So hello, everybody. We're in this beautiful afternoon here to talk about Java and DevOps supercharged or live your pipeline with containers. So I'm about to talk about, particularly, of containers technology from developers' standpoint. And I would like to start our discussion with a simple question. If we are developers, I don't know if you are developers, but as developers, when is our job done? When is your job done? Our job done. Because usually, traditional developers believe that your job is done when you just commit your code into the repository. Or if you have a camera on board, you take the post and move it to the done column. It's kind of frustrating for me, at least, to realize that my code, the thing that I'm producing today, is going to take like two, three, four, six months to go to the production. Because I lose that feeling, that empowerment feeling that I have when I get the things to be done. And even more, my lines of code, they are not benefiting anyone before going to production. And as a programmer, I like to believe that software can change the world and software can change the world for the better. So the more code and the better code that I could deliver into production, the faster that I do that, more people can benefit from what I do. So we want to deliver more and even deliver faster. But we usually try to avoid deployments because deployment is a painful thing. Nobody likes to be deploying things because usually we break things into production. And since we try to avoid that, one of the movements that happened the past few years are DevOps, which is basically a contraction of developers and IT operations, a tradition by model IT model, where you have people responsible for developing new features and you have people responsible for maintaining these things into production. And since we have this term DevOps, people like to say that between Dev and Ops, there's a huge wall between them because these people can be friends. They can be friends because developers, they are the ones that are constantly changing things and breaking things into production. And the Ops guys, the IT operation guys, they are the ones that need to keep the status quo. They need to keep the things running. And for you to keep the things running, you have to change the minimum, to change to the minimum. So how can they be friends if the dev guys are the ones that are creating trouble to the Ops guys? Because if developers break things into production, the phone call is gonna be made to the support which is handled by the Ops team and developers don't get that phone. They don't get customers or users complaining about what they're doing. So since they have different goals, they can be friends. And that's one of the things that we're trying to correct with DevOps because it generates a lot of memes in the internet. I like this one very much, The Disaster Girl, Work at Finding Dev, DevOps problem now because we're just delivering our problem to other people. And of course DevOps is much more than that. DevOps requires a cultural change, a process change, but we have a lot of different technologies that may allow us to make this process easier. One of these technologies is containers and containers happen like it's not a new technology, but somehow we are all discussing about containers these days. And I like to use the physical container comparison to explain how software containers work because I think it's very appropriate and we have a lot of different analogies to explain why containers are important today. I like to say that containers are so important for today's words, a seaborne trade that almost 6% of everything that is transported on Earth these days is transported by containers, on shipping containers, and the other 40% is transported, almost 40% is transported also in ships, but it's transported in bulk since we have things like petroleum and soy, so you have specific ships for that. And also, even though almost 6% of everything traded in the world is transported by container, only 13% of the world's ships are shipping containers. So we have a very small amount of ships that are transporting the containers worldwide and we have a very few ships transporting all of these containers. Container technology, the physical container technology has matured so much and is relatively new because it only started after the Second World War. But today, shipping goods inside a physical container is so cheap that when you get a codfish in Norway, it's cheap for you to get the fish inside a container, ship it to China, get people to cut it and send it back to Norway to be sold because the cost of the shipping from Norway to China and back again adds only a few cents per ton of the goods. So shipping containers today is very cheap, is very effective, is relatively fast and you have a standard for that. So containers change the world, change the way we see goods transportation and now it's changing the software world too. So what is so great about containers in software and again we're gonna do some kind of comparisons. First thing about great about containers is resource consolidation because you know you can transport in a shipping container, you can transport a lot of physical containers, that's why it makes so cheap to ship containers in a shipping container. So you have resource consolidation and how does that work in the software world? Traditionally for you to, you know some years ago, maybe more than 10 years ago we're discussing how virtualization can enable resource consolidation because we can do more with less hardware and then in virtualization we needed a server or a physical server then a host OS, then a hypervisor on top of that, then on top of the hyperviruses we need a guest OS, the binaries, the libraries, the software dependencies of our application and then we pack our application. That's a traditional virtualization model and then sometimes when you try to, when you have a very solid infrastructure, you try to minimize the amount of different OSs that you have into production. So usually when you have your own infrastructure, you have the exactly same OS with the same patches, the same versions running into production. So each one of the VMs that you have into production is gonna have the same OS, the same file system, the same files, the same everything. Then we have to stop to think about that. If everything is the same, why can't we use just one instance? Reuse that and just deploy what is different from one another. So that's what containers do from this point of view of resource consolidation because since now that we're using containers, we just need a server. Host OS, we share the libraries and each one of the containers only package the binaries, the dependencies and your application. That's why containers are, we say that containers are lightweight because you don't have to deploy a whole new guest OS in every single VM. You just have to instantiate your new container and when I say container, just to simplify that, imagine that the container is a thin layer insulating your process, in this case your application from the rest of the applications running in the host OS. So that's how containers work. In containers, we're using the same kernel, the same file system, the same services that are running on the host OS for each one of the containers running into production. And a very common question that I've received if we're using containers as in virtualization, we can use different host OSes, different guest OSes running into production. We can have different kernel versions. We can have different versions of the library that have no production. In containers, the answer is no, you can't have different OSes running into containers because all of the containers inside the host OS are sharing the same kernel. So you can run Linux containers in Linux and you can run Windows containers on Windows. And each one of the containers that are running are sharing the same kernel. So you can't have different kernel versions on your containers, so which is a good and a bad thing because you only have to manage a single kernel. And it can be a bad thing if you have a strict requirement of having different kernel versions. But that's another problem to solve. That's not the problem we're trying to solve now. Containers in software also allow default packaging. Container technology is not new. It's arrived at the 70s. And we have a lot of different technologies that provide a different packaging format. But now I think we have reached the point where we standardize the packaging for the container information. You can imagine a container packaging like a big zip file or tar file with some meta information for you to deploy the container. And default packaging is important because it allows you to just move your containers between developers and infrastructure. You can publish a container and other people can use your container because we agreed in a standard format. Just the way that physical containers allow the transportation to become so cheap and popular these days because everybody agreed on the format of a container. Another very good thing about containers is what I call virtual appliances because before that traditional deploy models used to be like, I have a server, I have to install it, I install the dependencies, I install my application server, then the developers generate an artifact like a jar or a year. Deploy that into my application server and that's the release process. Now with containers, again, this is not a new concept but containers allow us to do much better. And now we're talking with containers we're usually talking about virtual appliances. You don't let like, I have this installation and I just change my application artifact. In fact, this is a good practice with container. We just pack everything inside the container, everything that you need and your application. So if you need a JDBC file inside your application server, you just install the application server, JDBC file, the everything else that you need inside your application server and your application on top of that inside a single package. You might want to say that's a waste of resources when unpackaged every time and again the same application server but container technology also has layers. So you can install your application server in a layer and your application in the layer above. So each one of your containers will share the same layer of your application server. So you're not wasting, really wasting resources because it's gonna be shared, okay?  And what I like to say is like a turnkey solution for deploying applications. You don't have to worry about installation and configuration everything else. You just have to know the name of the container that you contain an image that you want to run, choose that, run and turnkey, it's into production. That's the way we want to deliver software these days. That's how containers help us a lot. And if I take an analogy with physical containers, that's exactly what happened also to ships in containers because these days, the guy operating the port at the crank, he doesn't care what is inside the container. I just care that this container must go there, this container must go here and there finales because the container knows what is inside and the containers knows how to handle what is inside. In fact, we have some very special cases. If you have a fragile thing inside the container, it's the responsibility of the people, of the person packaging the container to put things to make sure that things don't break. If you're transporting bananas, for instance, you need a specific temperature to carry the bananas over the sea. So the containers know which is the appropriate temperature and it has a built-in freezer. So all of the guy from the port who needs to know is that I need to take this container, put there and plug it to a power outlet. Nobody cares what's inside, it's just written that it requires a power outlet and that's a comparison I like to say about virtual appliances. The container knows how to handle what is inside and the only responsibility for deploying the application is to get which container you need to know and start it. That's what I call turnkey solution. But also that is not enough because these kind of tools and technology, they have been around since the 70s. So what changed in the past like five, six years for container technology to be so popular? Container used to be a very restricted technology because it used to be hard to build containers, almost impossible to publish containers and you had to be built in and run in your containers. What changed in the past six years? Now we have a different set of developer-friendly tools that you don't have to be root to be running these tools. And these developer-friendly tools, they have a very friendly command line. You can just execute a line in your CLI and you get to build a container, to package a container, to publish a container, to download the container for a third party, all with a single command line that I'm gonna show you later. And for me, the most important one thing about container technology in the past five or six years is the container registry. Because the container registry represents four containers, the same thing that the Apple Store represented for mobile applications. It represents a way for you to create your application packaged in a turnkey format and allow this application to be published in a common way that anybody in the world can get your application, install, and run that. You see, now we have a marketplace of applications and this container registry, we have a public container registry like the Docker Hub and we have also private container registry like the one that you want to use in your private infrastructure to publish your internal applications. So it's also a possibility. So container registry, I believe that's the real thing that allow the people to exchange these containers and allow all of the bugs that we're seeing today with DevOps and container technology. But much better than just saying everything that I'm saying, I get to show you a very quick demo in case you've never seen that, of container technology. So here I have my command line and I'm just gonna make it real big so nobody can complain that it's not running. So today's, these days if I want to build a container, I just need to execute a command like Docker builds and pass the folder where my container is, it's gonna build a container. I'm not gonna do that because I don't have enough time to show a complete demo but the greatest thing is not everybody needs to build their own container to package because sometimes if you're not allowed to do to run containers into production yet, even as a developer, I can benefit from containers using third-party containers in my machine. That's one of the things that happened to me two weeks ago. I was testing some stuff with Norco database. So I installed and created a container image file for Norco database and kept running but then I wanted to try some features in the MySQL database but I didn't want to install MySQL database because I would use just for a short time frame.  I just want to do a small thing. I don't want to install MySQL on my machine just for that. Then I remember that I could be using container technology to allow my machine to run a container since containers are usually disposable. I could install MySQL on my machine using a container, use for what I wanted and then just discard it. So I'm just going to show you here how can I run that. And the command line is big because my fonts are big but basically you're doing a Docker run. I'm going to give you a name which is the name of my container. Red hat, Java one. I'm going to set a MySQL root password which MySQL password dash D which is to detach. I want to run that in the background. I want to run that in the foreground. And here I pass the name of the container that I want to run. I want to run MySQL and I can pass a specific version that I want to run. So that's just this. If I push enter, it's going to bring me the hash of the container that I'm running. And if I execute a Docker logs, you can see it's very big but we have a lot of logs here. But basically it says that MySQL is running on port 33 or 6. So it's successfully running inside the container here inside my notebook. So I could get and just use it for development and everything else and it would be all okay. Another very good practical use case for container technology is usually I'm a comedian or master or am I using the latest version of MySQL but I'm developing version 3.0. But one of my customers, they are still using version 2.0 and they're using an older version of MySQL and they hit a bug. I need to fix that but I don't have the exactly same MySQL version. I don't want to uninstall the version that I have to install an older version. Just to fix the bug and then have to install the newer version again. So what can I do? I can, for instance, just as I instantiated a five, six, 32 version of MySQL, I could be choosing like a five, four version or five version of MySQL to be running and it would be both be running inside my machine at the same time. At the moment that I didn't need the container, the MySQL container anymore, I could just dispose that to discard. The container is very easy. I could just need to get the container. Well, fonts are big, but it starts with F4. Docker is top F4. It is top in MySQL container and doc rmf4. Container disposed, nothing rests in my machine. So it's very fast. And if you have a public residence for that, I get the official repository for MySQL database on the hub. And these are the versions that are officially released in support for the moment. I have a five. But if you get to the history, you get older versions too. So you can deploy any of the versions that you want with MySQL database. So that's one of the benefits of container registry. You can publish yourself. You can sell to other people your containers or you can help other developers around the world with your containers. And you can also use container for front party to run your dependencies inside your machine. Of course, the example I gave is just a single container, but you can have multiple dependencies running inside your machine using Docker containers. And each one of them, you're gonna see each other because you have the capabilities of your team in the platform. I also like to announce to you that micro profile 1.0 has just been released and everybody's talking about that. Java 1.0 is a joint community effort from Red Hat, IBM, Payara, Tommy Tribe, London Java Community, Sojava and Hammock, particularly I'm Brazilian too, and I'm part of among the leaders of Sojava, which is the largest user group in the world. So we're all here to provide because we know that Java can do more because we know that Java can improve in the world of microservices. That's why we're trying to push forward the technology to allow developers worldwide using Java to deliver microservices even better and faster. And if you want to know more about that, I recommend you, there is a special event on Thursday, 11.30 on the microprofilelaunch.com. There is a limited amount of seats, so you might want to register if it is still available. If you want to know more about micro profile, I suggest you to check microprofile.io. And if you want to know even more about DevOps, microservices and lots of different things that we're doing, particularly writing a book about a very special subject, which is how to break monolithic database into a microservice database, relational database. And so I've been standing this topic for almost a year now and I hope to finish the book to publish that. It will be available at developers.redhead.com together with lots of articles, tutorials, videos, and many other orally books that you can download for free once you register at developers.redhead.com. And also you have all of the Red Hat software available for free for development. And if you want to know more, please join us. And I'm also available on Twitter at Yanaga. If you want to ask some questions, feel free, I'm here. But I'm also available on Twitter, okay? And that's what I had to say. Thank you very much. Thank you.


And welcome to another Reclaim TV Friday stream. We're calling this one Building Community and we're joined by Martin Hoxie today, which is really exciting when we're gonna chat with, well, all four of us are gonna chat about, you know, building community on the web, what we've had success in, maybe what hasn't worked, I suppose. And the tools we liked, we've been enjoying using things like that. But before we get into all that, maybe we can kind of all introduce ourselves. Starting, Martin, if you wanna introduce yourself first. Yeah, Taylor, hi. Thanks for inviting me on to this show. So my name is Martin Hoxie. So I've had a recent-ish change in career. So two years ago, I started working for a Google partner, CDS based in the UK. So, but long before that, I was kind of heavily into new Google workspace products. And that's kind of, some of that was, it was actually kicked off from being part of a Twitter community that kind of changed my whole life around 2009, which eventually led with working with Marin for a long time. So, yeah. Excited to kind of explain a bit more of my journey as part of this show. Yeah, awesome. And also, of course, joined by Amanda and Marin. So thank you all for being here today. So I guess to kind of kick things off, obviously the topic of building community is a big one. I didn't exactly narrow it very much with the title, but I just kind of wanted to start, like, what is, what are you doing right now in terms of like what building community, what's your strategy and where are you building that community right now? For me, it's, you know, two years ago, a lot of it was working with Marin at the Association for Learning Technology. So building the community there or supporting the community there was an aspect of my role. More recently, it has kind of changed. So I've got my own personal interests and I'm just trying to bring as many people as along on that journey as I can. So I've got different things that I do as part of that. So as I mentioned, I work for a Google partner. So I'm, and the products that I'm working with, Google Apps Script and more recently, a no-code platform called AppSheet. Just trying to generate interest, get people talking about sharing experience. So I think in terms of community, it's really loose. It's like, I recognize some of the names in terms of people liking the content that we're producing. People, you know, it's not a formalized walled garden or anything like that, it's very open. So it flows a lot in terms of people coming in now. I suppose in terms of where I'm focusing my efforts, I do a similar kind of show to this in a fortnightly show where we get guests on and try and just talk about products bringing guests. But another thing which is, I think a bit more retro is I run a website called Apps Script Pulse, which is a WordPress blog, which I just curate content. So I find things other people are writing about at Google Apps Script. And just, I don't know if people remember Scoopits. I don't know if Scoopits still exist. So it's just finding other content that people have published, linking back to that, providing a small comment. There's a degree of automation in that in terms of pushing stuff out into LinkedIn. I've kind of given up on Twitter since they killed the API. So in terms of conversation, it's primarily happening around LinkedIn now in terms of people responding to those posts, rather than the WordPress site itself. So it's interesting how that has evolved over time. I don't know if other people have given up on Twitter. Where are the cool kids going these days? Yeah, it's a tricky, it's a big problem. I don't know, maybe even opportunity, depending how you look at it, right? With kind of Twitter's implosion and the API stuff. We've definitely noticed that too, we kind of used to use Twitter as our de facto completely public platform, right? We had other spaces, forum, use Discord, things like that. But I think for us, it's been a lot of, what tools can we use that don't introduce a large amount of extra time to integrate? And because of that, yeah, Twitter's just not one of them anymore for us, or actually. It's a shame, Martin, I remember, many people who are watching us, listening to us, will be aware of your tax explorer tools, and I know everybody on this call will have used that. And many of us in the community who used to rely on that currently to track community building on Twitter, particularly tracking conversations and going beyond the broadcast method of just sharing information. I'm really curious how you think that's changed for you in the last few years, because I remember when you first started the Apps Script Pulse site, and it sounds like it's very much you motoring it, rather than like lots of different people contributing. How is that evolving for you? It's, yeah, I think it's like a continual evolution in terms of, I feel like with the loss of, loss of Twitter, let's say it's the loss of Twitter, it's called something else now anyway. I think personally I felt a bit lost for a while, and it's really interesting you mentioned tags and tags explorer. That tool was actually created, so I could find where I was within the community. So it was basically a network diagram of conversations on Twitter. And I found that really comforting to see my little node floating in space but connected to all these other people. So right now it feels like those connections are more fragmented, people are going off to different platforms. So I think that's part of the reason that I've kind of doubled down on this Apps Script Pulse site. We have a couple of people that do contribute posts as part of that, but yeah, it's mainly me, but I think it's, in terms of shift, it's, you know, I've moved more to, rather than being part of a network to being the candlelight that the moths will flutter around and consume content and somehow use that in terms of their own work, maybe not directly, but it's always nice, you know, we're in a period now where we're going back to events and for me to go to events and for people to recognize what I've done have been consuming that for a long time, but and just come up and say hello. I think it's really nice. And I think it's a real struggle now in terms of going back to that whole idea of establishing where you are within the community. I think it's become harder and it can be quite lonely sometimes. And I think you have to remind yourself that there's a bigger picture to this and in terms of consumption or involvement, it's not always obvious what's going on there. I think that can be quite hard. I don't know if people feel similar to that or have ways to counteract those feelings. Do you feel lonely? Feeling lonely in a big community. I think that's a real challenging thing. Yeah, I think that just from our experience in Reclaim at Tech, there's a bit of an adjustment that needs to be made when you're just kind of like putting content out there and just wondering like, is anybody out there? Is anybody listening, you know? But what I love is the fact that we still do it. And so I do think that it's kind of a shift in mindset as well where our motivation for putting stuff out there is like, I love your metaphor about being a candle that the moss can come to, you know? It is how it feels sometimes. It's like we're putting out what matters to us so that hopefully the right people can find it. And then I think what makes the biggest difference is having a place for people to get in contact and actually get together, which is I think why Discord for us is so important and creating an ecosystem of different platforms and tools that people can join us on because as we saw with Twitter acts like putting all your eggs in one basket, it can kind of blow back up in your face if things aren't sustainable. Yeah, and similarly, as you mentioned, like we are, I think a lot of people are kind of looking in the direction of like, all right, well, what can I take ownership of here and maybe more of this belongs on my website? And then I can, you know, however you manage that, whether it's automated or just simply just copying and pasting links other places, you know, it doesn't have to be complicated, but sort of thinking about where the stuff originates from I think is something people are, which is I think a good result of all this, thinking more about. And I know we are too, like we obviously as a, at Reclaim, we're very interested in the open source stuff that you can host yourself and we use a lot of that, but it's not like we don't use any, you know, we use Discord, we use YouTube, we use StreamYard, but we're talking on right now. So we're trying to really intentionally make the choices, make sense for us and like, you know, combine them with other things we have more control of or just critically look at where it makes sense to to rye on these things and where it doesn't, I think. And we're always rethinking it, you know, there's no perfect answer, but. I think that it's also like a balance between like, you know, I really value having my own domain and like that's how I first, you know, became aware of Reclaim because I was like, really looking to have like a place that I had control over, but like, you know, for a long time I locked down all comments on my side because I was just getting spam and like really nasty spam or fault. And so I thought, okay, you know, I can't be bothered to moderating that. But then in like, you know, it's a really lonely place. Like in my blog, there's like three comments a year, you know, and like Jim commented on something like twice in the same month. And like my blog sent me an alert unusual activity, you know, because it went out two comments in one month.  But Steven and Mark in the Discord chat were just talking about like Blue Sky being open now and being, you know, waiting for Blue Sky Federation. And I'm trying so many different networks and I am completely at sea as to where I can have any conversations that I want to have right now. Certainly not in my blog comments, that is for sure, you know, I get to be the only one who perseveres with that Jim, which I totally appreciate. Other than that, it's just, you know, it's very, very different. I don't know if it's my age, but, or, you know, other factors of change, but back in 2009, Twitter was a huge thing for me in terms of making those initial connections. But now even towards, you know, end of my time at Alts, where, you know, curating the alt community on Twitter was part of what I was doing. I was spending less time doing that and I don't know if there was what changed, if it was the quality of the conversation had gone down or my focus was elsewhere. And so now kind of microblogging is not something that really features in my life. It's more into longer form, which is maybe even more retro than retro Twitter. I still live by RSS, so it's great to see Stephen in the chat. So, and it's one of the things in terms of, I mentioned I have a website that's curating content. I'm getting that content from subscribing to RSS feeds. So, and I'm doing one of the applications that you can install on weekly most thing is TT RSS. So that's, I even themed it as Google Reader, which was my go-to tool. When Google killed it, I couldn't live without it. So, and still today, it's like one of my daily rituals is to troll the RSS content that I've got, but it's interesting and I see a general decline in terms of people publishing stuff. And even myself, it's like, I've gone down from probably at my peak, I was doing something like a post a week and now it's maybe a post a quarter. So, there is definitely changes and preferences and kind of wider trends. So, but I always found community and it's that slippery beast and very intangible thing, but it organic. So you kind of just have to go where it goes or it takes you and see what you can do. But, yeah, I gone on the days when, but it was magical moments back then in terms of getting comments on your blog. And a big change in terms of feeling that you were completely alone just writing stuff.  It was amazing that sense. And I think that's something I have to keep reminding myself is letting people know that you value what they're contributing and making that connection to what they're doing. I think is something that is incredibly valuable in terms of spending time doing, but quite often we don't have time to do that.  I wonder, Martin, like we are seeing a lot of people on our channels talking about like newsletters and I wonder whether, you know, like we're like more in the age of the newsletter at the moment. Like I know we've got some flex courses coming up on the ghost like newsletter. And I'm sure Taylor will talk about our own, like, you know, a new ghost newsletter blog, but also like the long form comment is really interesting because that's something that Amanda's been heading up like reaching out to the community to kind of showcase, you know, by-of-case studies and kind of making more effort to kind of celebrate. So yeah, I don't know, Amanda, if you wanna jump in and like talk about that. Yeah, something that we've always wanted to do and we're kind of talking about since I first joined Reclaim in 2022 was this idea of showing off our community to our community. And it goes back to what Martin was talking about of appreciating what other people are doing and taking the time to show it off, I guess. Either giving people that direct feedback or taking the extra step of sharing it back out to the community. And in our case, we did it by reaching out, letting people know like, hey, we're watching, we're paying attention. I think that that is powerful. And then interviewing them, talking to them about what projects they're doing, using, in our case, Reclaim services and then creating something different out of that, something that can be published and then sharing that back with the community. And we recently did that finally set out our kind of launch case study on our new blog site and this was a conversation I had with Suzanne Norman from Simon Fraser University and what her experience has been like using bulk share hosting and how that has supported her overall very much, you know, non-tech related, like non-tech focused but needing tech to help publishing course. So yeah, Taylor threw that right in the discord chat. It was a really fun thing to do and felt really good to share it back out to the community and it's something that we're hoping to do more throughout the year. And it is a longer form thing. It does take a little bit more time. So you can't really send them out quickly but I think it's a labor of love. There's a lot of folks talking to them about newsletters and discord right now. And yeah, I just, it is interesting because I feel like there's more newsletter stuff than I've ever seen but it is maybe 90% basically the same thing as blog posts. It's not, you know, there can be differences obviously. And for me personally, they go right into my RSS reader because yeah, I'm in my RSS reader every day. That's what I'm reading. I don't really want those in my inbox personally but that is somewhat encouraging to me to see too is actually like, it's just funny because you used to hear like, it's like, oh, blogging is gonna completely disrupt journalism and media and in some ways it has, right? But then a lot of those bloggers went to work for media companies and then now there's a big shift to like, all right, well, I've left that company and now I'm doing my own newsletter and you can subscribe to it and pay for it or there's a free version or whatever. And so it does seem like we're on the back on the cycle, right? Like if it's a 20 year trend, that's about right. I'm keen to pick up on this comment that Mark posted about newsletters of being one way communication. And I listen and I find that really interesting because I probably have more people like circle back to me or connect with me in response to a newsletter that like I send out basically a summary of anything I've published in any given month. And like, I have like 18 or 90 subscribers. So this is like a very Bijou niche personal thing. So basically like a friend of family type newsletter. But so many people like come back to me and since I've gone freelance, my own newsletter is probably my main source of generating new business beyond posting anything on like LinkedIn or Instagram or Macedon or, you know, wherever else. And it is very strange. Like I wasn't really expecting it to be a two way thing either. So I am, and I know that when we send out the, you know reclaims monthly roundup with all the gifts, like that's probably where more people then reach out and kind of take action or get in touch than lots of the other stuff. So I'm finding that quite an interesting experience. Like, you know, it isn't a communication. It's not conversation, but it's definitely like not all one way in my experience. I think that's such a great point, Marin. And it really goes to show that there's something to say for like well thought out and like curated and yeah, just a well thought out presentation of content instead of just the constant like micro content and really that I think it's a, I'm not surprised that that's giving you business because you're able to really show a full picture of what you're doing and who you are. And I think people respond to that. And I think that's why people like the reclaim roundup as well, because you really, you get a sense of who we are when you see that roundup and just how goofy and also how busy we are. And you feel the energy from that, at least I do. Well, you make me feel bad. I have a newsletter as well, but it's not, it's basically a push of to work traditionally be like someone has subscribed to my blog for email updates when there's a new post. That's all it is. It's just just content I've published on this app. It's a script pulse website. Each day it will just send out whatever published that day to people.  But I think there was a comment as well in the chat in terms of newsletters have just got ramped up in technical knowledge and ability in terms of the email providers are now putting, it's like, Marin and I were chatting in terms of setting up her domain and it's like, I'm gonna spout out acronyms now. Oh, have you got your DMARC and SPF all set up, right? So you're in that whole world. We're not putting a lot of email right now and I think, but we saw the information that come out about these changes. So I think we're all having a collective side. Yeah, and it's not just the technical things that you're setting up on your blog. The mail providers are looking, if you're sending newsletters looking for things like unsubscribed links, who's it coming from, that kind of thing. So quite quickly, these are, for me, it's like my newsletter, I'm not generating. Everything I do, I don't generate any revenue. It's, I gave up even putting Google ads on my blog. It was just too much pain. But there's a lot of effort that needs to go into these things and there are so many pitfalls and nuances that you need to know about. So I could see why a lot of people would struggle with that. My tip, so on my side, it's a WordPress blog and I think it's mail poet is the plugin I use for that. I don't know, I know there are various other ones but I've been using that one for a couple of years now and I'm quite happy with that. I'm underneath the, I don't need to buy the premium license because I don't have 1,000 people I'm sending it to, which is fine by me. Yeah, the email stuff is, it's tricky. I just put in the Discord, the company Mail Gun, that's like a email API folks can use and they have various plugins and integrations as well. Did a pretty good write up, obviously. I mean, it's very much in their interest to do a good write up on how to make sure some of Gmail and I think soon Yahoo changes mean and it is kind of another thing that makes that self-hosted email hard, as self-hosted email has been near impossible, like completely self-hosted, I mean, really hard for a long time but this is just sort of another, to me it's just sort of another one of those things. But I will say from our perspective, using Mail Gun, which we use for a couple different things, both like most of the transactional email you may receive from Reclaim about your account is done via that, but also we use it for our newsletters. And it's been pretty good, honestly. And it's not been too hard to maintain in terms of those requirements either because they, as long as you follow their best guide, their best, it's not that bad. I wanted to pick up a point actually Amanda made before we went on air that I was just thinking about when we were saying about how do you get away from email and I think that's one of the things I've become more interested in in the last couple of years is kind of synchronous versus asynchronous engagement and I find community now, like building communities has to kind of work more asynchronously as well as synchronously. So I think, you know, like Amanda was saying that more people probably watch the show after it's been aired rather than being live online. I know, we work as a community that's across lots of different times. And it's like for Martin and me it's like the tail end of our Fridays now for Amanda and Taylor, it's like the start of Friday you know, some of the people in the chat in different time zones again. And I find that really interesting like because the ashram can I spit it's quite hard to get sounding anything more than an afterthought. What do you guys think about that? Temporal questions. It's just a big bowl of timing by me stuff. Yeah, I've never really thought of it that way but it's quite interesting. And I think, you know, it maybe relates back to that whole two-way communication or is it one way? I don't know. I could get very philosophical about it and okay, creating temporal moments. I don't know. I'm rambling there. This is an obvious thing to say I suppose but I really think the synchronous versus asynchronous is just a matter of who you're talking like everyone has different preferences and can fit that in to their day or lives easier. And I think that actually has something to do with sort of what we've been trying to do here at Reclaim and that like right now, right? We're on a stream. It is 10 30 Eastern time in whatever time and whatever time zone elsewhere. It's not gonna work for everybody, just won't, right? Like it's for me, I'm in central time. It's 9 30 in the morning. This is my job and I'm here and I'm happy to be here. Other folks are not gonna see this live. It's just kind of how it goes. So we've been trying to think of like how can we do both and not make it two and a half times the amount of work? And because it is content stuff is like that, right? Like if you do two things, doesn't really feel like twice as much work. It feels like more than twice as much work. So we've been trying to think of like how can we do something live because people like to participate live and it's more fun for us as well but also make that valuable and easy to find later. And I think we, you know, we typically get more people watching them after they're out for a couple of days. Yeah. We'd sign, so we, I do a similar sort of YouTube show and when the couple of years ago, we were, you know, it's the live aspect. I think it was a big thing for us to do. But part of it was in terms of just getting people commenting as part of the show and just responding to those comments. But the other thing was production. It's like, if we recorded something, we'd end up spending so long just editing it and then we just use StreamYard due to production live and then- There's the trick that we have for that. Don't edit anything. Well, that's it. With our StreamYard stuff, zero edit. It's like I might trim the intro clip slightly. What we were doing for the last couple of years as well is a lot of what we're doing on YouTube is not very visual. So, and with the tool like StreamYard, you can download the audio. So we take the audio, we put it on SoundCloud and then RSS comes to our rescue again. We're basically re-igrating that audio to every podcast platform that we can find. So it goes out to Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, which is dead, Amazon Music. So it's going out to all these different places and the challenge for us is then we've put it out to all these different places and then if people are commenting on it, we just don't have time to go in or even listening to it. We never go and look at the stats, but it's not a business for us. It's a hobby project. So, but for me, that was, because we really is back to the longer form. Our shows are about 45 minutes, sometimes an hour. And I think that's a really nice, you know, it's not the magic YouTube six minute moment that people want to consume. So I think it's ideal for people like me like to listen to podcasts while they're outside, away from screens. So we come back to RSS. RSS is our savior, pushes out. And I read recently that YouTube is actually, they had a beta of you could provide YouTube with an RSS feed for your podcast and it'll turn it into a YouTube clip. So we're going full circle now. Yeah, I was reading that. That's part of their getting away from Google podcasts is their Google's push has been YouTube is, you know, their tool for listening to podcasts. And to be fair, it's probably been their most popular tool for listening to podcasts for a long time anyway, right? Just people had to manually upload it there. So I haven't tried it, but I was reading about that it can literally ingest the audio files from an RSS feed and publish them as simple videos. I probably just static picture, but yeah. I wonder, I do worry about how many trees I'm killing now. We will, all this content basically ending up on different people, the same content on different people servers. So there we go. I also think it's an interesting kind of question around the open side of things, you know, because I think someone in the Discord chat earlier mentioned around, you know, how newsletters don't really contribute to open, you know, open communities and open practice. And like, you know, obviously you can do lots of things to make things searchable and archivable and so on and so forth. But next week, Martin, we have Alan Levine join us on Wednesday because we're like doing a community chat with him on like open education, open education week. And like, I think Alan's done a lot of like work with, you know, Discord in particular to try and kind of build like a sustainable community. And that is the kind of main question that I've got left on my list that I wanted to ask you about because you've been doing the community thing for like a really long time. And I wondered if you have any kind of thoughts on, you know, other than you just keep on going. Is there like a secret source of kind of, you know, making it happen long-term? Mm, I think it's a hard one. I think you have to, I really like, I think David White has the visitor and resident model in terms of, and I think you just have to accept that people will come in and out of communities. And, you know, if they stop for a spell, that's great. I think as well, the people that moderate communities or, you know, be the candle will come and go as well. So, you know, I still follow, you know, even though I've left alt, I still follow the members mailing list. I lurk on the side, not contributing. So I've definitely become a visitor to that one.  I think that, you know, keeps you going in terms of, you know, moving forward with something. The thing that kills community is when usually Google kills the product. So within Google Apps Script, we've had a couple of communities which I've been a moderator on. And the sad thing has been that for a long time, there was a really strong community in what was Google Plus and then Google killed the product. So we've moved in to Google Groups which is entirely email based with a very light web interface.  We've definitely lost people along the way. So, yeah. Yeah, and it, you know, you mentioned that people come in and out of communities and, but also even just obviously everyone engages in community differently, right? Like I am not a big blog commenter. I mean, I would like to, but it's usually I find myself reading something and my reaction is, that's really cool. I'm not going to type that in a box and hit send. It's not worth reading, right? So I tend to read a lot and comment not very often. And I think there's lots of people like that.  And, you know, it's not visible when people are just reading your stuff.  And people go like the like button, what's the point of that? You know, it doesn't offer anything. And I don't know that I agree with that personally because I think it offers a certain type of person a way to say like, yeah, I see this and I like it. I don't have anything to say that's interesting at this time, you know. And I think that can even be an on ramp for some folks who are finding a voice in a community too. It's a small thing, but it just keeps popping up for me, right? We have it happen here at Reclaim where we'll months later, we'll get an email from someone who's like, hey, I saw your video on this and it was really interesting, thanks. And I'm like, great. I didn't even know anyone cared about that, you know. So, Marin, emoji reactions. Discuss. We used to have when we all first started working online like in 2017, 18, like we had this big argument about like how, you know, how useful that is. And now it feels so quaint to even like consider it. But at the time it wasn't a done thing at all at least not when our working environment. But I was just thinking like, because we were talking about this platform, I think Steven mentioned called Discourse, which I haven't used at all. And I'm always kind of amazed by a wide variety of different platforms people kind of really identify with. And now I think when more people work remotely or from home all of the time, I think that's really increasing. So some people live their lives in like metamolst or on Slack or in Google workspace. And then you become really like habituated into these environments and the customs around emoji reactions, gifts and et cetera become really normalized. But like I worked with five different, or so companies at any given time and they will have completely different norms. So like depending on who I work with on which day, I have to kind of switch between, this is how you respond here, this is where it's appropriate to send a gift. They have never heard of a gift. They only operate by email that has like, a proper header and photo, like it's completely different. And I feel that a lot with online communities, like particularly ones that I don't really know that well, like always like, I have no real idea of what comes across as polite or appropriate. And like, you know. Maybe people can solve this one for me. I used to use the winking emoji a lot. And then someone said in America, that's you're flirting. So I stopped using the winking emoji. Yeah, I get nervous sometimes about how emoji reactions are interpreted by people because some of it is that kind of specific to like an area, but I find myself defaulting to whatever the, yeah, digital code switching is right, Mark, but is like whatever the alt text is on the emoji. I sometimes that gives you a really important like key to what the emoji is actually doing. Like, cause you may think you know, like I see it like a lot of people, I'm not gonna get into this actually, but there's a lot of different types of emojis. There are tools though, or maybe like Discord and Slack is where I'm using emoji reactions the most. And both of those let you like either hover over or long press to see what the keyword in their like search is. And I agree, I use that too, but there are other tools that don't let you do that. And they drives me crazy. I remember Amanda, when we were both pretty new at Reclaim, we even came up at one point where we're both like, hey, I think we have to recontextualize how we think of the thumbs up emoji as a reaction because to me, a relatively anxious person, thumbs up is like sarcasm, like it comes off as like, cool man, like I don't really care. But we use that Mac OS feature that does those reactions. But apparently I have that enabled still, but we use it at Reclaim and like in Discord, it's comes through too as sort of like 10, four, gotcha. And that I think is how most people perceive it, but that's not how I initially perceive it. You know? Which brings us back to newsletters is in my consumer Gmail, there is now emoji reactions to emails and I'm using that so much more. And then in my work email, which is also Google, that feature isn't there. And it's like, I miss it. And Myron will know, I come from a position where I was completely against emojis. And now I'm like the biggest emoji fanboy is like, give me an emoji, give me it now. I think there's a blog post in that one. Origin to emoji reactions. But I was gonna say like the person in my life who you just emojis the most is my mother. She's in her early eighties and she's an avid textor. And my mother learned how to type on manual typewriters. So, you know, she was like trained as an accountant. So she types very fast. And because a manual typewriter has a carriage return, that's how she texts. So it's like, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Return sent like, so you get like 25 messages in like, you know, very quick succession. But the only emoji that my mom uses to sign off any message whatsoever is a kiss with a heart.  Like the other day someone else saw my phone, a friend of mine and she was like, wow, you know, are you having like a real romantic exchange? I'm like, no, that's my mom, you know, and that's her only emoji. And I have tried to teach her that this is not an emoji, but nevermind, you know, it's too late for that. So yeah, so I have to smile so much because every week I have that. I mean, I'm so lucky to have that, but I also think sometimes it just makes me giggle. So. I will spend time just looking at ASCII art for, I don't know if you would come across that, but pre-emoji, this is your old school emoji, but I used to work with a colleague who's Japanese and there's some really nice ASCII art emojis for bowing and things like that. So there are occasions I'll go and find, I don't know it off by heart, I will go and find the ASCII art for bowing or praising someone and use that instead. The algorithms will never understand that. Yeah, once you put that through the sentiment analysis, it doesn't make heads or tails of curly line UTF characters. One thing. Cool. Yeah, I kind of miss ASCII art and I still am of, I still will do the very old school like colon open parenthesis smiley face in texts and stuff because I don't know, that's just sometimes, so. I'm similar in the echoes, do you want this emoji? I'm like, no. No. Yeah, because it's like a very, it's a choice sometimes, you know, it's like, no, don't auto-correct to that slightly smiling face. Just my colon or the parenthesis, like the person I'm sending this to will get the vibe. That is so interesting though, because I think that is exactly the kind of nuance. I think it's so hard to pin down and I think in a community kind of context or building professional sort of friendships and relationships, like those things really matter. And I think that's a really hard thing, like where people often kind of talk about community but they don't walk the walk. And I think in order to say the right things in the right way, you have to put in the time to kind of learn when you say what and how. And I think that's something that we are all doing in different ways is that we spend the time engaging and you're learning the language in the right way. So I think that's a super interesting observation. It's interesting as to how people, you know, going to the typing of emojis, how people make that their own. I think Lorna Campbell is someone, I think people will know very respected in the community. I think all her herds are upside down. So it's the reverse direction. And I've got another friend, Alan Fitzsomburg. He doesn't use the math, he uses this weekly bracket instead. I don't know what that one's called. So it's nice to see people personally, you know, take ownership of that and make it kind of their signature way. And I think, but you know, thinking of community is, you know, recognizing people for in different ways but through the tax form, you know, in terms of what people say or how they react to stuff. I think it's quite interesting. And it helps with that connection. Absolutely. We've got someone at Reclaim who always uses one particular emoji to react to things. And I never feel comfortable using that emoji because it's a little sparkles because I feel like when you see little sparkles, you're like, oh, that's pilot. And I can't use the sparkles because then people are gonna think I'm pilot and I'm not pilot. Yeah, I feel really the emoji reaction stuff, emoji in general, I guess are such an interesting, in some ways, I think microcosm of kind of what we're talking about here in terms of, you know, building community is a big, large, nebulous thing that takes time to change. And it's a cultural thing as much as it is, you know, we're using in our case, you know, tools, technology to do it, but it's not really about that stuff. Emoji is kind of, this is maybe a horrible analogy, but like, emoji is kind of similar for me. Like, you know, what is emoji? It's literally just some characters that we've decided can have images associated with them. And it's existed for actually a long time in some ways but now it's everywhere. And I definitely changed how I feel about using it too. And, you know, one of the things we talk about a lot at Reclaim is with any of the stuff we do with community building is that we have to try and, you know, meet people where they are to some extent, right?  You don't have to get it as an email. And we also have a blog, you know, that's for more regular, smaller announcements. And we want to try to do all of it while keeping it to be manageable time-wise for us because it's not like we make any, you know, money from you watching the stream, we're not doing that. This is more about just getting folks to be comfortable in the space and ask questions and, you know, attract new people to use some of our, maybe our host, we hope our hosting services, but really more in general, like the tools that we're excited about, right? Wherever you host them. And it's the hardest part of that has been trying to stick with it and see like, what do people think about this? You know, we've, you know, over time and try to be more regular with the things we're doing. And we're starting to see, I think, some payoff of like folks showing up for these Friday streams to discuss them and people mentioning them in email conversations with us. But it took a while and it's kind of hard to know like if anyone is even, if it resonates with anyone, you know? We won't long till. So I think as well, I think this occurs to me is that I've not thought about for a long time is hashtag communities, which, you know, something like came out of Twitter originally, I guess, I think in terms of history. And I still tag stuff. So on LinkedIn, I still tag stuff, but I'm not, I feel that people are less looking for hashtag communities. But platforms still support it, but I feel people are doing that less. I don't know if that's things you're seeing as well in terms of how people are coming together, whether the hashtag has died or it's still strong. Yeah, I feel like I'm seeing that less and less too. And I think on one hand, I've always chalked it up to just less of the platforms do as good a job, I think as Twitter did, right? Twitter, once they did support it anyway, right? It wasn't always actually like a official thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was, you know, there were Twitter clients that you could follow a specific hashtag. And even eventually the official Twitter stuff kind of let you do that. There are tools like tags that let you explore it. And it kind of comes down to API stuff. I don't know, probably LinkedIn does a decent job of it, but I'm not super, I'm not on LinkedIn all the time. But one thing I do know is that LinkedIn is, you know, pretty much everything you do requires a login. So that kind of, I think dampens some of that for folks. And then you've got other things like, I've been enjoying Mastodon, but by the nature of the technicals and we won't go into it of how Mastodon works, hashtag communities are really hard to get a full sense of what's happening across all of the Fediverse, right? You can't right now really always know of, oh, these are all of the posts that use this across any Mastodon. And since it doesn't really work that way right now, maybe it will work that way someday. Maybe there's other tools or other platforms like maybe Blue Sky can do that. I don't know, but I think honestly, I chalked that largely up to Twitter because I think it did it so well. And now that we have less folks using that, I'm not really there much anymore myself. None of the other platforms do it the same way. And I think that has something to do with it, but it might not be the whole picture. I think- We're dying to know man, where's Silent Sunday? We're nearly out of time. So I'm gonna try and condense that. I don't know that much about Silent Sunday or Silent Sundays, but that is the only hashtag that I currently use. And basically, as far as I can tell, it's people posting on social media without words and you don't post anything else because it's a Silent Sunday. So it kind of encourages you to use social media less. And I usually post a picture of a book I've been on or a cup of tea or something kind of peaceful. And so I have tried this on all the different platforms that I'm on other than LinkedIn. And it's surprisingly, that is the most engagement I get every week with anything I post. So clearly people like being silent on social media. So that is my last contribution. God, this hour has waved hard. I hope the Spammer's don't pick up on that. Could be less silent. Yeah, that's true. Advertise your mindfulness Sunday app. Yeah, well, Mary and you're right, the hour has flown and we really appreciate you, Martin, for joining us and chatting with us today all about community. And I think that we are also really appreciate the folks that are in chat too, who have been keeping conversation going. It's been really interesting to see. So thanks for joining. Thanks so much.


a very good evening aspirants welcome to the hindu newspaper analysis brought to you by shankara a s academy today's date is 31st of august 2023 displayed here or the list of news articles that we are going to discuss today now before getting into the news article discussion i have two important announcement to make the first one is regarding the most awaited pre-storming prelims 2024 test series the orientation for the test series will be starting on 11th september 2023 and the first test will be on 18th september 2023 the fee structure is displayed here you can go through it the second announcement is regarding all india open mock test for mains 2023 the test will be starting on 1st september 2023 for further details you can check the link in the description please don't miss the chance use it wisely to boost your answers in the mains 2023 so with this announcement let us move on to the news article discussion take a look at this news article from chennai page yesterday the state minister for municipal administration inaugurated a pilot project on the reuse of wastewater with nature-based solution to improve groundwater recharge this pilot project has been inaugurated at the little flower convent school in chennai the project is part of the efforts of city of thousand tanks so in this news article discussion we shall understand about city of thousand tanks and specifications of the new pilot project launched in the flower convent school see city of thousand tanks is a plan that was developed by a consortium of various organizations led by netherland-based oos architectures and urbanist the aim of the plan is to demonstrate a model that can make chennai water secure by identifying the interrelationships between the underlying causes of floods water scarcity and pollution in chennai currently city of thousand tanks intends to develop a water balance model across the city by collecting rainwater treating wastewater and runoff pollution with decentralized nature-based solutions and recharging them to the underground aquifier this will prevent climate change induced droughts by increasing groundwater resource and prevent saline intrusion from sea level rise simultaneously it will mitigate risks associated with high frequency floods as well as sea wage pollution see the current urban demand is thousand 580 million liters per day mld so the project intends to fix supply side issues by creating water retention and supply capacities of 200 to 250 mld in first two phases one such initiative is what we saw in today's news article the project in the school used advanced wastewater treatment techniques and constructed wetlands especially an artificial wetland with canal plants to treat gray water apart from this harvesting rainwater anaerobic and aerobic treatment methods are also used to treat 27 000 liters of sewage generated daily the treated wastewater would be released into an aquifier through infiltration gardens see this program is an initiative of henry owink the special envoy for international water affairs of the kingdom of the netherlands the team has also collaborated with other organizations in chennai as well for example cat earth dressed will monitor the impact on biodiversity in the garden and check the quality of treated wastewater city of thousand tanks have also planned to scale up the initiative to other parts of chennai the program besides reducing burden on urban sewage infrastructure and flooding it would also help urban cooling due to increase in population and the depletion of water table chennai will run out of water in the next decade that is why this initiative has been launched remember kenna lily has huge potential to remove carbon nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater and the subtropical conditions this recycling technology of wastewater using nature-based solution is known as phytoread technology or in other words phytoread technology is a self-sustainable technology for wastewater treatment that works on the principle of natural wetland hope you learned something new in today's news article discussion so these learned points now let us move on to the next news article discussion take a look at this news article it talks about the reason coop that is happening in an african country called gabon after the coop attempt there is uncertainty about who is in charge of gabon the coop leaders have announced that they have installed a new interim leader this is the cracks of the news article given here in this context let us discuss about the coop happening in gabon in problems point of view first let us see some of the basic information about gabon look at this map gabon lies on west coast of africa and the equated forces through it it is bordered by equatorial gunia on the northwest cameron to the north the republic of the congo on the south and the gulf of gunia to the west the gunon was previously a french colony and even today it has stronger economic ties with france gabon is rich in oil resources and oil is the main source of country's revenue even though it has plenty of natural resources one third of its population live in poverty due to exploitation by european powers so with this basic understanding now let us discuss about the coop that is happening in gabon see recently the president of gabon ali bongo was deposed by the country's military his family has ruled gabon for 56 years and there is public resentment for their rule there is also public discontent over broader issues like poverty inflation influence of france in country's economic policies and etc president bongo has been removed from his office by military leaders in the recent coop as a result the rebel leaders have received the support of common people but france and other western nations have condemned to the coop interesting thing to note here is that this is the eighth coop in former french colonies in africa in the past three years few days earlier we have discussed a coop happened in niger which is a west african country before that political instability happened in mali gunia senegal and etc so we can see that there is an increasing trend of military coop in west africa and this latest coop in gabon is seen as the part of this trend as upsi has tendency of asking questions about conflict regions around the world we can expect questions based on these recent coops in west african region that is why we have chosen this news article so these learned points now let us move on to the next news article discussion now take a look at this science page article this article speaks about managing nuclear waste now suddenly this topic is in news because of japan japan has started releasing treated radioactive water from the fukushima nuclear power plant into the ocean i hope you all remember that in 2011 japan was hit by a massive earthquake during this earthquake the fukushima nuclear power plant was flooded with seawater and it was heavily damaged the flood water had mixed up with the water that was used to cool nuclear fuel rods so all the contaminated water have been collected and stored in tanks this is because there was a chance that the water would contain harmful radiations now after several years the wastewater was highly filtered to reduce radioactivity and it was released into the ocean this has raised some concern among the people about the disposal or management of spent nuclear fuel so because of this only the topic regarding managing nuclear waste appeared in the news today there are some temporary traditional methods followed to manage nuclear waste let us understand them in this news article discussion now to have a better understanding we have to first know about nuclear energy and the functioning of nuclear reactors see nuclear energy is a green energy it is one of the alternatives to fossil fuel or carbon based energy currently 10 percentage of the world's electricity comes from nuclear energy as we all know many countries like the u-verse china and india have set a target to achieve net zero emissions so they are focusing on obtaining a higher share of energy from nuclear power plants but the problem here is that there is no clear cut common global policy to deal with nuclear waste that is obtained from nuclear power plants now coming to the functioning of nuclear reactors see nuclear reactors are the heart of a nuclear power plant the nuclear reactor contains nuclear fuel rods which comprises of numerous pellets of feasible uranium fuel the nuclear fuel rod acts as a fuel to run the reactors the nuclear reactors carry out controlled nuclear chain reactions with the help of uranium filled fuel rods during operation the reactors produce extreme heat through a process of nuclear efficient reaction the heat obtained through the nuclear reaction is supplied to one adjacent chamber filled with water due to extreme heat the water starts boiling and it produces steam the obtained steam spins a turbine and it creates electricity with the help of a generator this is how nuclear reactors function here the nuclear fuel rods that are used to run the reactor are constantly cooled with the help of water if it is not cooled it will melt down the reactor and the radiation will get released into the environment this in turn affects the living organisms surrounding the power plant so the fuel rods should be kept cool to avoid any disaster see when the nuclear fuel rods are exhausted of fuel it is unloaded and replaced by the new fuel rods now the spent nuclear rods are not safer to dispose of in the environment so they are unloaded and kept into a water-filled pool immediately it allows the rods to decrease its heat and radiation levels note that the rods are held in the water pools for periods ranging from a few years to decades so now what happens after the cooling of spent fuel see after cooling the spent fuel rods are transferred to massive air-cooled dry casks for storage here the spent fuel is stored safely in a centralized facility for the rest of the lifetime most of the countries follow this disposal process but in a few countries the fuel is spent to a reprocessing plant in the reprocessing plant the spent fuel is dissolved and some of the elements like the plutonium and uranium are recovered in some cases the recovered elements are recycled to use again in nuclear reactor also in some countries the cooled spent fuel rods are buried in near-surface disposal facilities at ground level or below these facilities are protected with a cover of at least a few meters thick apart from this the nuclear waste is also placed in walls which are filled with soil and clay then the vault is covered with an impermeable material and buried under the ground see these are some of the options followed to dispose of low-level and intermediate level waste that is to dispose of the waste with low level of radioactivity that typically comes from a nuclear power plant however coming to the disposal of high-level waste see disposing high-level waste that is the waste with high level of radioactivity has few options the most visible option is deep geological disposal currently this process is followed by Finland the deep geological disposal process involves three layers of protection firstly the nuclear waste is placed in copper canisters secondly the copper canisters were wrapped in bentonite clay and finally they are buried more than 400 meters below ancient pit rock see the deep geological disposal process will help to keep the waste isolated from surroundings apart from this this disposal process will also be able to withstand disasters like earthquakes or tsunamis so these are all some of the methods followed to manage or dispose of nuclear waste so these learned points now let us move on to the next news article discussion take a look at this news article this article discusses a recent report called state of food security and nutrition in the world in short called as SOFI 2023 the report is published by the food and agriculture organization FAO and other united nations agencies the report focuses on the affordability of a healthy diet in India and compares it with other countries so in our discussion we shall see the important findings of the report as mentioned in the news article before that the syllabus relevant to the news article is highlighted here you can go through it firstly let us start with basic information mentioned in the report see the SOFI report talks about two important dimensions regarding food security in India one is cost of healthy diet and another one is affordability of healthy diet first let us see what does the report says about cost of healthy diet see to determine the cost of a healthy diet the report takes the cheapest local food item that meet dietary guidelines then they compare the cost of these food items with average income of the country if the cost of the diet is more than 52 percentage of the average income then it is considered as expensive the key findings of the report indicate that the cost of a healthy diet in India has increased in recent years but it still reminds lower compared to bricks nation and India's neighbors now let us see about the affordability of healthy diet see even though the food prices are lower in India 74 percentage of the population cannot afford a healthy diet this is because of the low income of the population so the share of people who can afford a healthy diet in India is low compared to other countries the report mentions that India rank at the bottom of this list this is because income levels in India is stagnant or declining the report also highlights a specific case study from Mumbai it says that the cost of meals increased by 65 percentage over five years in Mumbai but at the same time the wages increased by only 28 to 37 percentage it means the food prices increased much higher than the wages now we shall understand the findings of the report with the help of four charts as mentioned in the news article now look at this first chart this chart compares the cost of a healthy diet for one person per day in 2021 this cost is measured in PPP dollars which stands for purchasing power parity dollars see here one PPP dollar in the united states is equivalent to one PPP dollar in India or Brazil even though the actual currency value might be different so according to this concept one PPP dollar has the same value in different countries for example in India the cost of a healthy diet is 3.066 PPP dollars per person per day this is actually lowest among the countries studied you can see that in the chart given here now look at this chart two this chart tells us how many people in each country couldn't buy a healthy diet in 2021 according to the chart 74 percentage of people in India could not afford a healthy diet this is the fourth highest share among the countries studied by the report many people in India still cannot afford a healthy diet despite low cost of diet this is due to lower income levels among the population now the third chart explains that the cost of a healthy diet in Asia increased by almost 9 percentage between 2019 and 2021 this was due to a number of factors like COVID-19 pandemic which disrupted supply chains and increased food prices additionally the economics low down in Asia has led to low incomes for many people making it more difficult for them to afford healthy food now look at this fourth chart the number of people who could not afford a healthy diet increased in Asia and Africa between 2019 and 2021 Asia accounted for 72 percentage of the worldwide increase followed by Africa which accounted for 20 percentage increase in people who could not afford the healthy diet in Asia South Asia region is most affected and in the African continent eastern and western part are most affected so these are also some of the important findings of the report given in the article overall the article highlights the lack of access to healthy diet in India and other regions of the world due to low income levels so these learnt points now let us move on to the next news article discussion take a look at this news article according to the article yesterday the Irola tribal people deciding in the Palsune village of Krishnagiri district in Tamil Nadu didn't allow a dead body of a village person to enter into their village it is said that the person died of cardiac complications at Jipmar in Puducherry last Tuesday so his body was brought by ambulance to the village but the ambulance was stopped at the entrance of the village itself this is because according to the Irolas the body of the deceased cannot be brought to the Irola settlement they consider that bringing the dead from a hospital for burial in the Irola village is ominous here ominous means that something unpleasant is likely to happen the Irolas believe that bringing the dead body from outside to the Irola village will cause unpleasant things to their community so they didn't allow the dead body of a person from outside into their village here even though the Irolas of Palsune village didn't allow the body into their village they themselves took the dead body to the common graveyard on the outskirts of Krishnagiri town after that they contacted the revenue officials to help them in cremating the body the officials arrived and they held talks with the Irola people to allow the body into their village but they denied the request and finally the body was cremated that is the body was burnt into ashes here one thing have to notice the practice of cremation itself is alien to Irolas see mostly the tribals around the world don't cremate their dead body this is because they live in hills and forest so burning the dead will sometimes end up in forest fires therefore they bury the dead instead of cremation the Irola tribes also have a belief that burying the dead will give birth to the new as like solving the seeds so this is the background of the news article given here based on this news article let us also revise some of the points about Irolas in Prillam's perspective see Irolas are one of India's oldest intergenius tribal communities they reside in northern district of Tamil Nadu and in some parts of Kerala and Karnataka they speak Irola language which is closely related to Dravidian languages of Kannada and Tamil the traditional dance of Irolas is Irola dance the Irolas are classified as particularly vulnerable tribal group in short called as PVTG here PVTG refers to the marginalized section of the scheduled tribes in India these tribes are relatively isolated from other communities and they are both educationally and socioeconomically backward people now talking about their occupation see the main occupation of the Irola is snake and rat catching they also collect some of the wild resources like honey firewood and so on apart from this they also work as laborers in the agri fields during the sawing and harvesting season or in the rice mills the women in the Irola communities are very knowledgeable with regard to medicinal plant varieties they can treat some of the diseases with the help of medicinal plants this knowledge has been passed on from many generations talking about their food habits Irolas mostly consume millets this is because millet based food is very much ideal for their rigorous lifestyle apart from this they also consume the meat of chicken goat pig and fish not that Irolas don't consume beef now coming to their lifestyle see historically the Irolas live in the caves subsequently they began to live in huts made of bamboo but due to scarcity of bamboo they began to build huts with the help of soil and stones so as of now most of the Irolas are living in houses made up of stones and muds so these are also of the very important point that you have to remember about Irolas so with these learnt points let us move on to the next news article discussion take a look at this news article yesterday the Lok Sabha speaker revoked the suspension of congress leader Adhir Rajan Choudhury from the Lok Sabha this decision was taken after the recommendation of the privileges committee headed by BJP MP in the Lok Sabha the committee unanimously recommended the speaker to revoke the suspension so based on the committee's recommendation the speaker revoked the suspension of Mr Choudhury this is about the news article given here so in this news article discussion we shall understand about privileges committee of the parliament see basically member of parliament have some privileges while they speak or take part in the proceedings of the parliament these privileges can be classified into two broad categories like collective privileges and individual privileges now the main function of privileges committee is to examine the question whether these privileges offered to them or breached or not if any member of either house of the parliament found that there is a breach of privilege by a certain MP then they can move a privilege motion against such MP then if the speaker of either house finds that there is substantial breach of privilege they refer the question of breach to the privileges committee after receiving the request the committee decides on a breach of privilege based on the valid facts after due study the committee makes appropriate recommendation to the speaker through a detailed report based on the report the speaker would pass final order on the question of privileges in some cases the speaker also directs the committee to lay down the report on the table of the house this is how privileges committee actually functions talking about their composition in Lok Sabha privileges committee consists of 15 members and they are nominated by the speaker in Rajesh Sabha the privileges committee consists of 10 members and they are nominated by chairman of Rajesh Sabha note that the chairman of privileges committee of Lok Sabha is nominated by the speaker in case of Rajesh Sabha the privileges committee is headed by the deputy chairman of the Rajesh Sabha except the composition the functioning of privileges committee in both the Lok Sabha and Rajesh Sabha remains the same so that's all regarding this news article in this news article we saw about privileges committee how they function and their composition so these learned points now let us move on to the next part of the news article discussion which is the problem practice question discussion now take a look at this first question this question is about privileges committee of the parliament three statements are given you have to find how many statements given here or correct statement one the privileges committee of the Lok Sabha is headed by the opposition leader in the Lok Sabha this statement is actually incorrect the chairman to privileges committee of the Lok Sabha is nominated by the speaker now look at the second statement the recommendations of the privileges committee or binding on the parliament this statement is also incorrect the recommendations are not binding on the parliament now look at this third statement the members to the privileges committee are nominated by the prime minister this statement is also incorrect the members to the privileges committee or nominated by the speaker in case of Lok Sabha and chairman in case of Rajesh Sabha so the correct answer for the question is option d none none of the options are correct here now moving on here a description regarding a particular tribal group was given you have to find for which tribal group this description will be suitable four options are given option a toda option b kurumbas option c irulas and option d paliyans see here the correct answer for the question is option c irulas because from their community only recently two persons were conferred with batmashri for their expertise in snake catching okay so the correct answer is option c irulas moving on the term d geological disposal is associated with which of the following option a carbon sequestration option b disposal of spent nuclear fuel option c burial of deceased animals and option d disposal of burnt coal ashes see the correct answer for the question is option b disposal of spent nuclear fuel we saw that in the discussion right so the correct answer here is option b displayed here are the main practice questions for you today just go through the question try to answer it in the comment section with this we came to the end of the news article discussion if you like the video hit like do comment and don't forget to subscribe to Shankar IAS academy youtube channel now thank you for listening


We are back towards corporate governance and reaching nearly the end of the module. In the previous sessions, we were talking about the different options of the future of corporate governance and some very viable options, those options which would create a more globalised texture of corporate governance, more adaptability, more flexibility, more inclusion, more diversity and more options for organisations around the world through a implementable corporate governance model, more universally accepted. However, with all the fervour and energy to converge all the different systems together for a more universally accepted model, however, there are many complexities of reform. And that is what we are going to be looking at today, that due to these complexities, it is easier said than done. And even though a global or universal model can be created in paper, the implementation is going to be a very big challenge. So let us look at some of these complexity of reform. There will be a strenuous effort to secure commitment to the essential basis of trust. This will occur in countries with different cultures, legal systems and economic priorities. So again, what we are seeing right now is that after the Cold War and then the breakup of the Soviet Union, again we are seeing new economic polls emerging on a global level, the American, the European, the Russian and then the Chinese. These four new polls are emerging. Businesses are done in different cultures, they have different legal systems and definitely they have their own economic priorities. Resources are different, human resources are different, culture, tradition, values are different. And in all of that texture, we are trying to bring about a homogeneous model. It looks very nice but definitely it will be very complex and very difficult. And maybe the energy or the effort or the resources spent in unifying all of this would not be value for money and would not give that impact that it should. So therefore, these considerations are also very, very important to assume that all countries will adapt to the same corporate governance structures is unrealistic. It is likely that fundamental features of the European and Asian approaches to corporate governance will be maintained. So, yes, their contextualization can be maintained and yet within that, there can be lesser ambiguity and more homogeneity within the different systems. In these different complexities, we see differences will be perceived as part of the cultural integrity and economic dynasm of the national economy. Countries will adopt the important universal principles such as international accounting standards. So, there are many aspects which can be adopted, just like the international accounting standards. We can create more environmental, environmental protection standards, social accountability standards. These can be created and these can be adapted by the countries according to the international standards, according to international auditing and according to international certification. They can be achieved and they can be maintained and that would create that homogeneity within the global contextualization of the different corporations. So, that is also very important. This part of evolving and this dynamic complexity of corporate life in which both convergence and divergence are basically occurring simultaneously is over there. So, it is a matter of convergence but due to the complexities, there is also divergence. So, the future of corporate governance has to accommodate and assimilate the convergence and divergence and create a model which can be acceptable across the world. So, yet having their own national context but carrying a intrinsically implementable global flavor within the whole corporate governance model would actually minimize the complexities of reform taking place right now. So, if we look at this particular diagram, then what we can see is that these four different boxes basically are created and we see that on one side there is convergence, on the other side there is accountability and institutionalization and on the other side we see that there are different aspects. Now, what we see is that we talked about earlier the Chicago school and that is a market-based basically system and that is considered to be of higher priority because it would be driven by the markets but again there would be many differences. On the other side we see convergence, on another one we see divergence and then we see how these different models can be put together but based upon this matrix which has been created again the Chicago school is something which carries much more weight and within these complexities and within these different factors we come out with a universally acceptable corporate governance model and framework which is implemented across the board without any discrimination and that would be the way forward. Thank you so much.