterprises are very skeptical and don't like to touch them in general. So I want to talk about several different ways that enterprise tools turn out to be not just less effective than these tools, but in fact downright harmful for the enterprises in which they're used. First thing I want to talk about is context switching cost. And when I talk about context switching, please don't get this confused with multitasking, right? Multitasking has big downsides in a lot of ways, and the idea is not to do a lot of things at one time, but the idea is that we do have to switch from doing one kind of thing to another and we want to reduce that context switch cost. People have done psychological studies of programmers and one of the characteristics of good programmers is that we tend to be able to mentally switch gears quite easily both from low levels of abstraction to high levels of abstraction and from one aspect of our system to another and from the activity of coding to testing to debugging to going and reading a spec and finding out how that API call works and all those different things. So one characteristic of tools that are good for good software developers is tools that help us to context switch very cheaply. Tools that start fast, tools that allow us to drop in, do one thing and get out and switch back to a different tool. Most of the good programmers I know have pretty heavily worn alt and tab keys on their keyboards. And big enterprise tools tend to be take a long time to fire them up and once you do fire them up, you have to get in and click here and click there and click there and then it wants you to do more and stop and write documentation here please and also it tries to do a lot. I want you to stick in this tool and use this tool for a lot of different activities even though it might only be good for one or two of them. Another way to think about this is you want tools that are very easy to just hop into and hop out of. A vehicle like this is a good model for the kind of software tools that are really good for rapid software development. They're specialized. You hop in and you hop out as compared to a different kind of vehicle that getting into and getting out of is quite a chore and in fact once you're there you want to stay for a while or you've sort of missed the point. Good software tools tend to do one job at a time and big expensive costly enterprise tools try to do a lot. I'm not particularly happy with this picture because the intent is to show something that tries to do too much and is a bad idea and frankly I would love to have that tool but I think you get what I mean. I actually found a lot of pictures that illustrated my point better but that one was just so beautiful I had to go with that anyway. We have a design philosophy in our code of do one thing well a class, a method, a test or tool should pick one thing and do it well and you get multiple things that do one thing well and you put them together to work together to do a larger thing well and that philosophy works really well for our tools as well and enterprise tools tend to try to do a lot all at once. Why is that do you think? You can charge more. Yeah, I think that's the big reason there are a lot of ancillary reasons that support that but I think that unless it does a lot you can't charge much money for it so let's bundle some more things in. The feature checklist one illustration of the right kind of tool is it's often very hard to explain to for one of the better words enterprisey types why we need both RSpec and Cucumber in so many ways they seem like they're attacking the same problem but we like them both and we use them for what to us seem like very different things and one excels at one kind of testing and one excels at another kind of testing and they use different vocabularies and this is a very fine granularity I think of tool specialization but it doesn't feel too fine to me it feels just right and enterprises would prefer to have just a few tools that each do a lot than a whole bunch of tools that do one thing well and yet I think that ultimately a few tools that do a whole bunch is a harmful strategy I want to talk about two kinds of craziness typical enterprise tools if you read the sales brochure about what they're going to do what they will do for you what they allow you to do you'll almost always find something in there that's like oh cool but why would you ever want to do that and I'm not sure it's a good idea and in the effort to throw more and more features in and build up that sort of sales checklist you end up with do everything tools that try to do some frankly crazy stuff and we all know how businesses are once they've spent money on something they want to use it it's a bit facile to blame that for the fact that when given these tools programmers do crazy things because when we have a tool in front of us and it does something we like to use it to but there's another kind of craziness and it's a craziness that's actually good and that enterprise tools usually prohibit which is the craziness of completely stepping outside the box and look at things that have happened in just the ruby part of our field over the past few years and the changes that have come about and some of the, you know what a lot of enterprises would see as really complicated deployments with you know Nginx and Thin and then Rails running behind that and Redis server out there and the database and you know a solar instance running that you push indexing and search requests to and stuff like that that's the kind of crazy things, crazy things that developers need to do to solve problems quickly and efficiently and yes it's a little complex but in every case it's you know picking a little tool that'll do the right thing instead of having to implement it all yourself or integrate it all into one big thing and integrating those tools together in lightweight ways and you end up with something that's actually really powerful and flexible and in every case or at least in most cases we're trying to use the right tool for the job and the typical enterprise software development tool actively prohibits that kind of branching out and experimentation and grow and using small pieces loosely joined so to speak. There are kinds of craziness that we'd rather not be pushed into but at the same time we'd like to reserve the right to be a little crazy sometimes when it seems appropriate. Not long ago I probably shouldn't even start this unless I'm sure I can remember the whole story but you know every now and then there's media outlets and media companies, newspapers and music publishers and everything else realize that boy they should really try to get control of how people distribute and use what they produce and not too long ago I think it was Reuters and I heard somebody say something it was the AP made an announcement of they were going to start putting strong digital rights management in all their wire articles and they had this vision this power pointy slide kind of vision for how this was all going to work and anybody with a dose of technical chops knows that this is lunacy and it could not possibly ever work and so some technologist somewhere had told had sold the AP something crazy something that could never possibly work and John Gruber at Daring Fireball I love this line he said AP just got sold some magic beans a lot of enterprise tools I think are selling magic beans Enterprise tools often have impenetrable shells they might do deep magic inside but in the effort of being easy to use or perhaps easy to train people to use because that's one of the things that vendors are on the hook for is to train developers to use their tools they have a simplified API or a declarative API or configuration checkboxes and a tightly constrained list of things that you can do it might be a big list but nevertheless it's not extensible this is what this tool will do and you can get it to do this and that and the other and this list of 50 things but what if it's what if the one thing you need today is not on there most of the tools that we tend to know well so one example of this is plotting and reporting and charting packages there's a whole family of them and they're usually declarative in either through a graphical user interface or through some sort of language you declare what you want this chart to be and where you want it to get the data and how it should be plotted and things like that and as long as you are happy with the different kinds of plots that provides you're in good shape but if you want to do something a little fancier you're not and there are tools and they're more programmer oriented tools and they tend not to have as fancy sales brochures but there are tools with what I like to call an onion skin API where there's a nice simplified constrained outer layer but then there's an escape hatch and you can peel that back and get to the next lower level API that that outer API is built on and that's documented too and so you can take a little bit more control if you want to and then you can peel that back does this sound like anything that people in this room know? Coco? Active record? That's my favorite example Active record you can peel back as much as you want and get down to the level of just throwing raw sequel in there you want to do that all the time? No but on every project I've ever worked on with Active record there was probably at least one query where we ended up throwing a reasonably complicated sequel fragment in but to use Dick Gabriel's words it's not the right thing it's not clean and pure and nice and architecturally pleasant but it's extremely pragmatic and it lets developers move fast and get what they would need to do done in a reasonably clean way and it doesn't take the power away from us which is the most important thing they'll come at you sideways it's how they think it's how they move sidle up and smile hit you where you're weak sort of man they're like the scent leaves hard kills you never ask a lot of enterprise tools force us to come at problems sideways integration tools are particularly like this I want to communicate with that thing over there great! and we've got an API and it's got a data format and we've got a data format and if you'll just buy this integration bus that sits in the middle all you've got to do is make that tool communicate with the integration bus and then make your thing communicate with the integration bus and you're set okay and the beauty of it is if you ever need to get other things to communicate with those two things it's already there and you have this one common format that you can use across your enterprise the problem is that right now we just need to get from here to there and sticking this integration bus in the middle takes us sideways and really it doesn't simplify the problem at all it just doubles it now instead of making A talk to B you need to make A talk to C and B talk to C and in my experience and I've worked in a lot of enterprise software situations that that future scenario of you need to make other things talk to all of these things somehow doesn't really ever come to pass not enough to make it worth all this sideways effort some tools come with their own ecosystems so let's talk about finished robot overlord tools name an enterprise tool that sort of accretes its own ecosystem within an enterprise all of your familiar with them web sphere oracle active directory Ruby on rails we'll take this outside what? unicenter clear case yeah you don't have to convince me and this is one of the things that we really recognized a lot I want to show you I have permission from Verizon to show you this I want to show you something we did a model we built we started building a model of incentives remember I talked about the the whole I think it's probably over here we talked about the whole story of manufacturing inventory being counted as an asset rather than a liability and I think there are a lot of similar stories in enterprise software situations where the way people account for things the way budgets are controlled and the way results are evaluated and performance put all kinds of negative incentives in place and we started trying to model this using an interesting tool called flying logic and there's this giant awful model I can't figure out how I've got a new laptop it used to be just a key so we started modeling this and this is a giant horrible model and we think we're about 10% done with modeling incentives and dependencies within large, typical large IT organizations and so I want to collect some of this and throw in on this one box called tools and blow that up so let me just do it this way so in the back you won't be able to see a lot of this but I'll point it out to you so there's all kinds of different different things we plotted out here and there's one I want to focus on of how tool enterprise tools cause problems and we're particular talking about really expensive ones that have their own ecosystems volume purchase agreements have price benefits for the enterprise we like to think of this all happening because the the CIO likes to play golf and the Oracle salesman goes out and plays golf and buys him drinks and sometimes that happens but it's not always that nefarious I mean people who control the purchasing for large enterprise groups fall prey to the same kind of marketing baloney that we do when you know it's like hey it's on sale I could save money I didn't know I needed it five minutes ago but you know it's on sale I can save money so you have things like you know well we can use MySQL for free or buy Oracle and save a hundred thousand dollars right what are you going to do so what this means is that companies buy these enterprise licenses and they buy they get a site license and but that means that the IT departments have to create groups around those tools because they require this kind of support structure and so again we like we typically think of it in a simplistic way as well it's a sunk cost and the company wants to make good on that cost and somebody will look you know really stupid if we spend all this money on Oracle and nobody uses it but again it's often a lot more complicated than that and so they create these groups around the tools and it has all kinds of other negative effects getting results from the tools requires engagements from the tools group and if people don't want to use it it's more than just the guy who is responsible for the purchase looks stupid the people who are controlling the tool start to fear for their jobs right and they're agitating for wider use of this so that they can stay employed and so there's a whole bunch of other things here and I won't go into all of it because you probably don't care that much but we really found that tools that have their own ecosystems are a horrible cause of inertia in large organizations and tools that are sort of human scale and that programmers can understand and install and deal with and manage and control themselves are valuable precisely because they avoid the need for tool related groups within the IT organization and all the bad things that come with those a lot of enterprise tools treat the symptoms and I'm going to speed up here a little bit but I'm going to just give one example which is near and dear to my heart which is rules engines how many of you have worked with rules engines how many of you think they worked really well for the situation where you used them I'd love to hear your story so I think there's a place for rules engines I think they are applicable to certain domains and when I use them I like to build a good domain model and encapsulate the rules engine behind part of that where it really makes sense but often rules engines are touted as sort of being right at the center of an enterprise architecture and so I'm talking about treating the symptoms and the reason rules engines sell as near as I can tell more than anything is because business people want to be able to change their business rules more quickly and by themselves without having to involve the IT group and programmers all of which sounds okay until a few months down the track the the business starts to learn why the IT group has certain processes in place and really these rules represent the logic of the application rules can be buggy and those rules need to be reviewed and tested and their deployment into production needs to be controlled at least a little bit and every time in my experience that rules engines have been really strongly advocated in a large IT setting they were treating a symptom rather than the problem and the symptom was that business people couldn't get changes into the system fast enough but the real problem was that for whatever reason the IT group was not responsive enough and the best answer in that case is to work on making the IT group more responsive bringing the rules engine in has all kinds of problems because basically the business people are now in a sense managing source code and they don't have the tools in place to do that effectively but also it kind of makes the IT group defensive and postpones dealing with the real problem which is that they're not responsive enough enterprise tools end up sticking the IT organization in a time bubble enterprise tools are big and unwieldy usually and the cycle of getting them into the enterprise takes a long time you have to go through a survey to choose a tool and then the purchasing process goes on and then comes training and a learning curve and then the long period where the tool snakes its tendrils into every part of the organization and by this time months have gone by how many different web server technologies have the rails community gone through in that amount of time by the time one tool gets into a sizable enterprise I think we raced through Lighty and fast CGI and mongrel and thin and now we're on to unicorn and so part of the goal of enterprise tools is actually to slow down innovation and slow down experimentation and be more cautious and I can actually see that sometimes that's a valuable goal but meanwhile the general pace of innovation and change in the software world is increasing and IT groups and enterprises are falling farther and farther behind all the time they're thinking they're pretty hot now because they're adopting Java in a lot of cases, those are the worst of them but it's true, there are a lot out there that are like that solving people problems with technology, I don't need to talk about that one too much just aiming for too much control once you get above a very large size at all command and control doesn't work when even the US military understands that centralized command and control is not a bad idea it's time to start looking for something else and a lot of enterprise tools are about preventing people from making mistakes and if you prevent people from making stupid things from doing stupid things that's usually good but the problem is that it usually comes at the expense of also preventing people from doing certain smart things and far better than control is the combination of facilitation and feedback don't make it difficult for people to do things in fear that they might make a mistake make it easy for them to do things and at the same time make sure you get rapid feedback so that mistakes can be seen and caught quickly and corrected before too much is lost obviously there are places in the process where mistakes are more costly than others and you need controls around some of those but in general facilitation and feedback is a better choice and the typical enterprise tool is more oriented towards control so we're back to the manifesto again and I started this with a question about why this is and why we all say we buy that when really we all love our tools and I would like to suggest that when you see this you think about a corollary to that first one which is yes we believe in individuals and interactions over processes and tools and as a part of that since we need tools to make us more effective we value tools that enable people over tools that control and constrain just like these thank you very much


Right here, this is Dave Vellante of wikibon.org and we're live, day two, Oracle Open World. In the Moscone Center, John Furrier, my colleague and co-host, it's a good interview. NetApp, just really focusing on business value. Very SAP-like in that regard. That guy, that guy was smooth. I mean, he was good, I'm going to try to get them to get Billy Bean to come in the Cube, author of Moneyball, obviously the movie's out with Brad Pitt. He's here giving a talk at the NetApp booth and I got to tell you, NetApp not known for their marketing but getting Billy Bean here to do a guest appearance in their booth, obviously big data. It's a focus, it's great timely, good move, great move by NetApp and that's great marketing because let me think about the movie Moneyball, Dave. And I hope we get him on an interview because that's good. Billy Bean is the author, I'm not the author. He's a subject of the book, Moneyball by Michael Lewis but Billy Bean was the general manager of the A's which now the movie's out with Brad Pitt. He's the protagonist in the book really. Who first ran the numbers and is a fascinating book, the book's phenomenal but Moneyball was about how he used big data to take the A's from the seller with no payroll to compete against the likes of the Yankees and the Red Sox who had huge payrolls. Essentially, like that's Oracle, right? The Yankees would be like Oracle, right? And the A's would be like a startup, right? So he used essentially big data techniques to essentially compete and this is what big data is all about. He used stats and information, analytics to get a competitive advantage. The amazing thing about that book is Billy Bean was an unreal athlete, right? And he was the one when he went to the, whatever the equivalent of the baseball, football combine is in baseball. You go there, he ran the fastest, jumped the highest, tracked down the flyboats. You know, the Scouts would see him there, their jaws would drop, I got to have that guy. And he played, I think he played for a number of Mets organizations and others. He was a bust in the major leagues. He had all the skills, all the tools, just was a total bust. And then through a series of... Well, Billy Bean is the legend, obviously the book and now the movie. And so by NetApp having him in the booth at two o'clock today, if you're at Oracle Open World, you're watching this, go to the NetApp booth because Billy Bean will be doing a speech from two to two 30. We're going to try to get him here at this table and talk to us about big data techniques. As an analyst, that's the opportunity today. So this is why I'm bullish on Hadoop and big data. Anyone in the business, an analyst, they don't have to be a programmer, can use their knowledge and use big data techniques in real time to get a competitive advantage. So there's a Billy Bean out there in every organization to make their company successful. And I think it's a brilliant move by NetApp to market Billy Bean here at Oracle Open World when the subject is big data and hats off to NetApp. And data is all about finding value and value sometimes isn't necessarily saying, oh yeah, this is like fruit since the Red Sox, manning Ramirez, paid him 180 million, call Crawford, paying him $20 million a year. That's obvious, anybody can go do that. What Billy Bean used the analytics for was to find value where others didn't see it and statistics and data were how that occurred. He was an analyst and that's exactly why big data is relevant and things like that. They never wanted anything with that approach. They got there. They made the post season, they won the division. You know, the premise of the book was when you get to the post season, now anything can happen. I don't know, maybe that's where the expensive players step up. That's why they're paid so much, I don't know. Well, anyway, good interview by NetApp, great job there. That was good, thank you. We're here at Oracle Open World. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and we're live on the air. We've had over 150,000 people watch today. Thank you very much for watching. We're covering all the news from Oracle Open World in San Francisco, California, where the show is so big that the city of San Francisco has shut down Howard Street and the surrounding areas to accommodate Oracle Open World and Java One. And Java One, the Hilton, other part of town. But it's one big, huge event. Hard to get a table at a restaurant. Everyone's having a great time. Good business discussions, great networking, a lot of partying, serious amount of high tech and energy going on here, Dave. Yeah, a lot of business going on. You know, it was interesting, got a couple of events last night. It's interesting to note the degree to which Oracle partners in the field with the big consultants, the Deloites, the KPMGs, the Accentures. I mean, those guys are associated with the money, the wallets, right? I mean, a lot of suits, a lot of big deals going on. You know, a lot of high-end consulting activities. That's really Oracle's space. That's what they're all about. So we've had a lot of guests on today. We had Juniper Networks. We just talked to NetApp. We had Juniper Networks. We've had a lot of good guests come on. We had Q-Logic earlier. We talked about the iPhone, Apple announcement covering in Cupertino, California. So, you know, we're in San Francisco, Oracle Open World. Apple has the announcement of the iPhone 4S in Cupertino. We've been covering it live. Tons of stories on SiliconANGLE.com, Alex Williams, Clint Finley, Kristen Nicola out there covering everything. All of our writers working hard, art, kit. We got on the Wikibon side. We got Jeff Kelly, Stu Miniman's at Interop right now covering Interop. So give us the update on what Stu's up to on Wikibon side. So what's going on in Wikibon, Dave? Yeah, Stu covers virtualization and networking for us and Interop, as you know, long-time historical networking show. It's all Stu's peeps. He's got to be there. He'll be covering Convergence. You know, I actually didn't ask Vaughn about FlexPod. That's, you know, their Convergence strategy. But, you know, Vblock, HP Converged Infrastructure, FlexPod, I would even put, you know, some of Oracle's, I guess, exologic products in there. All about converging networking and storage and servers. That's Stu's area. Jeff Kelly really focused on big data. Of course, David Floyer, Nick Allen focused on virtualization and cloud. You know, working with SiliconANGLE, cloud, mobile, big data, really the three pillars that we focus on. And they're good ones to be in. So, you know, there's a lot of news going on, honestly, not all good news. I just got a tweet from my good friend on Twitter right now, TechStockRadar, great guy. Told me Acme Pack had provided third quarter financial update. They're down huge. And according to TechRadar, TechStockRadar, which is a great analyst out there, who's got a great subscription newsletter, down 28% after hours, issued negative Q3 pre-announcement. So, not all good on the networking front. Acme Packet. It's a real company. The Road Runner. So, Acme Packets down significantly. The ticker symbol is APKT. They're down 25%. So, well, that's after hours. Look at the after hours number down 25%. So, they're up for the day. But after hours, because they announced after the bell, they're negative earnings. So, again, I reported, and the Juniper guy was, you can see the Juniper guy was very, not combative, but he was definitely edgy because I reported on Saturday that Juniper laid off 3% of its staff, which they confirmed they had layoffs, but would not confirm my number of 300, which put it around 3% of their overall company. He's a bit defensive. Three, he got a little bit defensive.  He's been beating around the block. But, you know, he's reported by Moody Gray Executive. I like Juniper, but you know what? They definitely would not confirm the 300 number. And 300 is a lot of people to lay off. So, it's newsworthy enough. No one picked it up.  And they're the only ones who picked up Wall Street Journal. Nobody picked it up because the Juniper PR machine absolutely denied the layoffs and actually tried to circumvent my report by saying that they're actually adding headcount. So, I don't know who to believe. I know for a fact that I've confirmed and Juniper's confirmed, 300 people were laid off and their PR team would not admit the 300 but actually try to spin it to the Wall Street Journal and cherish wishes of the world that they're actually gaining headcount. So, it's kind of shaky PR on Juniper's side, but my point is they're retooling. Juniper's retooling, I love their story. ACME packets down, problems in the networking business. And Dave, however, the shining light in the networking business is HP. HP's doing very extremely well. And the news today from HP is that they've promoted Bethany Mayer officially as Senior Vice President General Manager of the networking group. That'll be up on siliconangle.com. She was on theCUBE at HP Discover. So, HP doing really, really well in the networking area. We've had them on theCUBE, gone to HM, gone to EA, VP of Marketing. Well, congratulations to Bethany. I'm actually very impressed with her. She's, you and I met her over a year ago out at HP, very understated, very smart, has a technical background but also very strong marketeer, has been in the networking business, obviously has the confidence of Dave Donatelli, the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Server Storage and Networking Division. So, that's a big, big promotion for her. I think she did a great job of marketing converged infrastructure. That was her baby. Really did a fantastic job there. Crazy day in the market today, John. The Dow was down, you know, big, early. This is Bethany right now. You're looking at Bethany Mayer right now. She is, was on theCUBE. She was a marketing executive now and she took the interim spot as General Manager for the Networking Division, Dave. Because Marius Haas left the company to join KKR. Now, Marius Haas ran Corporate Development for HP, was responsible for the EDS merger, ran that thing end-to-end, did the whole integration, acquisition integration, and he came from Compact. So, Bethany Mayer, rising star at HP. Let's see what she can do. She's a junior executive growing and now Senior Vice President. Let's see what she can do at HP. And who knows, maybe she could be one of the ones promoted from within. Yeah, well, I mean, it's rare when somebody's named acting anything to then get the job, right? Yeah, she earned it. Yeah, I think that's... And she's got technical chops. So, when we talk to her, she's got a technical background. And the other thing, Bethany's savvy. And she knows that the networking group inside of HP is a good place to be right now. It's hot, and so, we're sure the best. As I was saying, John, crazy day in the market today was way down, the Dow was way down early, the NASDAQ's been up all day, the tech has been up, with the one exception being Apple, although it did rebound at the close, ended up only down two points, a half a percentage point off.  And we're here at Oracle Open World, live 2011, covering all the angles. We got David Flynn coming up at the bottom of the hour. I see David Floyer bopping around, wondering what he's been kicking around. Been out talking to Oracle practitioners, getting the inside scoop, so we should maybe grab him for a minute, see what's up with him. It's up to you, unless you want to take a quick break and come back for some news. You want to take a break and come back for some news. So let's just do a reset real quick and come back to where you and I will talk about what's going on with Apple and some of the news. Okay, great.


CHAPTER XXVI. For a refuge and an abode, Wilde could have chosen no better place than where, after his downfall, he ended his days. Paris is of cities the most clement. Paris has the shortest of memories for men's misdeeds. He judges by the present, not by the past, and religiously observes the law of prescription. In England, if a man has once fallen, he is not to rise again. There is no amnesty on our side of the channel. It is a fact that all the insults that were put upon Wilde during his life in Paris were inflicted by his fellow countrymen. From the French, he never suffered even a slight, except possibly as agents for English people, as when a maître d'hôtel begs him to leave a café, because de clientres sérieux object to his presence there. And even then, the enjoinder is delivered with apologies and an appeal to the comprehension of the exigencies of business. It is an Englishman who refuses to occupy the same chair at a hairdresser's which Wilde has just vacated, and blusters out his objection and his reason for it, so that all the shop may hear. It is a party of Anglo-Saxons who in loud voices ask Madame de Bremont to point out to them Oscar Wilde, who was present in some place of entertainment, quote, as they were curious to see what sort of a monster he really was, unquote.  Quote, he was greatly changed, had grown very stout, and the rich waves of hair had given place to a close-cut coiffure that seemed to accentuate the coarseness of his face. A small white hat added to the grotesque outline of his once beautiful head. He was clad in a suit of grey tweed, the short coat increasing the heavy lines of his figure, and giving an impression of overweight to the upper part of his body. Every vestige of the dandy had disappeared. His eyes were heavy, and the pallor of the skin added to the look of ill health, despite his robust figure. Quote, I cannot say that I ever saw him like that. I met him at times in Paris after his return from Naples. He was no longer as friendly as he had been formerly, for he seemed to bear some sort of resentment against me, because I had blamed him for going to Naples, which I considered an impolitic act of public defiance. But that he was embittered one could not but see. There was the continual irritation of impecuniosity, for in despite of the fixed income, and Douglas's boundless charities, there were many occasions on which, as he told Gide one night at a café, he was absolutely sans resource. Monsieur de Poirier told me that he found wild once, sans domicile, with his baggage held in porn at the Hotel Marsolier, and advanced the money to release it, while offering wild the hospitality of his roof. He writes the Stuart Merrill for a small loan to enable him to finish the week. Douglas states that he composed many ingenious begging letters, but gives no proof of the assertion, nor has ever any such letter come to light. Such a condition, combined with that paralysis of the brain, which was so horrid not of me, but to me, and prevented him from earning money, was enough to embitter him. I think that the only occasion on which he ever spoke with real irritation to me was in Paris shortly after his brother's death. I had condoled with him, and I had added, I hope something will come to you from his affairs. I used the word affairs in the French sense, and referred to the small, entailed estate which Willie Wilde had held, and which I supposed had reverted to his brother on his death. He snapped at the word affairs. What do you mean by affairs? He asked, quite angrily, and though I could see that he was offended, I could not for the world imagine why. On another occasion I was in the Calaisier café, and looking round, saw Wilde seated some way off at a table with smithers by his side. The picture was not a pleasing one. There was absinthe in front of the two men, but what was more disturbing was the attitude and expression of smithers. He was proposing something to Wilde, which Wilde did not seem inclined to favour, and the picture was a very sordid one of temptation. I knew the kind of proposals that smithers used to make to needy artists, and I suppose my face expressed some anxiety and some distress. Smithers noticed me looking at them, and whispered something to Wilde, and then they both jumped up and moved to seats outside the café on the boulevard. At my last meeting with him, however, Wilde was his old self. Not long after Ernest Dowson's death I was in Paris, and I went to the Hotel d'Alsace, because I thought Wilde would like to hear about it, as he had always had a regard and high esteem for Ernest Dowson. I also remembered how, on a previous occasion, he had written to me to blame me for not going to see him. I am glad you are so busy," he wrote, but sorry that you are too busy to come and see me. It was the injustice of a peeved soul. It pleased me to see with what deference I was received at the Hotel d'Alsace as a caller on M. Melmouth. Access to the great man was, however, not a matter of course. I will send up and see if M. Melmoss receives," said the landlord, and a waiter was dispatched. When the man returned, and with a thousand regrets, informed me that M. was très fatigué, far too tired to receive anybody, I wrote a message on a card and sent it up. I was then asked to montez. When I reached Oscar's door I found him waiting for me. He caught hold of my two hands and drew me into his room. I really am too tired to speak to anybody today," he said, but I don't like to send you away. The room was a small and gloomy bedroom which opened out, however, onto a larger chamber where there was the sun. Oscar was in a dressing-gown, and reminded me of himself, seventeen years previously, at the Hotel d'Caye Voltaire. Before again the table was littered with papers, the bowl containing segratins and ashes was not wanting. Some books were heaped up in disorder in a corner. On the mantelpiece was a pile of letters. I hope you weren't offended," he said, because I had first refused to see you. I am never any good in the mornings. I wasn't offended at all. I said, Mr. Champhlorie either receives or does not receive. This reference to a famous French Louvet d'Hérédoc brought us at once to literary matters. I see you have here the Émoe Camé, I said, picking up a book, and there, I added, pointing to a bottle of Pernot absence that stood on the wash-hand-stand, is the Piarian spring that inspired them. The Pernodian spring, you mean," he said with a laugh. But you are quite wrong, for it was de Moussé who used absinthe, and these exquisite poems are by Théopheil Gauthier. It came as quick as lightning, this correction of my mistake, for indeed at the moment I had thought of Alfred de Moussé as the author of the poems. Synth and poetry brought me to Ernest Dawson, but Wilde did not seem to care to hear about him. It is all so sad," he said. Ernest was an enfant roue au noir. Then he added, much of what he has written will remain. You are working too, I see, I said, pointing to the letter on his table. He answered, One has to do something. I have no taste for it now, it is a penance to me, but, as was said of torture, it always helps one to pass an hour or two. I then said, If you never wrote another line, Oscar, you have done enough to ensure your immortality, and when I said that I knew nothing about de Profundis. He seemed really pleased, and brightened. But then his face went all grey again, and I saw him glance towards the stimulant, and I was reminded of poor Alphonse Daudet in the moments just before the morphine syringe was produced, and the injection taken. He went and threw himself on the bed, exhausted it seemed, and I rose. Come and see me again, he said, Though I hardly like to ask people to see me in this room. He was referring to the poverty of our surroundings. Why, I had never noticed it, I said. What does the mise en scène matter? Qu'en pour le verre, pour vous connaît l'évresse, he said. You have become reconciled to sully prude harm, then, I said. I think now that the word «évresse» was the last word that I heard Oscar Wilde say. I said «Abiento» as I left the room, but did not hear any answer. I felt sad as I went downstairs in the gloomy and malodeurous staircase, with the maculated paper hanging from the wall, and through a dirty glazed door into the bureau. I had expected to find the landlord here, and wanted to ask him about my friend, but the office was empty. In the passage outside was a rack where the keys and the candlesticks of the lodgers were placed, and near this was pasted against the wall those rules of the establishment, which one sees in all Parisian hotels of this class. All rents are payable in advance. In devolt of payment, a locataire may be immediately sent away. Oscar Wilde would see these sordid regulations every time that he lighted his dim candle on his lumbering ascent to the dingy room where I left him. But familiar myself with all the phases of the life of which this was the usual mise en scène, I fancy my sadness must have proceeded from an instinctive feeling that I was to see my friend's face no more. Such an idea did not present itself to me at the time, and as I walked away up the Rue des Beaux-Arts, and was, a frequent pastime, endeavouring to analyse my feelings, I determined that I was sad because I reproached myself for the flippancy of our interview. We had bantered and chaffed when, perhaps. But after all, had we not done well to hasten to laughter, so as not to be forced to weep? On my way home I passed the Hotel Voltaire and looked up at the first floor windows, the windows of the suite which Oscar Wilde had occupied in those radiant days, seventeen years previously, in the days when we used to dine with the Duchess, and I was told to bring rhymes from Passey. Far away, at the end of the key, I caught sight of the statue of Voltaire, who seemed to be looking at me with a sardonic grin, the same grin with which, day by day and night by night, he would watch poor Oscar's exits and his entrances. There was some comfort in the wicked old man's cynicism, and I turned away hoping that my friend might find it also. It was a grin which ridiculed all illusions, all sentimentality, all beliefs and all hopes, which taught that the only true philosophy is to live as he, Arue, lived, trusting no one, expecting nothing from God or man, and taking out of life all that one could get by fair means or foul, a philosophy which conducted the sage of Ferney along comfortable and opulent lines to an extreme old age. During the short time that I remained in Paris on that occasion, I took the opportunity of asking people, who were likely to be informed, about Wilde. I certainly did not gather that he had acquired a bad reputation. I heard from Ari Bauer that he had been for a long time under close police surveillance, and that the police had stated that on any relapse on his part he would be immediately expelled from France, par ordre administratif, which gives the person to whom it is addressed, just twenty-four hours in which to leave the territory of the Republic, and vouchsafes no reason for the injunction. As Wilde was living peacefully in his hotel, where he was evidently liked and respected by the landlord and servants, who would daily come into contact with the emissaries of the prefecture, for a detective calls every day of the year at every hotel and lodging house in Paris, I gathered that there was nothing whatever in his conduct to call for blame or to excite suspicion. At certain cafes I was told that M. Melmouth, Le Grand-Écrivant, was a frequent, even regular, client, a fact of which the waiters and Géran seemed proud rather than otherwise. Despite literary people there was a decided feeling of sympathy towards him, only everybody wondered why he chose to live at such a bad address, and why on earth he did not make use of his talents. One great writer, since dead, quoted Balzac to me and said, Il passi servia sipalea. At an important newspaper office I was told that he had been invited to collaborate regularly, a weekly chronique at 300 francs the article. I left Paris fairly reassured about him, and was able emphatically to contradict in London many slanders that were current about his life in Paris. I told people that he was as strong as ever, and that they might be prepared to see him in a new phase, a reincarnation. He is only gathering fresh strength, I said. I did expect that something would come from his pen, that would set the whole world speaking again of him as Oscar Wilde, C-33, being forever forgotten. That was indeed to be, but alas, years after his death, the news of which came to me as a shock and a surprise some months later. The ivresse of living was over and done, the locataire had received his congé, not in default of payment, but for having paid too much. End of Chapter 26. End of The Real Oscar Wilde by Robert Charade


Hello, hello. Hi everybody. Yeah, it's wonderful to see everybody. This is a really, really exciting event. I'm sort of, you know, I'm tasked with just saying hello to everybody as they come in. And I'll be talking more later as is my, as is my custom. I'm always happy to talk for as long as people give me. But first I just, before we get into that, like the weeds of everything, I just want to thank Lucas, and just say how much work Lucas and the team have put into this symposium and frankly into everything to do with the generative efforts at CTLT. So a lot of the, a lot of the team are on screen right now. So Rich and Lucas and Judy have been doing so much work to, to get all of the generative AI stuff together. So thanks to all of you for making all of us a reality. It's just been an incredible, incredible push really to, to get all of these things up and running. So, so yay it's thanks to, thanks to everybody that, that we're here, but mainly this one I think, you know, Lucas this was, you sort of came around to this you were like I think we need a symposium I think it needs to look like this and so the reason that we're all here is, you know, thank you, thank you, Lucas. So, nice work. Well done. You did it. Congrats. So yeah so while we're just welcoming everybody I just want to say hello. And the way that the session is going to go it's not a tremendously long session it's just kind of an orientation to the whole to the whole couple day event. Lucas is going to start us off by kind of orienting us in the space. And then I will take a few minutes to wax philosophical. You know, I don't know why I'm allowed to do that but here I am and I'm just going to do that which is going to be exciting for me, and you're all going to be subjected to that which is great also for me. And then, yeah, and then we're just going to take a look at the next couple of days. I think that it's the case that every zoom link is the same for this event. Right, Lucas. Yeah. So if you've registered only for this event but you're like oh I wish I had registered for a couple of other but don't worry you can just click the same link and it's all just one one whole day of you know to hold dates and stuff all on the same link. So, yeah. Okay, well I think our numbers have kind of settled. Super excited to see everybody here and again, you know, thank you so much Lucas for putting this together it's just been this for cullian effort, and so much of your vision has gone into this and so thank you thank you I'm super proud to hand it over to you to to welcome everybody to today. Thanks for the kind words and that hopefully it doesn't all go wrong now. So welcome to the teaching and learning with gen AI symposium and what we're going to do for the next half hour is we wanted to all go through land acknowledgments and intros and then we wanted to kind of give a little bit overview around almost a thought experiment we've doing thinking about some of the challenges that the institution and societies looking at with gen AI and then at the tail end of that, I'm going to kind of go over the events and link them into that little framework we put together. So, just to begin with acknowledging that I'm coming from UBC campus which is on traditional unseated Musqueam territory, and also that I think when we think about generative AI. One of the big ethical issues is the amount of indigenous knowledge that was online, and has been scraped by these tools and has been used without permission, and I think that goes beyond intellectual property, and it starts to get us thinking about colonialism and what the impact of that might be. Let's start with just a again kind of a thought experiment that Alyssa and I were doing thinking about gen AI in teaching and learning and we put together this kind of levels of change. And the idea behind the levels of changes that at the very top there we have our foundations, thinking about our academic integrity or ethics or capacity. Then the pedagogical changes what approaches is it changing in the classroom, what opportunities are there, and then getting into institutional society changes so what new skills are we needing to learn. What's changing in our professions and disciplines, and then kind of getting to the very top. So what we need to do. How is teaching changing really in a large way. And so what I'm going to do now is walk through one and two, and then Alyssa is going to talk to us more about three and four. So, just from a foundational level. And as I'm saying this I'm like why did I put foundations at the top their odd foundations. However, I think there's kind of some key questions that a lot of us have been asking in the university community and wrestling with and by foundation level I mean kind of what we need to do today around gen AI. And one of the questions right away is what are the capabilities of these tools, and when gen AI started getting quite popular in January of this year. You probably saw there's lots of news articles there's lots of posts there's lots of articles saying this isn't that powerful I put in a question, I didn't get a great answer. And what a lot of us have seen is that this has changed really quickly and we're seeing a lot of incredible capabilities with these tools, acknowledging that they're still not experts. But we have seen a big increase in capabilities and just a couple of examples of that. We know that GPT for was able to get 90 in the 90th percentile in the standard bar exam. The study by Lee at all showed that gen AI when writing critical reflections in the context of pharmaceutical education was able to score better than the average student, and in addition was indistinguishable from evaluators couldn't distinguish the two outputs. In computer science, we've seen studies that show that GPT can score above average in first and second year computer science problems and verata who's going to be presenting later today is going to talk a little bit about some of the stuff she's seen in her own context. So we're also seeing capabilities change in terms of what these tools can do. Computer vision now is significant in chat GPT. If you use GPT voice, you can have some pretty good conversations recently I had a socratic dialogue about the state of nature with my phone, which was a slightly outputting experience. We've also seen Internet access growing and you know one of the things we said initially was that these tools couldn't access the net. And now we're seeing with being AI, the ability to crawl the net and the ability to find more recent references. So that brings up the question is how do we develop capacity as faculty members as staff with this changing. And we're hoping that through this symposium it's one way to start that capacity conversation with the capabilities I think has come some of these huge ethical challenges around this tool and it's a difficult thing to square personally is how do we deal with these ethical challenges we know that a lot of our private data and research and the world's private data has been researched and scraped and sold back to us in some ways. We know that the privacy is quite challenging these tools haven't passed the PIA. I just saw this morning the chat GPT data analysis tool. People were able to access files through it by running queries so we know these tools have leaks in them we know there's privacy problems. There's environmental questions with these tools. There's equity questions. And then finally kind of putting these together how do we think about academic integrity in these space, considering these capabilities of these tools and considering all the work we did that faculty did during the pandemic to make our institution more flexible more accessible for students with things like online exams, online approaches, how do we wrestle with this now how do we think of academic integrity, when we also know that AI detectors have been problematic, and they get a lot of positives a lot of the false negatives and human capability to detect AI in recent studies, linguists were only able to identify 38% of output generated by chat GPT. So I think this is a big challenge at the foundational level. And that brings us a little bit to the opportunity there. You know what are new ways of thinking about learning what are new ways about thinking of teaching in these environments. We have new opportunities for personalization that I don't know if we've seen before. When you think of things like I know Simon's in the room we talked about the bloom Sigma two problem, how we know the tutoring is tends to be at least according to that study, a more powerful way of or more effective way of teaching. But what does it mean now that we can have tutoring that may be scalable. How did these models augment our roles as faculty. And what are some new and emerging approaches to teaching and learning a list over to you. You think after years of this zooming that I would know where my mute button is but you know, takes me 17 seconds to find it every time thanks. Thanks, Lucas. Thanks for, for bringing us to this space and also thank you for your land acknowledgement. I think it is. I'm also joining from traditional Muslim territory in my office at CTLT. And when Lucas and I were planning this session. We had that picture from slide, you know this the other slide where is it the this one on the on my whiteboard. And Lucas said okay well I think I can speak about the foundational the pedagogical the institutional, but what do you mean when you say the singularity. What are you, what are you talking about. I can just speak about that one. So that this is falling to me. And the reason that I think it's important for us to talk about it is because once we have examined, I mean, so the questions that have been raised are like, you know, we initially met this with sort of saying okay we can do this. How do we get everybody access how do we, how do we make sure that students aren't cheating. How good is this thing really there was a lot of concern. And then we sort of moved through these layers of abstraction like now we're sort of thinking okay well how can we actually leverage this what is the role of this in our education. We're very much thinking within our shapes that we've already made our abstractions of our education and our, our system. That that we have already worked within how do we bring this tool into our into our system, so that it can help us so that it's a facilitator of our existence. And realizing maybe, or maybe kind of corner of our I realizing but without maybe grappling with the fact that this isn't just a tool that's going to help us. This is a tool that is going to take over, and that is going to, in some ways replace us, and that we will begin to rely on the same way and I think Simon you and I were talking about this it's almost like the way that we rely on electricity. It goes out what do we do we start to, everything starts to kind of collapse. How much are we going to start to rely on these tools and what is it that they can really do. You know it's really funny listening to, to how these tools can, you know beat the bar exam or beat, you know, beat various assessments of course, of course they can they're cheating these tools cheap, right they are have the ultimate open book exams and they are memorize the entire book and so of course they can beat these things it would be shameful if all the LSAT textbooks in the world didn't then produce, you know, a tool that could easily query itself and see what the answer should be to all those questions. But now that we have something that can do these things that can guess better than us and that can that can code faster than us with with better correctness. What is our role. So I think the next question that we need to ask is what is actually the human component in this. I think market forces will keep looking for cheaper options to everything that we do, whether philosophically, we want education to dramatically change maybe we have a very sort of nostalgic notion of what education should be maybe we feel like we should be in a monastery thinking philosophically about things, but the truth is the market drives what we do. And if something is cheaper, it'll probably be a success. And so what is it about, I mean we know that this is going to be cheaper for so many things. So I think that Rich and and I have been exploring how to take one of my courses and completely robotify it so that you know just basically pushing it pushing this to its limits so that we can replace me as an educator just to see how much how much I can be replaced. And I bet it's pretty, I bet it's pretty far I think you know I think it's going to do a pretty good job I'm excited to see how it goes. It's not that I'm trying to bring on my own. My own obsolescence but I think it's a good idea for us to think through how much, how much can we really be replaced and then what is our final role in this space, so that we can work on that. As educators, you know our business is education we do need to know where we fit as educators what the special sauce is that we bring. My thinking is that we, you know that human touch human human emotion human motivation pragmatics all of these things are genuinely important in education. But it remains to be seen. And I think until we've tried it until we've gotten ahead of it and tried it I really don't think we'll know. And I feel like for our university for our institution it's our job to get ahead of I guess I should have gone on one slide. What comes next. It's our, it's our job as educators to try and figure out what education will look like in 15 years, you know not I mean even in two years that's going on with dramatically changed all of those things that we've said, TAs will be, you know augmented and instructors will be augmented in 15 years what will it actually look like how many of us will there be and what will classes be like, and will there be classes and will it just be students talk to robots and then come to an office hour. I'd love to hear everybody's perspectives Celeste I see you've joined just be delighted to hear your perspective on this. I think you know that's one of the reasons that we sort of set this, you know, Lucas is going to go over the shape of the shape of the plan, but this is one of the reasons that we wanted to explore the depths of this because it is truly our mandate here at this enormous university in the class of university in Western Canada, we should really be leading the way in seeing what is coming in the next decade, so that we can, to some extent influence the space, I don't think we want to be the ones on the back foot, I think we want to be, to some extent the leaders and the, and the way pavers for the way that education is going to take shape. Luckily, we're, we are behind in some things, as everyone always is in this global world everyone's always behind in something, but we're ahead and in some other things and I think right now, we can get ahead and thinking about how our massive role is in totally revolutionizing education to really bring this on so that we can be an ally with the new approach as opposed to being just a rider of the tidal wave. So that is my, that's my, my thinking and yeah, I'm excited to explore this with everybody here.


For researchers, identifying sources of environmental contamination can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. And that's if they're lucky, because in some cases, they may not even know what to look for. In this line of work, known as non-targeted analysis, high-power detection technology is critical to generating chemical fingerprints for unknown compounds. Just as important, however, is an expansive database that matches those fingerprints to the correct compounds, but bigger isn't necessarily better. Researchers from the United States Environmental Protection Agency have shown that a promising new resource called the CompTox Chemistry Dashboard can actually outperform larger, well-established chemical databases, pointing to streamlined approaches to ideating potentially harmful contaminants. The CompTox Dashboard uses a ranking approach similar to that of the popular database ChemSpider. Both order search results according to how frequently a target compound occurs in different data sources, including scientific articles and patents. The difference lies in how those data sources are managed. The dashboard's highly curated database is limited to chemicals relevant to environmental health science, whereas ChemSpider caters to all walks of chemistry. That contrast is reflected in the number of chemicals in each database, 720,000 versus over 50 million. As a result, the researchers saw that although the CompTox Dashboard generated fewer results for a given compound, the target candidate consistently ranked closer to the top than in ChemSpider. Fewer entries, of course, could mean that some compounds won't be captured by the dashboard, but it could also mean fewer dead ends to muddle through in any given search. Because the key is to quickly but accurately identify potentially harmful compounds, future work will be dedicated to growing the database with high-quality data sources and to refining the built-in search tool. Tapping into results generated by popular internet search engines, for example, could be one way to improve accuracy. But already, the approach in the dashboard appears promising. Built by environmental scientists for environmental scientists, the CompTox Dashboard could provide much-needed guidance in non-targeted analysis, helping researchers and decision-makers assess the risks posed by unknown contaminants.


Good morning, sir. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you. Thank you. I'm proud of you. Nice to see you. To all who shall see these President's greetings, this is to certify that the President of the United States of America has awarded the National Security Medal to Lieutenant General Lincoln D. Farr, United States Air Force, retired for outstanding contribution to the national intelligence effort, given under my hand in the city of Washington, the sixth day of August, 1985, the following the citation follows. The President of the United States takes pleasure in awarding the National Security Medal to Lincoln D. Farr, Lieutenant General, United States Air Force, retired for exemplary performance of duty and distinguished service as the Director of the National Security Agency from April 1st, 1981 through March 31st, 1985. General Farr displayed inspired leadership and unwavering devotion to duty while directing and guiding the complex, highly technical and worldwide mission of the National Security Agency to unprecedented levels of success and thereby contributing significantly to the national security goals of the United States. During a period of revolutionary technological change, expanding foreign intelligence operations and expanding requirements for timely and accurate intelligence information, General Farr's combined experience, foresight and uncommon leadership ability ensured that the nation's most sophisticated intelligence systems were ready to meet the challenge. His reputation as an innovator and intelligence professional is acknowledged and regarded as of the highest caliber within the intelligence community and throughout the highest levels of the United States government. General Farr's exceptional achievements and contributions reflect great credit upon himself and the National Security Establishment of the United States and merit the award of the National Security Medal. I think we just have to wait for a few minutes until we're already in the cabinet and then we're going to do our farewell and all the press out here in the news card. You can see we made everything bloom very pretty just before this. Oh, yes. That would be great. Yeah, good morning. How are you? How much are you? Five for that. Good morning gentlemen. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. I'm going to sit here and watch this. For now. That doesn't hold. You're going to hold it or mine? I think it's a lawful for me. Just so we stay out of their way when they walk in. Oh, okay. Part of this. We had a great deal yesterday at Camp David trading market access. I am very pleased with the Prime Minister's intentions for implementing the deal for results and terms of growth of the infrastructure that we've been discussing. But there wasn't enough time yesterday for summit topics. I know that our shareholders have worked have worked closely together and well. I believe that it's essential that at the coming summit, the political declaration is some severity between us will help those who are trying to negotiate with armed reductions in Geneva, but that's enough for the Zinnia al-Wadah Prime Minister. Prime Minister Nakasone and I have just completed two days of discussions on bilateral and global issues. Our meeting has reaffirmed my conviction that the close relationship between us is of immense importance for our two peoples here at the White House. We had as always much to talk about in discussing relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, including and the defense of Japan. As you can imagine, the state of U.S.-Japan trade relations was a major topic during our meeting. And I told the prime ministers we agreed on the necessity to continue to intensify efforts to expand trade through better market access. The prime minister informed me that he is dedicated to fulfilling Japan, but are committed to a national goal of reducing Japan's trade surpluses. The prime meant fundamental policy changes, and I applauded the prime minister's commitment to leading his nation toward an economic future, particularly of manufactured and other high-value added goods. In a similar spirit, I committed my administration to his relevant ministers to pull together a broad group of high-level officials to discuss structural economic issues of mutual concern. We will continue working. We discussed a number of other regional topics focusing on Asia, and shared in particular our thoughts on the progress that Japan has become the second largest donor of economic assistance worldwide. Our governments will continue close consultations to increase the effectiveness of our individual contributions. The prime minister and I agree that we both have complex potential. But this unique bilateral relationship is mutual understanding and close cooperation. Together, there is nothing we cannot accomplish, and I might add that that was the spirit of our discussion during these past two days. The importance of promoting world peace and disarmament and of the U.S. Soviet Union is bigger, and the necessity of promoting the new round of all multilateral negotiations, also the trading system. Japan's market access is the cost of years, and holding that Japan will continue with people to this end. Our policy goal was steadily reducing the current account imbalance to one consistent with international harmony. To this end, I believe that Japan must tackle... ...a historic turn, and I am determined to accept the challenge. The President wholeheartedly welcomed this approach. At the same time, I hope that other countries come the agreement reached yesterday to hold a bilateral dialogue of high officials on structure on a global basis with adequate consideration to the Asian region. In our discussions on regional issues, the President...  Are you going to have a meeting later today, sir?


Land degradation and desertification have become increasingly important issues in recent years due to their potential impacts on human health, food security and economic growth. Remote sensing has emerged as a promising tool for detecting these changes, but there is still much debate about which methods should be used and how they should be validated. This paper reviews the existing literature on this topic, focusing on the use of multi-temporal analysis of vegetation index data. It identifies the need for further research into the development of reliable and accurate monitoring systems, including the validation of methodologies and the detection of degradation at minor intensities and magnitudes. This article was authored by Thomas P. Higginbottom and Elias Simeonakis.