Well, hello and welcome to Understand Men Now. I'm Jonathan Asley of JonathanAsley.com, and I'm so excited to be shooting this short video for you today. Our topic, the three ways to know you're in the right relationship. There's three ways to know it. Okay, really quickly, if you're new to my YouTube channel, please hit the bell and hit the subscribe so you can get notified of new content. I shoot about three or four videos per week. All right, those three ways to know you're in the right relationship. Okay, I'm gonna make a little bit of a joke here because those three ways are the exact same thing. Kind of like, have you ever heard the phrase, what's the, when it comes to real estate, what are the three most important things? When it comes to real estate, it's location, location, location. And in relationship, it's the same thing. It's if you have to analyze the relationship, there is the big problem. So right off the bat, if you're watching this video about a relationship you're in, you might already have a problem, okay? Because if you're analyzing the relationship, analyzing the relationship, analyzing the relationship, if you're constantly analyzing the relationship, then chances are you're not in a good relationship. So if you're concerned, if you're not in a good relationship, I've got three books I wanna recommend for you today. Well, technically it's gonna be four books because first off, I want you to check in with yourself. One of the most important things when it comes to romantic love is your own sovereignty, your own power, and not giving your power away to another human being. Often, ladies, oftentimes I see this from you, you're giving your power to men, you're adopting this philosophy or this need of, I need you to love me for me to feel good about myself. I need you to love me for me to feel good about myself. So I really wanna encourage and embracing self love, self love. And if you're not familiar with my book, What the Heck Is Self Love Anyway? Written by Jonathan Asley. Check out the link below, it's called selflovethebook.com because it starts within. Three ways to know you're in the right relationship, it first starts within because when you are actually don't need to analyze the relationship because you're in your sovereignty, you're in your power, you can have clarity. And clarity builds confidence and confidence builds better choices. Remember those three things. Clarity builds confidence, clarity builds confidence, confidence builds better choices. So I wanna help you, if you feel that if you are analyzing the relationship, I wanna introduce you to a new book, I just purchased this, I just got it a few days ago. I just started skimming it, so I'm not fully familiar with it, but it's called Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay. Good, Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay, okay? Now, not all of you are in a relationship, but what I like about what I've skimmed through the book so far, it's actually a template for choosing the right guy and actually knowing if you're in the right relationship or not.  I've talked to hundreds of women who have gone through a breakup and it's fascinating to me how many say the same thing? I knew in the first, second, or third week, something was off, but I went against my better judgment. I went against my better judgment. And so, have you ever experienced that before? Have you ever gone against your better judgment? Please post a comment below. I wanna hear about it. Also, if you have questions, please post it below. I read almost every single one that comes through and I do my best to respond. So feel free to post a question, regarding this topic. Because here's the thing. Those women who went against their better judgment, this is what I'm trying to educate you on, is to make better choices. And it starts with clarity. And there's another fantastic book. I've mentioned this tons and tons of times. It's by Barbara DeAngeles. Are you the right one for me? Are you the right one for me? This is a fantastic book. And look at how thick that is. I gotta tell you, as a coach, I refer to this book regularly, to actually mostly to help me with fodder for shooting these videos. But there's so much great content in understanding human behavior, understanding the mechanics of another human being.  Because this isn't singular to trying to figure out if it's the right man. Men should be reading this too.  Because choosing a good, look at, what's it? Esther Perrell says, the quality of our life is a representation of the quality of our relationships. Breathe that in. The quality of our life is the representation of the quality of our relationships. By the way, she didn't say it exactly like that. I'm paraphrasing a little bit. But the point is, the quality of your relationships, both your professional relationships, your personal relationships, your intimate relationships, will vastly affect the quality of your life. So one of the things I do as a coach, and if you're interested in coaching with me, check out the link to schedule a free discovery call. Because one of the things I do as a coach is I help teach you how to vet for the right guy. How to vet for emotionally available men. Let me reframe that. Emotionally mature men. If you haven't listened to my podcast, The Five Signs of Emotional Maturity, please check it out. I talk about it, check out the other videos. I talk about this frequently. Because emotional maturity is so critically important. Because when a man is emotionally mature, you're not analyzing the relationship over and over again. And if you haven't watched the video I just shot, it's called The Four Things Men Do, Only Do When They Really Love You. That really gives you insight into the men they're gonna lean into a relationship. And if you need additional support and help understanding men, then I highly, this is the three things. I highly recommend you check out the book called Queens Code by Allison Armstrong. The Queens Code, another thick book. She gives so much great insight. Allison is fantastic in helping women understand men. Now she comes at it from a slightly different perspective than I do, but I totally support her work. My work comes from being down the rabbit hole with many of you, gone through divorce. I've gone through a lot of the emotional stuff. I've had a significant relationship. I'm in the trenches there with you, so I get it. So I understand men a little bit different from the surface level, but I highly recommend checking out Allison's book. I recommended three great books. Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay, Are You the Right One for Me and the Queens Code. You all should be in your repertoire to know if you're in the right relationship with a guy. And if you are constantly analyzing, analyzing, analyzing, analyzing, chances are you might not be in the right relationship. Hey, I hope this had value. Please post a comment below if it resonated with you and if you need additional support, check out the links in the description for more support from me. I'm gonna wrap up this video as I always do. First off, giving myself a big, gigantic, Jonathan Bear hug of self-love. I'm gonna reach into the camera and give me, give you a hug of love if that's okay. I'm gonna ask you to turn to someone and give them a hug of love because hugs are a great source of love and we can all use more love in our lives. Thanks a bunch. Bye-bye now.


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Hey, welcome back here on theCUBE, the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV where our colleague, John Furrier, likes to say we extract the signal from the noise. That's what we're doing here at Dell EMC World 2017. Live in Las Vegas, along with Keith Townsend. I'm John Walls, and we're joined now by Trey Layton, who is the SVP and CTO of the Converged Platforms and Software at Dell EMC. Hi guys, how are you? Good to see you. Thanks for being with us. First off, let's just talk about the show in general. Bigger, better than ever. More attendees, a lot of, I'd say excitement, a lot of good vibe, I think. But from your side of the fence, what are you feeling so far? I could not be more excited about the combination of the companies coming under the umbrella of Dell Technologies because we're finally able to be a true infrastructure company that can address the entire breadth of challenges, problems, infrastructure needs that customers have. I'm a geek at heart, and I love the client side of things. And then we've been doing rough and tough hardcore data center stuff for a long time. And a lot of the things that we're building are having the client in mind in different overarching transformation strategies. And so I'm excited about what we can do from an enterprise side. I'm really excited about tying that into the client side, I think as well. You said breadth and that you think about all the items you got in your toolbox these days. And there is not one slice of the pie that you can't cover. You know, it is very true. And I love the strategy that we have as a company that VMware is a part of the family and virtualization is a very competitive landscape. There's other software stacks out there. There's a partnership with Microsoft. There's a partnership with Red Hat. So we're able to be a very agile company and have broad partnerships that individual businesses may compete from market share. But collaboratively, we as a company in Dell Technologies are able to partner and pursue market share opportunities in a wide landscape of the industry. And really pursuing that as Gartner and IDC report $1.7 trillion of potential spend out there in IT. And we're excited to go after it. It makes our eyes light up, doesn't it? Right. So as we talk digital transformation, a lot of talk about digital transformation about not doing, we had chat on earlier about not doing the things that don't add value. Leave that to the experts. Which brings us to Converged. Can you give us a high level overview of Converged CI versus Hyper, HCI? Hyper Converged? Yeah, absolutely. So Converged infrastructure has been around for quite some time. And you think about in the early days when you would buy components and you would stitch those components together to provide a function and operational outcome for your business and the applications that you're running if you're operating from a customer perspective. Well, there was a lot of complexity and still is today in integrating an array to a compute platform optimized for virtualization with networking and sand fabrics, transporting those communications in a reliable scalable form. CI was a mechanism to abstract the complexity associated with that integration and provide an ongoing operational lifecycle experience in limiting the complexity of managing that outcome. So CI is about productizing the integrations of components that are built by different engineering teams. HCI is really a lot of software development standardized on a Dell compute platform where engineering teams are engineering and codifying the integration on the outset. Instead of building individual components and stitching them together, we're building a product that's designed to function and operate in one way. In the CI space, we used to try, try, try to convince customers ruthless standardization. The more standardization you have, the more repeatability, the lower cost of ownership. We use a number for ratio of spend. Average IT shop spends about 70% of their ongoing IT budget, keeping the lights on. 20% on new software acquisitions, 10% on equipment. I get in trouble for saying this, but I'm gonna say it anyway. We could give the equipment away and it wouldn't have an impact on the budget. If we can transform the way that you operate the infrastructure and materially impact that 70% side of the ledger, you get to transform the way the business operates and make IT agile for you. So CI gets us on that journey. ACI builds it in. They coexist. It's not one versus the other. They operate in partnership to operate of the workloads that are necessary for your environment. Some applications need the data services of a storage array. Some applications need the simple ease cookie cutter nature of building virtual machines in a very simplistic manner and scaling out the architecture in point and click operations. So let's talk about integration between the two. Is there a use case where a customer would have both CI and HCI within their same data center? Absolutely, it's happening today. So in data center footprint, then you talk edge. So in the data center footprint, there are applications out there, your cash register applications, the applications that run the economy of the business. They require data services that are resident in decades of innovation at EMC and building capabilities to ensure consistent ongoing operation data protection. The Oracle apps, the large red letter business apps that you run in your environment. A lot of them gravitate to needing the features of a storage array. There are applications that you have in your data center that are homegrown to run in an encapsulated virtual machine. HCI is converged infrastructure, packaged in software and hardware combination, optimized from the born in virtualization. And so being able to build virtual machines very easily and scale that infrastructure out are things that customers also need. So utilizing those two infrastructure strategies to support all applications in your data center is vital to, I think, any infrastructure strategy. So let's talk about the edge a little bit. One of the, I think, big concerns of CIOs, CTOs is data growth at the edge as we bring in IoT, big data. How does HCI-CI relate to those challenges? So in our HCI products, we embed cloud storage native to it. So you can actually pick your cloud provider and we'll replicate data sets to that environment for really data protection, data recovery. There are also methodologies in our architecture where you may want to centralize some of the replicated information in a central sense.  You can still do that in the CI landscape as well. We have those architectures. We've been selling edge CR solutions for a long time. We find that in a more traditional manufacturing plant where they have, again, an application that may require a bare metal operating system, not maybe 100% virtualized, needs features, the data services of a storage array, that's where at the edge we would deploy a CI platform. But I would say it's more like 99% of the time HCI, 1% of the time you find a CI requirement. It really depends on the customization required by the app and the data services needed by the app in that deployment at the edge. So let's talk about value to the organization. Where is the value in HCI? Is it only in the cost savings associated with the engineering? What about operations? Oh my gosh, so from an operations perspective, imagine buying a product that's designed to function software and hardware from the ground up in every aspect of how it's engineered. There are operations tools that we put inside of the product to manage how it works and report its health status back to operators. Performing software updates are literally a point and click operation. A lot of times in infrastructure conversations we talk about point and click upgrades. In a large data center, there's a lot of dependencies in upgrading software because you have different products. In an HCI platform, the software is literally all packaged and bundled together and just tremendously simplifies the act of performing updates. And one of the problems that we find in environments is candidly good hygiene related to keeping your infrastructure updated to not the bleeding edge code releases but the latest and greatest most secure software updates to navigate yourself around all the vulnerabilities that inevitably good-minded security professionals find out there. We want to make sure that we keep those systems updated with the most current firmware and operating environments. And HCI platforms engineer all that integration in the software, it makes it a heck of a lot easier. How do you, we've talked about a lot of choices, a lot of options, different kinds of migration paths. I mean, how do you help me get there at the end of the day? I mean, boil it down to maybe what is that basic question that you asked the end user about what their functions are and what their priorities are to help me decide what to do? Yeah, so I would start it at a very high level with any customer and that would be more around their strategy of helping formulate their strategy for infrastructure acquisition. And that's asking them, how much, what are your applications like? How well do you know your environment and your employees? There's a lot, I used to be an IT professional actually in a customer environment and I used to love to tinker with stuff. And a lot of times I would go out and I would put, I would leverage my boss to acquire technologies just so I could tinker. And a lot of technology professionals love to have that latest and greatest technology but they deal with some of the obstacles that you encounter of being on the bleeding edge. So I think one, I would understand what are the skill sets of my organization? What are the priorities of my organization? What are the applications I need to run to support my business? And so when I found that, there are some environments that have custom applications that required a simpler procurement experience, a simpler prescription on how best to integrate. In our portfolio at Dell EMC in the Converged Platform and Solutions Division, we have a Ready portfolio that's designed for build outcomes. So those organizations that want to accelerate the procurement of things that are going to work together, we sell build outcomes in our Ready portfolio. Then on the opposite end of the spectrum, we have architectures that are designed for buy outcomes, literally the integration is packaged and the value proposition is to simplify ongoing operations through life cycle assurances, release code management, ongoing validation that integrations are going to successfully operate. Now we have array based integrations and hyperconverged based integrations in both ends of those spectrums. So the first thing is, where do you fall?  When you find yourself into that spectrum, now let's talk about do the applications require arrays or do the applications lean themselves to be more virtualized, more encapsulated, capable of supporting scale out deployments that lend themselves to more hyperconverged environments. What we'll find a lot of times is organizations have requirements for both. It's trying to figure out what percentages spend, what percentage of infrastructure you want to allocate in both of those use cases and what the skill sets of your organization are to be able to handle the ongoing operations. There's a lot of good IT staffs out there that can handle the ongoing management of infrastructure. Build outcomes are great for those. There's a lot of IT organizations that are scrapped for resources and capability. They want their nights and weekends back. Buy outcomes are great for them. So that's where I would start. Got you. Well, before we let you go, I want to just make sure everybody home understands they're not giving it away. They're not giving the equipment away. It's not really going to happen. That was purely a metaphor, right? Thank you. Not going to happen. It's funny when he said that Michael Dale strolled up to the set to free. Great. Thanks for being with us. Thank you for having me. Appreciate the time. Best of luck the rest of the week. Thank you guys. Have a great show. You bet. Thank you. We continue with our coverage here at Dell EMC World 2017. Live from Las Vegas. More coming up right here on theCUBE. Cool. Thank you.


Studying in IIT Madras, I came from Chhattisgarh actually to IIT Madras for pursuing MS. Before coming here, I was using NPTEL website to have some lectures, to do some courses. And after coming here also, I attended the courses in the classrooms. What I feel is there is no difference at all between what has been uploaded to the NPTEL website and what is being taught in the actual live classroom. Those are both having resemblance. The main advantage what I feel for having the program something like NPTEL is like the depth of the knowledge that we get, that we get being taught by IIT professors, even if you are not in IIT, is exactly same. The IIT professors teach in the same manner, with the same depth, which they used to teach in their own classrooms. So it has been very, very useful for me for getting proper knowledge of the subjects. And here also it is coming handy to me in my research. If I want to have some subjects done, then I just access to the NPTEL website and do my subjects there. So it's kind of a very helpful thing for everybody of us. And I think we all should make proper use of it. And it will be very nice for everyone. Thank you.


John Stuart Mill argued that this, that this pleasure and pain, that's what's important when we're dealing with morality. He argued for what he called the greatest happiness principle. The greatest set up in his principle states that actions are right to the extent that they promote happiness and wrong to the extent that they promote the reverse of happiness. They call this theory utilitarianism. So before we really jump into utilitarianism, it's important to remember here that Mill's significant contribution to morality is not necessarily hedonism. I mean we've seen hedonism before and hedonism basically is the idea that what's important morally or what's the value morally speaking is pleasure or happiness. We've seen hedonism with Epicurus and even Aristotle to an extent, sort of, when Aristotle talks about happiness. Here, it seems like Mill is even borrowing from Epicurus and Aristotle. He uses the language of ends from Aristotle and pleasure from Epicurus. He even defends Epicurus against some critics. Now Mill's, you know, while Mill does appeal to hedonism, that's not his main contribution. That's not where he's doing something new or different here. Now what he's doing new or different here is consequentialism. What Mill claims that has moral worth is happiness or pleasure. He's going to hedonism on this route. He is doing consequentialism and consequentialism has something to say about what can be evaluated morally speaking. Not moral worth but what can be evaluated. What sorts of things are good and bad. So, we can contrast this to Aristotle's virtue ethics. A virtue ethics says that what can be evaluated morally speaking is the character of a person. Whether a person is honest or has integrity or is vicious or a liar, you know, those are bad character and good character. Consequentialism does something different. What consequentialism says is that what is evaluated morally speaking is the act. It's the act. Okay, so what does this mean? It means, you know, Mill says, look, what matters morally is the consequences of actions. What happens as a result of actions. Okay, now you can have a very honest person. You can have a person with great integrity, but if they walk around causing pain all day, that's bad. It doesn't matter if they're honest. It doesn't matter if they have integrity. If they routinely cause people anxiety, if they cause pain, if they cause misery, those actions are bad. It doesn't matter what the character of the person is. Consequentialism can be contrasted to virtue ethics, but virtue ethics and consequentialism are not the only ways to evaluate. Not the only ways to morally evaluate. Okay, so virtue ethics will evaluate. They'll say what can be morally evaluated is the character of a person. Consequentialism says it's the actions. Another way to go is called deontic views of morality. Now, deontic views will say what's morally evaluable is whether the person followed the rules. So under this view, there are absolute moral rules which describe how people should behave.  If you break the rules, you're doing something bad. But for Mill, this doesn't matter. You can follow all the rules and still cause pain. Yeah, you can follow the rules and cause happiness. Okay, sure, that's possible, but you can follow the rules and still cause pain. You can cause the greatest overall happiness to drop, and that's bad for Mill. So his view is not a deontic view, per se. I mean, you're following a set of rules. Rather, that the consequences of the action must promote greatest overall happiness. It's the action, not the character. It's the consequences, not the rules that matter.  You could be a thief and you can be, you know, a scoundrel. But if you're promoting the greatest overall happiness, for Mill, that's all that matters. Now, as I said, Mill is offering a kind of hedonism. Now, his hedonism is not just, you know, based debauchery, right? He's pretty clear when he defines happiness. He says happiness is pleasure and the absence of pain. Now, his version of pleasure is a lot like Epicurus. And he borrows some from Epicurus here. He defends Epicurus. Pleasure is not just merely, you know, the garden of carnal delights, right? It's not just, you know, partying all night and going to the all-you-can-eat buffet. And, you know, you can imagine, right? All these versions here. Now, Mill is careful to avoid this. He menses no words. He says that there are higher pleasures and there are lower pleasures. And the higher pleasures are the ones that are worth pursuing, not the lower pleasures.   So there's a sense in which Mill is following Epicurus here. But he also kind of deviates from Epicurus as well. You remember, Epicurus argues, he has his version of hedonism. He argues for basically a very simple life and a life of contemplation. And Epicurus' reasons for this is that, you know, if you follow a life of contemplation, there's no pain incurred by, you know, no pain incurred as what you'd find following the other kind of carnal pleasures. So, if you went on a night of drinking, yeah, there'd be a lot of fun, but you'd have a hangover the next day. Even those pleasures are not necessarily incur a hangover, right? Just, you know, rich chocolatey desserts, right? If you have those rich chocolatey desserts, Epicurus says, well, there's still pain involved because when you don't have the dessert, you miss it. And that's a pain. So, you know, Epicurus says, you should follow these higher pleasures, or what Mil would call the higher pleasures, because they don't incur any additional pain. Now, Mil is doing something slightly different than Epicurus in distinguishing between the higher pleasures and the lower pleasures. Now, for Mil, the lower pleasures are lower, well, because they're lower, right? You might even think of the lower pleasures as being lower than anything below the head. So, these pleasures are carnal, they're visceral, they're emotional. They're lower because it's what animals enjoy, it's what pigs like, but not human beings. So, desserts, drinking, you know, staying out all night, your average night in Las Vegas, right? These are lower pleasures. Those appeal to things that are lower than human beings. So, we have lower pleasures, but then we also have higher pleasures. Higher pleasures like intellectual contemplation, mathematics, science, history. We have art, beauty, refined music, classical music. Even the food's allowed, right? So long as it's, you know, the higher culinary delights, which takes a lot of skill and effort to make, that's simply a big Mac. These are the higher pleasures because, well, Mil argues that they're higher because people who experience both, the ones that go for the hard night in Las Vegas and then, you know, come home and spend a quiet evening in the libraries and reading philosophy and history, if you experience both, you'd prefer the library over Las Vegas. Those who have experienced both eventually drift over to the higher pleasures, the more sophisticated pleasures, the ones that require intellect, not emotion, the ones that require, you know, refinement, not just your guts. So, we got this distinction in the higher pleasures and the lower pleasures. Now here, you know, since Mil is kind of appealing to this idea that people who experience both would go to the higher pleasures, I think what Mil is doing here, he's drifted a bit away from Epicurus. I mean, that much is clear, he's drifted a bit away from Epicurus. And at this point, I think he's doing Aristotle. And I say these pleasures are higher, not because the lower pleasures are important, right? Sure, every once in a while you go for a night in Las Vegas, okay? And that's not a terrible thing, but, you know, you keep drifting back to the higher pleasures. So here, I think, excuse me, I think Mil is leaving Epicurus and drifting more towards Aristotle. These are higher pleasures because of the kinds of things we are. We're human beings, not pigs. We're supposed to be socrates, not fools. We've got the two different kinds of pleasure for Mil, but we haven't really looked at the greatest overall happiness principle. Now, Mil is clear about whose happiness is important. Everyone's. No one gets special treatment. No one's happiness is more important than anybody else's. This is about as unbiased as one can get. It's not, nobody has any particular rights. Nobody has any duties above anybody else, nothing like that, right? What matters is the greatest overall happiness. It's not any particular person, any particular person's happiness that matters, right? But happiness itself that matters. We have to raise the level of happiness, and in doing that, we're doing something good. The greatest happiness principle has implications for your actions. So, you might think that with utilitarianism you're either permitted or obligated to promote your greatest happiness. No, that's closer to egoism. Egoism would state that you can promote your happiness over others. Utilitarianism doesn't even state that you have to promote the happiness of other people's over your own. No, that's not it either, right? Sometimes you promote your happiness over others, sometimes other people's happiness over your own. What matters is raising the overall happiness. So, when you are taking your actions into consideration, it's not just yourself, it's not just other people. It's everybody involved. So the greatest overall happiness principle requires us to promote the happiness of all the people involved. Well, human beings aren't the only ones that can experience happiness in the middle sense. Remember, middle defines happiness as pleasure or the absence of pain. And human beings have two different kinds of happiness, and that's true. But we have the higher pleasures than the lower pleasures. But we're not the only creatures that can experience the lower pleasures. Plenty of other creatures out there can experience, you know, good food in a sense, right? You know, can experience eating food, and they can experience the exhilaration of running, or being free out in the field, and flying high in the sky, everything like that. And these creatures can also experience pain. So, for Mill, and for lots of utilitarianism, lots of people are going to argue this, when we're talking about pleasure and pain. Human beings are not the only people, not the only creatures that can experience pleasure and pain. So, according to the greatest happiness principle, remember, no individual person's happiness matters more than anybody else's. And we should also, since we've got more creatures than human beings that can experience pleasure and pain, it's actually expanded. No individual creature's happiness. No individual creature's pleasure or pain is more important than anybody else's. So, when you're considering your actions, you know, the consequences of the actions, you have to consider not only how you're affecting human beings, but all these other creatures out there that can be made miserable by what you do.


The most pertinent motives for protecting living entities from unrestrained destruction are still derived from religious and philosophical animism, embracing not only humans, but also animals and often plants and other entities. As Edward Bernard Tyler has shown in 1871, animistic worldviews, that is the doctrine of spiritual beings with his special relation to the doctrine of the soul, can be found across all cultures and philosophies and are frequently associated with theories of rebirth and reincarnation, which can be assesized in one way or another. The observer's category, animism, has many shades of meaning. It was coined by the physician Georg Anstahl in 1707, who in his book, Theoria Medica Vera, Theoria Medica Vera, revived the ancient idea of the identity of the vital principle and the immaterial soul, which after Tyler became popular in 19th century anthropology and comparative religion. Its subsequent dismissal from the conceptual repertoire of comparative religion after severely being severely criticized by Livy Brühl, Baldwin and others, proved to be a premature reaction as indicated by its recent revival. Rather, a clear differentiation between the dimensions of the term animism is called for. Robert R. Merritt in 1912 introduced the term animatism, for instance, to differentiate the attribution of vitality to inanimate objects from the belief in the existence of spiritual beings or disembodied phantoms. Renewed significance of the term animism was suggested by Jean Piaget's influential work, The Child's Conception of the World, which controversially compared ontogenetic and phylogenetic dimensions of animism. Here understood as the tendency to regard objects as living and in doubt with will. Piaget based his theories on the evidence of numerous statements by children, such as Gilles, or Gilles, who replied to the question, a stone feels neither heat nor cold. Would it feel if it was dropped on the ground? Yes, why? Because it would break. Tyler had argued that the supposition of spiritual entities is a rationalization of such perceptions. For Piaget, it was an empirical question, whether animism in the case of the child depends on the existence of the notion of mind or on the contrary, on the absence of such a notion. However, the idea of spiritual entities historically originated most, but not all religious, philosophical, and psychological theories today, continue to postulate the existence of spiritual substances or processes, soul, self, consciousness, or mind. Many continue to regard these invisible forces also as the formless vital essence or essences of living entities. In contemporary Buddhism, obviously, may be an exception, but that is debatable. In contemporary academic discourse, however, only theories that extend such conceptions to non-human entities are called animism or animatistic. The assumption that human beings have a soul or self is rarely bracketed together with the so-called primitive animism, which already Tyler rejected, who posited an unbroken continuity into the midst of the high modern culture. The reasons for this scientific rejection of animism as a genuine world hypothesis, a term Stephen Pepper introduced, were criticized by E.A. Robinson in an article on animism as world hypothesis. To call any philosophy animism is to condemn it. The word usually refers to an early level of man's thinking about the word, the world, a level in which our distinction between animate and the inanimate had not yet been made. The artificial conceptual boundary drawn between scientific and animistic variants of the conception of spiritual substance or process, challenged but not replaced by a contemporary neuroscience, rests on the combination of two conceptual oppositions, body versus mind and nature versus humanity. These centuries old Western theological and philosophical distinctions still dominate global scientific discourse, though their inadequacy has frequently been pointed out. The distinction between nature and humanity is entirely paradoxical and renders the nature of the human animal itself obscure. Anthropocentric speciesism is a mode of this distinction, obviously. The rather arbitrary lines drawn by scientists, philosophers and theologians between entities that have a mind or soul and entities that do not is powerfully manifest in the case of non-human animals. Until recently, many evolutionary biologists, anthropologists and Marxists still posited the ability to use tools as a distinct quality of human beings, yet the evidence for such perceived radical differences between humans and non-human animals is getting thinner by the day. Fact is that the attribution of a spiritual essence to an entity establish it as a moral subject or in Tom Reagan's words, a subject of a life. And hence qualifies it for certain elementary individual rights. The degree of conceptual deanimation of nature in scientific and theological schemes based on more or less arbitrary conceptual distinctions determines the relative size of culturally demarcated domains of nature which are granted no protection by such intrinsic moral rights. The right to live, thus rendering them open for legitimate exploitation. The metaphysical issue whether spiritual substances exist or not is not relevant at all in this juridical theological context. One of the most comprehensive ethicized theories of animism ever conceived is the classical Jane Soul Body dualism. It postulates that not only humans, animals and plants but also the elements fire, water, air and earth are animated by individual life giving spiritual substances. Atman or Jiva, which are in doubt with consciousness and willpower. Souls or selves are conceived as immortal substances which trap themselves in their respective incarnation as a consequence of interacting with matter and remaining trapped by committing injury, hymsa to other sentient entities. Since it is assumed that violent acts rebound on the embodied soul in form of karmic particles which constitute physical bodies by attaching themselves to the soul like grains of dust, only nonviolent action and finally non-action will in the long term assure the purification and self-realization of the soul. In this version of animism which explains phenomenological pulsoism with reference to an ontological dualism, the soul-oriented desire for salvation is predicated on the protection of life. Classical Jainism is not interested in the preservation of the environment, that is living beings per se. Jain non-violence is motivated primarily by sociological self-interest. Even if stripped from some now implausible metaphysical and cosmological ballast which may seem outdated in the light of modern scientific discoveries, the question remains which elements of the Jain doctrine and historical experience represents globally important intellectual and cultural resources which are potentially universally acceptable and may serve as elements for future globalized environmental ethics. The remainder of this paper will revisit the dilemma of ethical pluralism in reinvestigating the question to what extent the Jain value of non-violence stripped from some of its specific indie cultural elements could serve as one of the better rocks for universal minimal ethic of the future that could remotivate human beings to pursue less destructive ways of life. In his introduction to the volume Globalization of Ethics, the Canadian philosopher Will Kimlicka, known like John Rawls, Charles Tyler and Michael Walzer, for his dual commitment to cultural rights for minority groups and certain core liberal principles, asked a key question which is applicable to the emerging global discourse in environmental ethics as well. I quote, how do some of the world's most influential ethical traditions think about the task of constructing moral conversations and moral norms at a global level? What intellectual resources are available within Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, liberalism, natural law, Confucianism and feminism when confronted with the need to engage in a globalized ethics? It is difficult to overstate the gravity and difficulty of this task. He continues, unfortunately the scope for convergence has too often been obscured by different modes of expression, historical grievances and resentments and the absence of appropriate forms for open dialogue across ethical traditions. Kimlicka considers three different responses to the challenge of globalizing ethics. One, to start with an existential and existing, sorry, moral tradition, to start with an existing moral tradition and to attempt to impose it as the single legitimate framework for global ethical discourse. We all become Jains. This approach he notes is both illegitimate and unrealistic and presupposes inequalities in power. Two, to try to define an entirely new ethical world vocabulary that is not drawn exclusively from one of the historical ethical traditions but rather is built specially for the purpose of engaging in cross-cultural debates. The principle example is in 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the UN, which however he remarks is a lightly disguised form of Western liberalism with its emphasis on the protection of the rights of the individual from society and the state. This conception is not rooted in any historical tradition. International human rights must therefore be supplemented by other ethical norms and principles he says, such as indigenous conceptions of the stewardship of the land, et cetera, or animistic conceptions, one may add, but there's no consensus. Last but not least, three, to think about global ethics as a two-level phenomenon. At one level we have a self-standing international discourse such as human rights that sets to define a minimum set of standards agreeable to all. At a secondary level, we have a multiplication or multiplicity of different ethical traditions, each of which has its own account of what more or less of what more or what else is needed above and beyond human rights. Any convergence at this second level will be the result of learning, mutual exchange and inspiration, which is likely to be a slow and uneven process. A crucial task of a globalized ethics therefore is to think about the conditions under which such interchange, dialogue, not coercion can take place without presupposing or imposing a single ethical perspective and without limiting ethical debate to the thin and minimal discourse of international human rights, end of quote. Kim Likert points out that two-level models of ethics is not an entirely modern invention. This is in response to sustained criticism of his earlier work on multiculturalism, which was labeled an ethics of assimilation to the liberal project. To some, the question is merely whether the animal rights agenda, like the modern ecology movement as a whole, can be subjected to a similar approach as a middle class fed that disregards the needs of economically suffering, if not starving majority of human beings, as in favor of the preservation of the lives of plants and non-human animals, that makes sense. It is now apparent that this simple contrast is not persuasive since the survival of even meat-eating human beings depends on the sustainable biosphere. The attribution of the universal rights to animals, plants or other beings, we heard it paper by Paul Waldor today, qua attribution of a moral status comparable to human beings, created paradoxes, which, if at all, can philosophically only be resolved by individually giving up the will to live in the manner of Schopenhauer's suggestion or Jane religious practice. Generally, the proposition leads to a casis tree of specifications and contextual exemptions from the rule. This becomes evident by comparing the differential treatment of the case of the lion and the deer across cultures. The scenario was controversially discussed both in the modern animal rights philosophy and in Jane philosophy. Tom Reagan, in his paper, Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics, which he planned to present at this conference, discusses predator-prey relations as follows, and I quote him at length. Suppose a tiger is stalking a small child. If we frighten the lion, we may be able to save the child. Since the lions are not moral agents in the sense into which I use the expression, subject of a life, no rights violation is in the offing. But the child almost certainly will be harmed if we do nothing. Should we try to prevent this outcome? Do we have a prima facie duty to intervene? It is hard to imagine how a negative answer could be defended. Sorry, I don't know how that moved on, but it doesn't do any harm. Where's this thing? Come back to that. It is hard to imagine how a negative answer could be defended. So let us assume what I take to be true, that we have a prima facie duty of assistance in this case. Next, suppose the same lion is stalking not a child, but a wild wildebeest, and suppose again that if we frighten the lion, we may be able to save the wildebeest. Since lions are not moral agents in the sense of which I use the expression, no rights violation is in the offing. But the wildebeest almost certainly will be harmed if we do nothing. Should we try to prevent this outcome? Do we have a prima facie duty to intervene? My answer has been and remains, no. It did not take long for critics to think that something had gone wrong. Jay Baird Calico, one of the true pioneers in environmental ethics, this is still Tom Braggen, is representative. As part of his critique of the rights view, he writes, if we ought to protect humans' rights, not to be preyed upon animal predators, then we ought to protect animals' rights, not to be preyed upon by animal predators. And not just a little. Calico insists that the rights view is committed to protecting prey animals a lot. In his words, Reagan's theory of animal rights implies a policy of human predator extermination. Since predators however innocently violate the rights of their victims. End of quote. Reagan defends his apparently contradictory response by arguing that there's no inconsistency because only moral agents are capable of violating rights and non-human animals are not moral agents. I can quote him. Instead of advocating a policy of massive intervention in the affairs of wildlife, what we ought in general to do is nothing. In my view, our ruling obligation with regard to wild animals is to let them be. An obligation grounded in the recognition of their general competence to get on with the business of living, the competence that we find among both members of predator and prey species. We do not find this same competence in young children. The plain fact is they cannot take care of themselves and have no realistic hope of surviving. In any circumstances in the wild or in the home if we do not help them. To let children be, therefore is not to honor their competence. There may be small animals as well, but this doesn't come into play here. Reagan concedes that the rights view which addresses individuals of all species alike fails to provide a credible basis for addressing our obligations to preserve endangered species. Quote, first we have an obligation, prima facie to be sure, to stop human moral agents, commercial developers, poachers and other interested third parties whose actions violate the rights of animals. Second, we have an obligation to hold the destruction of natural habitat that makes life for these animals sustainable. If we succeed in discharging these obligations my discussion implies we will succeed in discharging our duty to protect endangered species. It continues, the rights view can apply compensatory principles to animals, the East African black rhino for instance, et cetera. Whose numbers are in severe decline because of past human wrongs? For example, poaching of ancestors and destruction of habitat. Although the remaining rhinos have the same fundamental rights as do members of a more plentiful species, rabbits say, the duty of assistance owed to the former it arguably makes a greater claim on us than this same duty does when owed to the latter. Question mark. Like Singer, Reagan too draws an arbitrary line between forms of life that qualify as subjects of a life and forms of life too rudimentary to qualify as subjects of life which hence can be legitimately exploited. My last quote of him, what the rights view denies at least given its articulation to date is that plants and insects are subjects of a life and it denies as well that these forms of life have been shown to have any rights including a right to survival. Of course we may that is, there's nothing wrong in principle if we do make great efforts to preserve such life based on human aesthetic or sacramental interests for instance. But what we may be willing to do this stops well short of establishing that plants and insects have a valid claim against us to do so. End of quote. Hence the lion and the rhino are given individual rights to be which plants and insects are denied this, while plants and insects are denied this privilege because they are too rudimentary. If this argument fails to convince, Reagan himself turns against similar lack of convincing reasoning in the claim of some of his opponents that species have inherent value and so do ecosystems and the biosphere. The case of prey predator relations is also controversially discussed in Jane literature which privileges not a rights perspective but a Karman theoretical perspective of natural metaphysical justice. Basically two perspectives are contested. One, the view that the duty for the protection of life, Jiv Daya, is implied in the negatively formulated Jaina doctrine of non-violence whose positive correlate is compassion. And two, the view that from a sociological perspective non-intervention is required universally. Not only with regard to animals but also with regard to humans because karma will take its course and intervention will harm the agent because it attracts good karma and does not lead to the annihilation of karma. Only from a social perspective is protection of life both human and non-human are moral good. And the reasons for protection in the Jane case is precisely given in this, for instance in this quote from the Suyagada in the Shwetambara canon, i.e. all beings hate pains. And I could say more about all these matters but we're running out of time. The comparison between the modern animal rights discourse and the ancient Jaina doctrine and culture of non-violence to all living beings shows not only similarities as pointed out by Chris Chappell in his pioneering 1993 book, Non-Violence to Animals, Earth and Self in Asian Traditions but also differences. The animal rights discourse echoes the new international human rights agenda which focuses on the individual rather than the group or species and thereby bypasses or transcends the agenda of cultural or religious specific attitudes. Mark Bekoff focused on this contrast as well as this morning. It's probably not accidental that proponents of the secular animal rights theories such as Paul Peter Singer find greatest interest in Buddhism which is more widely known than Jainism in the West which dominates this field of inquiry and social activism because Buddhism and Jainism are sociological sects as Louis de Mont following Emil Durkheim's approach pointed out that is religions of the individual which cut across the group religion of caste which is constituted by Brahmin controlled life cycle rituals. As Chappell has emphasized already, Jainism seeks to achieve attitudinal change in terms of its own religious cultural agenda by way of transformation of the individual. This is traditionally achieved through the application of specific vows of renunciation which commit the individual to renounce or restrict violent practices such as attachment to possessions, exploitation of animals, travel or consumption for a certain period. It was the Terrapant Acharya Tulsi who in response to the unprecedented experience of violence at the time of the Second World War, the atomic bomb and the partition of British India. So the need to change this approach and to propagate not only world renunciation as in the orthodox Jaina parts of salvation but also world transformation to use Max Weber's terms. His proposition put forward in 1949 was to instigate universal morality through the propagation of the voluntary individual commitment to selected normative social rules of limited scope. I think I'll picture him. Skip things here. This approach was modeled on the traditional Jaina procedure of self-imposing vows. Though the name of this scheme, the Anuvata or small vow movement alludes to the identically labeled religious arrangement is what was explicitly stated that it is not especially religious, especially religious or Jain outlook but universal for the moral improvement of the entire nation and humanity. The content of the vows was simply changed from ancient religious to new secular moral commitments not to cheat in exams, to renounce sectarianism, not to pollute the environment, et cetera. I show you just some lists. We have no time for all this stuff today. We are here. It goes endlessly on very specific vows and I will believe in human unity, et cetera. Let's stop there rather arbitrarily. So this approach shows paradigmatically the conscious local attempt to extract particular religious concepts and processes out of their traditional context and to universalize this cultural knowledge through redefinitions. The old practice was not given up but a new practice acceptable to all added to it. Achaya Tulsi was uniquely talented and forward-looking modernizing religious leader shaped by his times and instigated a number of similar schemes based on distinction between religion and morality. I come now to the end. The question is how the Anurad movement fared over the last 60 years. Can it function as a paradigm for similar approaches in other cultures and religious context, for instance concerning the problems of environmental destruction? There are vows related to the environment like do not pollute the environment or something like that. I will not pollute the environment and some qualifiers. So are there similar, can it function as a paradigm? With hindsight, sadly, it has to be considered that the movement which has several hundred thousand followers amongst all Indian religious traditions but mainly amongst Jains and Hindus has not been able to expand. In the present generation, it even seems to lose impact despite politicians advocating their support in the media and great media campaigns. What does have an impact though is local action on specific environmental issues. For instance, drought relief, feeding animals in the desert of Rajasthan, traditional animal shelters, interestingly rejected by the Therapuntis for certain doctrinal reasons, et cetera. It seems the universalist discourse of global morality and ideologies of rights has less potential than ancient ritual and behavioral patterns which are followed routinely. The question remains therefore, do we need new rituals rather than new ideologies? That's what I have to say.


Okay, so I see we've got attendees live attendees filtering in welcome everybody. Just give 10 more seconds for others to get into the room and then we will get started. This is when we need that jeopardy music or something. Next time. Okay, it's one pass so I'm going to go ahead and get started. Good afternoon everybody my name is Brianna Sunrid I am in the communications manager community participation officer for the town. I'm joined today by your town manager Paul Walkman Jones library director Sharon Sherry and Austin Serrat Jones library trustees. I'm going to give everyone an opportunity to ask questions today live. We have some questions that were submitted already by people and to do so today you can raise your hand and zoom and we'll recognize you and come into room and ask your question live, or you can use the Q&A function. But before we get to that, I'm going to go around to ask our guests to introduce themselves and we'll give Paul a chance to give any general updates on town matters. So take it away Paul. Great, thank you I'll try to be brief because I know there's lots to talk about with Austin and Sharon so thank you both for being here and thank you, Brianna. Thanks. You know, the in terms of COVID which is our always our first topic is we have really stopped the mask band date. We have maintained certain capacity limits in municipal buildings to. The other information that's coming out and came out yesterday is that the university has announced that it will no longer be offering community testing through their stop the spread site as of March 31. That's a decision that the state made we wanted to keep them open we advocated for that as did our state legislators. The other two announcements that I think are really exciting is first, Hickory Ridge we have closed on Hickory Ridge $520,000 for for a project that was valued at $5 million. A great bargain sale negotiated by Dave Zomek and his team, and in a really honorable ownership led by Barry, Barry Roberts is noticed interesting in the Gazette a few days ago on this on St. Patrick's Day actually, there was a 10 years ago a applied golf which was the owner of the property had bought the Hickory Ridge golf course at auction for $1.2 million or something like that so 10 years ago as it was sold for $1 million at auction, and we were able to get this incredible piece of land for with 150 acres, just a unique parcel, a mile of frontage on the front and Fort River, it's going to help the community forever. And the third thing is just to announce that we do have a great developer wayfinders who will be developing two sites in East Amherst on Belcher Town Road and that the East Street School preserving the East Street School to create 70 units of affordable of housing 60 of those 70 units will be affordable housing some with very deep affordability so really terrific project that the town has put forward with a really terrific partner. So those are my quick updates. Great. Thank you, Paul. I'm going to let Austin and Sharon introduce themselves and give some general updates about their work on the project. Everybody I'm Sharon Sherry the director of the library before we get into the project. Paul reminded me. So regarding the test kits you know this partnership that the town has with with UMass, the library has been a pickup site. And so this morning the Amherst ambassadors will be out on our front lawn, basically distributing the final test kits that we have so come on down to the library and come get them while while they're still hot. So we'll let Austin talk a little bit about the project. Thanks Sharon. Thanks Paul and I just want to say on behalf I know of all the residents of Amherst having Brianna in town doing the work that she is doing is just absolutely wonderful and we're incredibly grateful to Brianna for her efforts and if this community chat goes wrong, we're going to blame Brianna. Thanks Austin. I have the privilege of serving now as chair of the Jones Library building committee. The building committee is an amazingly diverse and interesting group of folks. And our work is to shepherd the building project from here until the ribbon cutting and beyond. Our hope, our hope is that we will have a this project completed and a ribbon cutting in the spring of 2025. Between now and then we're going to go through several stages. The first stage is we're going to have to review the existing schematics that our architects have prepared and that were the basis of the town council vote and the conversation with the community that resulted in the overwhelming vote on behalf of the project. And the second stage is we're going to have to review that the town engaged in. Once that is done we go into design development phase, again with the architects throughout those that this process we will have opportunities to talk with members of the community solicit input from members of the community. And then we're going to have to review the commitments, the bidding phase, and then the very exciting work of actually seeing the renovated and expanded Jones Library emerge. So that will tell that's a little bit about the process the Jones Library building committee has a design subcommittee that's going to work very closely with the architects, making recommendations to the building committee. And it will then make recommendations to the town manager and to the board of trustees of the library the town manager and the board of trustees of the library, I mean joint final say if you will, about the design of the library. And I'd like to ask Sharon now to say a word about. Let's imagine it's April of 2025, what do we hope that people will see an experience and love when they come to the renovated expanded Jones Library. Have to say, this is this it's such an exciting question to be asked. I hope, you know, number one, I hope that everybody feels welcome in this new space. It's really exciting to think on, you know, day one we're going to open the doors and so the space is going to be completely accessible. It will be sustainable net zero ready on day one and then you know the purchase of offsite renewables will make us net zero. And the preservation aspect of this project is also super exciting. There are so many gorgeous spaces in the 1928 L that we're going to be able to bring back to life and and again open the doors and say please everybody come on in and and check it out. Function so that's another huge one that staff are especially really excited about that this new space is going to be fully functional it'll be easy to navigate you know you know you're going to go to special collections. It will be easy to find your way safe safe is another piece of this puzzle that will be a lot of wide open spaces and a lots of lots of staff oversight. Right fun children's room I always think of the children's room of any public library bigger small it doesn't matter. As being very much the heart of that space it's what's bringing families together into the library and so we're going to have this great new space that families can come and enjoy the teen room. You know, when when we started this project my daughter was very young and I was very excited that hey you're going to have a teen room. Unfortunately, this has taken a little longer and and she will have aged out but this next generation of teenagers, they're going to have a space that they can call their own. And they'll be able to help design it and populate it and then it's going to be so great. And you know the other piece of the puzzle. So ESL Special Collections the Burnett Art Gallery. These are spaces that are kind of hidden in our building right now, but they're really important programming elements. And again they'll be easy to find, and they'll be, they'll be large enough to handle the demand that this community places on it. So those are some of my, my fun shout outs. I wanted to say one thing. What we hope will happen when people will walk into the renovated expanded library is they will recognize this library. This will be still the Jones library. And second, they will understand its centrality in the cultural and social life of our town. Third, they'll see it again as the most democratic space in town and space for the old and the young, the rich and the disadvantaged for English language and native speakers. And Sharon will tell you that what we've heard over and over again from our colleagues in towns across the Commonwealth is that when libraries are renovated expanded often what they hear on day one is simply wow. And we're looking for some walls in April of 2025. Thank you both I got some good visuals there I don't know about the rest of you, but that was really helpful and nice to hear from your perspective. I want to remind all of our live attendees that we would love to hear from you with your questions whether you want to raise your hand and ask them live or type them into the q amp a box. I will start with some of the questions that been previously sent, but please jump in there and raise your hand and ask your questions. Well we have our special guests on the line. Okay, I do see a hand from Dylan Dylan I'm going to invite you into the room if you could introduce yourself and ask your question. Hello, I've never used this computer so let me know if my mic's too loud or anything is it is it okay. We can hear you a lot nice and nice and clear, not too long. Okay. All right, perfect. So yeah I'm Dylan Corey. I'm a reporter with the reminder. And I wanted to ask about, I know that, you know, in the in the PowerPoint, and also earlier in the meeting as we're talking about how with the renovations. So I'm going to take net zero and and one of the more environmentally friendly buildings so I guess I would ask, you know, are there any ways in which the renovations to library itself are going to help with that and also I know you said that some of it was purchasing renewable energy so I would ask what was that purchase what did that look like. And yeah just kind of information about that. Thank you. Thank you for your question. Yeah, so I don't I don't have the chart in front of me. So yes there are certainly things that will be happening to the building for example, you know the, the low hanging fruit is the photovoltaics that will go on on the roof. Oh, Austin I'm going to need help with this. So, so Dylan, they're going to be a variety of, they're going to be a variety of things we've worked with the a sustainability committee. So the building is going to be more insulated. The building is going to have many solar panels. The building is going to have a lot of windows which will allow sunlight and warmth to come into this building. We have an HVAC system in our building which is failing. So the building will be adequately the building will be adequately cooled. The way in which the building is being constructed so we're not using steel beams we're using cross laminated timber is designed to minimize the carbon output during the process of construction. So, the hope is that in the building of the new renovated expanded library, as well as in the maintenance of the library and its day to day operation. It's more than a hope this library will be one of the greenest buildings, if not the greenest building in Amherst, and will certainly be a model of environmental sustainability in libraries throughout the Commonwealth. Thank you for that question and for that answer Austin. Again, feel free to raise your hand or put questions in the Q&A. I'm going to start with some of the questions that we have here. I've heard this one a couple of times so have all the legal challenges to the project been resolved. Are there any impediments to moving forward at full speed now. All of the legal challenges have been resolved all of the appeals periods have expired. So there are no legal impediments for moving forward, and we're full steam ahead. Great, thank you very clear. I have a hand from Martha so Martha if you could unmute and introduce yourself and feel free to ask your question. I'm Martha Hanner Amherst resident and it's really exciting to hear about our expanded library, and I would just like to know what concrete efforts are you making to involve high school students in the design process. I'm wondering, for example, whether one or two students might actually be invited to be members of the design subcommittee you talk about a teen room but but really having them actually involved in the process of designing would certainly be something very, very great. Yeah, so let me start and then Austin can follow up because Austin is on the outreach subcommittee. So the outreach subcommittee they're just starting to work on their processes and they're planning a couple of big events coming up where people will be able to come to the library and talk. The outreach to the schools is going to be in the students teachers and students and families that will be a large part of this because absolutely we need the teenagers at the table and telling us their ideas. It really is a wonderful question and I'm really grateful for the question the outreach subcommittee. Right now is really in the early stages of figuring out the kind of outreach that we're going to do in the most effective mechanisms. What Sharon said right at the start of her remarks is that we want this library to be a library in which all segments of the community feel a sense of ownership that this is their library. So it's not just with teenagers that we're going to be working we're going to be working with communities throughout the city throughout the town. So we're in, I think more specialized meetings, rather than adding membership to the outreach, the outreach subcommittee. So when we're talking about the team room. We will be making special efforts obviously to engage the teen population of the town when we're talking about the children's room will want to make special efforts to engage families with children. When we're talking about special collections, we want to make special efforts to involve people who care, particularly about historic preservation. So rather than just adding communities, you know, to the, to the committee, it's our hope that we can design processes that will involve them both throughout the process, and also in those particular moments. Part of the library that they are most concerned about is being discussed. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you Martha for your question. Okay, next we have something that's like us on everybody's mind but we hear that inflation is driving all construction costs up significantly is the project being adjusted in light of this. Well, I can tell start. So we have a we have a we have a fixed budget at this point. It's our part of our process will be again as I said to look at the schematics and to go through design development along the way we're going to be asked to make choices. And some of those choices will be different in 2022 than they would have been in 2016 or 2015. Early on when we conceptualize this, this process, inflation is a fact of life and it's going to affect everything that the town does, not just in the building project for the, for the library, it will necessitate some difficult choices and some even more energized fundraising for our for our project. Paul, do you want to say anything else about the. Yeah, yeah. So we are noticing that inflation is ticking up. You know, in interest rates are ticking up very slightly as well. Those are all cost adds to what we hoped would be where we are on the project. And for this project is for every project we're dealing with with the school building project we're dealing with it with road construction projects, quite, quite frankly, which is very oil dependent industry. So it's just a fact of life, as Austin said, and it's something that we manage through, and we won't be able to do as much as we as may roads as we might want to do otherwise but you know we manage in other ways to but we those costs have to be incorporated into the existing project. And it's not it's not the nice it's not just to this project it's to everything that we're doing. Even supplies that we're looking at now. This next question is kind of related to the increasing project costs but how is the fundraising proceeding and has that target been increased to compensate for the growing costs. So our capital campaign committee is absolutely working to reach to reach our goals they the goal has not changed. And as far as what we are success so far. So we've raised over $1.5 million that's towards our $3.3 million community component. So you combine that with the 1 million from CPA. And so we've raised a total of 2.5 million towards the 6.6 million goal. One of the important pieces of this process will be applying for grants. And so we have, for example, we submitted the Massachusetts cultural facilities fund grant the amount of $500,000. And I think we have more than one year to be able to apply for that. We just submitted a grant for the beverage foundation. And we're working with local and state legislators on additional funding and, you know, because we have so many special interests regarding this project whether it's historic preservation or sustainability accessibility, there are different grant opportunities out there for these different pieces. Okay, great. Another reminder to our live attendees. Please feel free we've got another nine or so minutes. So please enter your questions you can type them into q amp a or raise your hand. I have a question here that I think I meant to ask when I did the legal challenges question but just quickly. Maybe this will be for Paul. Is the Attorney General investigating contracts related to this project as was reported recently. Could you explain. So the Attorney General is not doing any investigations. We typically when we are doing contracts for major construction projects or anything we do review all of our steps that we take with our legal counsel with anybody at the state that has to look at our library commissioners. And we also review it with our bond council because at some point we will be going into the market to be borrowing money. And we just are always asking the questions are we all in good shape and that's where we are at this point in time is continuing to do our due diligence. But there is no investigation going on or anything like that that I'm aware of maybe there is a secret but I don't know of a Jeff says thanks for clarifying. I have a question as I was asking you someone else that also so it's out there. Okay, so I'm going to have let me see my next question here. What's going to happen when the library is under construction will we still be able to go to the branches. Yeah, actually so the branches are going to be our number one place where we will start. The branches, the North Amherst library project, you know that addition project should be complete by the time we need to move out of here so we will be able to utilize that new meeting room space for collections for programs technology. So both branches will be staffed more their open hours schedules will be increased. And then we will also be looking for other spaces, the two branches aren't large enough to hold everything that the Jones does the staff have put together a spreadsheet of their, their space needs. And we've given that to the opm and the opm will will work with the town to see what what spaces in town are available and and then we'll go from there but definitely library services staffing programming technology, all of that will still be happening during construction. Okay, thank you Sharon. So this Austin spoke a little bit about this I think when you were talking about the outreach committee's work but this question is, is the design set. Are there is there still time for me to weigh in on things that I think the library should include. So the answer to the question is no and yes, but but I'm a college professor and I need to go on for a little while longer than no and yes. So the design is not set there are certain things that we cannot change. There are certain basic things that we had to get approved by the Massachusetts Board of Library commissioners that kind of basic footprint of the building, the program for the library those things are not going to change. As I indicated earlier, we're in the phase will will be soon reviewing again the schematics going into design development, there'll be ample opportunity for people to weigh in for example on details of things that are going to go on in those on in those rooms. I also want to say something else about this opportunity for people to weigh in. The town had a vigorous and very engaged debate about this project. We are incredibly grateful for the commitment of citizens throughout the town and their vibrant engagement engagement with the question of whether we should go ahead with the project that we proposed. Those debates seem to me now to be over. And it's our hope going forward that the energy that was brought to the debate about whether or not we should go forward with this project can now be brought to the question of making it the library that everybody wants it to be. So it's our hope through the building committee process through the design process and through the outreach process that the love that everybody has for this library will bring us together to work together and hear each other's voices. As we go through this very exciting process of making the Jones library yet again, the crown jewel of the town. Thank you Austin well said. So I have a question that just came in live and we're coming up on the last few minutes so anyone else who's live in the room wanted to get something out. This is your chance please put it into the q amp a or raise your hand. So next I have what are the immediate next tasks, for example, over the next six months for the building committee on this project to tackle. I'm definitely working with the architect ending schematic design going into design development. Great, and we have another question here from Martha and it actually this is normally what we end on so this is perfect Martha asks perhaps you can mention websites for people to leave ideas. So that is a great prompt for us. Someone else asked how do I stay up to date on this project. I'm happy to share a couple different ways right now that you can. As both Austin and Sharon mentioned earlier the outreach committee for the Jones library building projects just getting started so they're going to be much more opportunities that those are going to get fleshed out. I'd like to look at some of the materials that have been compiled and, you know, really well done, I will say, on the Jones library side is Jones library dot org slash building project, go there and really everything that's happened about this project is there is a lot of information to digest so it's a great place to start for committees for the Jones library building committee and their subcommittees you can go to Amherst m a dot gov slash JLBC, which stands for Jones library building committee. There you'll find all of the meeting minutes packet materials agendas those types of those types of things and as the outreach committee starts getting, you know, having more meetings and has to get their planning out there could be other specific things to better answer you Martha about how you can leave ideas or how you could interact with the project so stay tuned to the outreach committee for those types of things. All right, well, make sure there's no other questions I don't see any other live questions we've just got about two minutes left so I'm going to ask Paul Sharon Austin to leave us with anything they didn't get asked or something they want to say a call to action for for those watching and for those who will watch later. Yeah, I just want to thank you Brian I know you've been under the weather but you powered through our session here today, so thanks for team up to be here. Anything for the library. I want to say one thing I need to give for all of the, all of you who would like to donate to the project.  There's also a printed form you could fill out mail back. If you have any specific questions about, you know, giving stock or, or, or donating from your IRA, you can email info at Jones library capital campaign.org. Thank you. It's beginning to feel like WFCR fundraising appeal. So I just want to again thank Brianna for for this and thank Paul thanks to Tom for for doing this. I've always been very fortunate in having a wonderful partnership with the leadership of this town with the town manager with the finance director with the assistant town manager with the town council and its distinguished leadership. You've propelled the project and made the work on the project truly a partnership, and there are many, many, many, many people that one could thank and point to who played really great roles in getting us to where we are. This is an incredibly exciting moment for this town. The renovation and expansion of the Jones library will be the first time since the new police station I believe that a significant town building has been developed, or in this case renovated and expanded. The expanded Jones library will be designed to serve citizens, residents and visitors to this town for generations to come. But for the vision, commitment, energy, dedication, and optimism of our library director, none of this would have been would have been possible. So great thanks to Sharon Sherry for her leadership throughout the project. But I'm still not going to give you any money so it's okay.  We'll share it on social media to probably end up on the Jones library building project page so feel free to share it with friends who weren't able to make it today. And thank you to our special guests. Yes. Take care everybody have a good weekend. Thanks.


Okay, so thanks for being here. This is a introduction to Blackboard.js. So first, let me ask you a few questions. So, who is developing web apps? Good, great. And who is using GQuery? Excellent. So then my last question is, did you feel like this guy at some point?  I mean, you don't have so much more fun because it's not maintainable anymore. So, one of the solutions to help you get maintainable code is to use this tiny library called Blackboard.js. And I will not give you a theoretical demonstration. Demonstration, I want to go deep into a practical example. This example is called Super Top Friends. It's like, you know, this first application on the social network on Myspace or early on on Facebook. You log in and then you select your best friends. And then you can tell everyone, hey, look at my best friends. So, this is the first page of the application. It's not using any server, it's serverless. So, let me log in on Facebook, you can see the second page. So, let's see, we have on the left our friends and on the right we have the reader of something, our top friends. And I can just browse to my friends and say the best one. So, I have something in my browser. First one, I'm going to have this one. You can choose like this. And once you have set the top friends, there's a button, you can click on it and you can click on this button and that's my best friend. So, very simple app, this app is the other thing. It means that usually you create your markup and then you add your callbacks and at some point you get messy because you don't know what is the beginning, how it's working on. Here it's not really driven. It means that first you take your application, you analyze it and you say, okay, that's my data models. And then when people, users interact with your application, they will directly modify data and this data will send events and views. So that's why we use four different data, the models, the collections, the views, and a router. The structure of this super top friends app, you see it very simple, there's only one HTML file and then we have a bunch of JS files, the collections, models, views. So let's begin to delve into the DM. So the first thing I want to show you is the router. This is really entry point of the backbone application. It's represented like this.  So for each key value of this root object, you define the root. This is the root of the application. You see this is the first page. And for the value landing, you tell, okay, for the root, when I type the root URL, I'm going to the landing application function. And then for the second page, okay, if you type dash, hash friends, you will go into friends function. So pretty simple. So then let's analyze this application. We have two data models. We have the friends, of course. So each friend is a picture, a name, and inside there's also an idea of Facebook ID. And there's also a winners model. This winners model represents the five best work friends. Let's begin with the winners model. So winners model just extend hash board.router and inside I can define default values for the data that will be inside. This is not mandatory, but it's good practice to work. So that when you go to the root, okay, this is the kind of data I will store. So you see I am my five best work friend with some default values. I also initialize the function, for now there is not so much to do. Then let's go back into our order. This is how we initialize winners model object. Winners model is a new winners model, but it's in the initialized function. Then we have our friend model. This one is almost empty. There is only a initialized function because you can store whatever data you want in a model. You can even add them at runtime. You can modify them so you don't have to specify the defaults.  We don't know how many of them we create because they come from Facebook. And to handle them, we use the collections that we call friends collection. And this friend collection, maybe it's possible to create this model and to store them. This is our collection. So we can initialization, we extend the value of the collection. And inside, there is an important property. We specify what kind of model we can store inside this collection. Here it's a friend model. Then we have also access to them. Here we need this because we interact with the Facebook API. So we need some problem to set the access to them. Here, this is the neural web. This is a function that becomes a string. I think it's also a string. And you can see that I will be using it to define where I fetch my data for my collection. This is from Facebook, graph.facebook.com. Slash this, slash friends. I initialize it like the real-life model. But it's a problem. What is interesting now is that when we're going to Facebook, you see that I'm calling the fetch method of the friends collection. This fetch method will implicitly use the URL I defined previously to fetch the data. And for each of these data, out of the collection we created. This is an example of the kind of data we received from Facebook. So you see it's a narrative of key-value objects. So for example, there's Michael, Simon, Ken. Okay, so. So the collection will create a model for Simon, the friend, a user for Kerminal, et cetera. Automatically, you will get some models in your collection. So then, we have our data, our collections. We need to begin to have some views. The function is the lighting view. This is really the first screen we see on the app. The first thing is, first you see the lighting view is connected to a friend's, is linked to a friend's collection. So to understand this thing, because it's very simple, you can just instantiate your lighting view and you specify what collections will be in your collection. But this is my friend's collection. Then, here, this is the code for the choose, the lighting view. As usual, we're going to have all the views now. Inside, there is EL property, which is important because it's, you tell the view, okay, we will get attached to the dog at the view, actually, select dog. If we go now to the index, let's change that file. You see, I have defined a div with the it view entry and all my views will be attached here. Then I have this life function. Inside, you can define a template. You can use whatever template you want. This is one of the strengths of a backbone. It's very flexible. Here, I'm just using some underscore template, very simple one, and you find, okay, you can find this template at this selector, then the view template. We go back in the HTML file, you see, this is my template that I define directly on the page, very simple. And then, for each view, you have to define a render function. When it's time to work, it's going to send you this render function in the code. And inside, you see, this is the way that you specify, okay, here is the HTML that you will use to render the page. You use your template and you specify your HTML. You see, we just got this render function in the router again, when the landing function will be called, and the view will be attached in the term directly. We have the landing function, as you recall, this is the first result of the presentation. How close? This is with the landing view. We will see our templates that will be rendered in HTML. So now, we want some interaction. When people then we click on this button, we want the user to get logged in to Facebook and want to take this access token so that you can get this friend. You see, my ID is login button for this button. And we go back in the landing view. This is how you specify events, I mean, user events in this region of the code. We just specify, okay, if there is a click on the login button, then you call this function, click login button, which is just here. And as I do some Facebook initialization, I don't want to cut into details because this is about the background. But basically, we store our view into Facebook and we store this access token in the collection each time user click on the... Finally, there is a convention that if you want the default behavior of the widget to get applied, you can return true. If you don't want the default behavior, you return false. But that doesn't mean it means that, okay, this is an anchor and I specify the href, go to the friend's page. So I want it to apply.  Our friend page. This friend page, this is like the friend's view, which is linked to the collection because we need to render these friends on the left and also to the winners because we need to render them also. This is almost specified only if you initialize the friend's view, which is a new friend's view. We specify the model that we used in the collection and this is the code for the friend's view. Pretty similar to the linear view, but surely it's something interesting in the initialized function. It's that we listen from events from the models. This is where all the data driven is working. So the first line is specify that, okay, if the model that we use is triggering a change event, then we want the view to render itself. So I think this change event is called which time there is a change of attributes. And then the second line is a bit similar, but the convention is that, okay, if the collection trigger reset event, which means that the fetch function has been called and then all the friends model has been created, then we will want the page to render again. And if you go back in the middle in our friend's function, you see here that we're not calling the render function of the friend's view, but we're calling the fetch function of the friend's collection. Because we have defined this event, this binding of events that each time there is a reset from the friend's collection, the page with the friend's view will render, okay? Then we have also the render function, basically, this is the same as the render view, but we have some more properties that we give to the page because we want to customize the view with different friends. And then for the events, we have basically two user events that you want to handle, the key on the checkbox, it says 100% friends. And the key on the published one. And you see for the checkbox, we will go to the click choice and for the publish, we'll go to the click publish function. So basically that's how this app is working. You want to see the growth is available on the GitHub. So why using it? Why using it? It's very small. It's not like a huge framework that you have to put in a lot of time to learn. It's more like very small. And I hope you get a lot of fans for the first one. Because it's only six kb, and then customizing is what they want to handle them with. There is many ways to do the things. So it's very flexible. Then there is no assumption that you are going to do the same for the people in this kind of stuff. You should see this for HTML and CSS. It's that difficult. And at the end, we have a more modern new code and it means for us to do it first. The fun is more of a long time. So some problems with the upgrades and carries. I think the main one is missing. Because, I mean, if you're creating a app like Gmail, you don't really care that the Google code is coming through your app. You don't want that. So it's okay to be struck by all of this. But in the case of do something right now to Google, Google closed the code. Because the features are on the client side, with JavaScript and the code will not execute the JavaScript, it will be a problem. But I guess there are some projects working on that. So that you can maybe use this experience also on the server side. So who is using it? That one is becoming one of my channel now. Because there's a lot of companies using it. Like, can I get a new person, new start-up sites, Postgres, or big companies like Groupon? Even 18 is using it for the mobile application. Also, it's quite popular on GitHub to see some of the best of the most popular sites in the world. So I guess it could get used more and more. Let me conclude the presentation with some resources. As you can hear from the show, the presentation. You can have a good e-book, if you'd like to learn something using e-book from this guy, how to use money. Also, there's good videos on PIP code to start running it. Yeah, that's a good question. What exactly does it do? HTML, generate, focus, and promote, that is how many people run it? And make friends, running. Yeah. So the question is how to change that into... Basically, this one, this template is very simple because there is no attributes inside. You cannot change it. So it's basically, you have the HTML, this is the HTML you will get. But then you can, for example... Yeah? Just one more question. Why is it in the script tag only? Why don't they do it? Because when you're using the ID of the streamer, right, your HTML is just here, you can just give it an HTML of that, that. Yeah. So why isn't the script then not in the top of it, which is just here? Okay. So, I mean, the question is more, why is it in the .jtdx.jml file? Why isn't it in the script tag? It's not some other... I mean, it's very simple and there is not like 50 different templates, so it's not a problem to store them in the main file. And also you can do things differently. You can store them on the separate files and then you can load them with agile request. But if you don't have so much templates in your app, you can store them directly or like... Is it in the script tag in this order? Okay. Why would it not in the script tag? Yeah, yeah. This is something, any tag? Yeah, you could do that in any tag, of course. You can add it in any tag, but in the script tag, okay? You just have to tell it to the browser, okay, this is not the browser. So you put whatever you want to. If you're in the spec template, there is like... It's not a template, so you change the template. The template will be better. Yeah, it will be easier. Who set the frames as to what did something? Show me how to do it. You only need to just say, okay, what is your selector? Okay, when there is a click event on this element in your DAW, call this function, which is here.  The question here is that this DAW HTML does not work? Ah, this... Line 13. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So how exactly does DAW come from? How is it working from here? Okay. So this dot dollar EL is a shortcut for this dot EL parenthesis that you put the dollar at the beginning. So basically some jQuery balancing. And you specify, okay. Now you, here is your HTML. You call this template and this template will get the HTML. Because basically here, you tell, okay, my template is there and compile it, then when I call you and compile it and store it here. And this is a function and you call it and then it will get you the HTML. Do what? How does it work now? Yeah. And it's up on the DAW. You want to take it off and run it. Yeah, go ahead. You say, why a backbone?  Why a backbone? Why not savvy or some other simpler framework? Yeah, there's a simpler framework, right? So why a backbone? Simple, simple. I mean, yeah. I looked at different, for me it was more like, okay, do I, will I take some huge framework like Ember or something like that? Which will be maybe one megabyte, you know? Or do I take this small library which is only six KB and you call the talking, they're very positive about it. And the author of the library is saying, okay, there's many ways to do things. So you're not stuck into one way of thinking. And I tried it and I think it's very interesting. Since it's always a single-page application, XT is one of the big problems. So any best way of ASC about this kind of application is there's a pancake website. Yeah. So I'm looking back. So I was on one site, should we search for a search engine or something like that? Yeah. There are some problems. You get some edge agent space application. What's the best way? I would say it would be good to work with node.js on the server side. And if there is a way to reuse these views that you have on the client and you render them on the server, then we're good, you can see the pages. But I'm not there yet. And there is not much yet, like very mature projects. It is probably around the server. If the same, you're okay. I mean, another one, so I was thinking that there's something better. Yeah, this is my first one. It's in the back and let's see if it works. So does it perform well with that view or not? So the question is, does it perform well with other backend technologies? I would say, there's no interaction with the backend because it's only JavaScript files on the client. I read people that rewrite applications with backbone and they said, oh, now it's more maintainable, it's more structured, and it's faster. So, and how? It's more like what we use to code JavaScript. I have one script to add to your page. Are they enough for documenters? Yeah, the documentation is quite good, quite nice, but at first it's a bit, there's some concepts that are difficult to grasp. Just look at the read documentation. This is why some people, some videos to use to start.