Good morning. Let's get started. Let me do a self-introduction. My name is Greg Yan-Yan. I'm a professor in public health, so I don't come here this seminar very often, as I travel quite often for my further international research. I'm really delighted to introduce our seminar speaker Dr. Mark Benedict. Mark received his bachelor's degree from the University of Florida, and also PhD from the University of Florida. And after that, he did a post-doc at the University of Arizona. This is Mark with K-Level, so on the general transformation of drosophila and mosquitoes. And then he did a short post-doc at the Emory University. Today, Mark worked at the UCDC Center for Disease Control for a long time. And a couple years ago, Mark moved to the IAEA International Atomic Energy Agency, an engineering agency, working on the mosquito control in Sudan using the sterile male mosquito technology. So Mark's interest is on the mosquito genetics, ecology, and the control. So he has done a wonderful work in this area. His author and co-author for more than 80 publications has consulted to a number of mosquito control programs, including the Geeks mosquito control program using genetic modification approach and the WHO vector control programs. I'm really delighted to have Mark to come to UCI to give a talk about a program in the public health. And Mark's talk is about unification of the vector pole, vector direction, ground route. Just one announcement after a seminar, there are a few students and invited to go to lunch with the seminar speaker. So I think the place is called Steelhead, probably somewhere in the University Town Center. Okay, bye. So I have to start off by thanking Guy Young for the invitation and for the opportunity to speak to you. But I have to confess that I've totally given up the probability that I'm ever going to get a Nobel Prize for anything. But for many of you, it's not too late.  And so I'm going to give you an idea. I'm giving ideas a way that are no good to me anymore. I'm going to give you an idea about how you can pursue your Nobel Prize. And the key, I think, if you think about Nobel Prizes, is not just merely coming up with a good idea, not just coming up with something clever and throwing it out there, but it's really coming up with an idea that has a lasting impact upon peace, upon science, whatever the particular prize is. And so what I want to talk to you about today is just an idea that I think is important in the context of malaria elimination. And I'm going to say some rather negative things about current efforts to control malaria, but I want you to consider them that I'm addressing them in the context not of the good that they do for the individuals who are receiving protection, but in the context of my topic, which is malaria elimination. And so if I say something negative and you go, well, people are being saved by this, it's not that I have any problem with people being saved. It's that if we're talking about the long-term goal of malaria elimination, we may have to think a little differently. And the little differently is what I want to convey to you during this talk. The other thing I should say is that other chaos will reign after about 15 minutes of my talk. When I'm going to give you an assignment, I'm going to break you up into groups and I'm going to ask you to do something. And you are going to teach yourselves what otherwise I would have to teach you, because if you teach it to yourselves, you're going to be much more engaged with the concept and you're going to see why it makes sense as opposed to me just telling you. Okay, so malaria elimination, right goal, right direction, wrong road, question mark. To an extent, that's a question that you are going to have to come away from this talk answering to some extent. And the reason I say maybe we're heading in the right direction, maybe we have the right goal is illustrated by this map of the fine university from my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, Georgia Institute of Technology. And if we want to get to the library in this campus, we can take Plum Street, which is right here. Plum Street goes right for the library. It's headed in the perfect direction. If we go to the end of that, we're almost there. The problem is if we take Plum Street, we cannot get to the library. In fact, we have to take the road that's further west, Atlantic Drive, in order to get there. And so this is just an illustration of what I'm saying. We're heading in the right direction, we've got the right goal, but maybe the road we're taking will not get us where we want to arrive. Do we have a pointer of some sort? Okay, maybe I can use the mouse. So I know many of you are not, you're not deeply steeped in malaria or vector-borne diseases, so I'll give you a very brief introduction. Malaria is a parasite that the transmission cycle of which involves three components, a human in which the gametocytes develop that are taken up by mosquito upon a blood meal. The mating occurs in the mosquito, the parasites move to the salivary glands and then upon feeding on a second human being, the infectious stage is transmitted to the human. So you have to have these three components in continual circulation or transmission ceases. Without the parasite, obviously there's no malaria. Without vector mosquitoes, there's no malaria obviously without people, there's no malaria. So that provides numerous opportunities that people are trying to exploit to interrupt the transmission cycle throughout the world. I say throughout the world that actually most of the risk of malaria is in tropical and subtropical regions. The real focus historically in terms of the emphasis for malaria interventions is sub-Saharan Africa. But it cannot be under-emphasized that Asia and South America also have significant malaria problems. So here we have this disease. It's got multiple vulnerabilities. It's spread throughout the world. It leads to the deaths of at least one million people each year, most of those in Sub-Saharan Africa. So it's a serious problem. There's no question about it. In spite of all these vulnerabilities for the parasite, for the mosquito and personal protection that people might implement, it's a tough problem to solve. Welcome Bill and Melinda Gates. Bill and Melinda Gates were made aware of the problem of malaria and they decided that to allow malaria to continue to kill people after a year was not acceptable. And therefore they decided to bring the very formidable resources of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to gather together not only their funds but also to get the cooperation of WHO, Rollback and Lary and these other organizations to also pool together with the very laudable, if difficult, goal of malaria elimination. And initially they articulated a view of increasing the funding for malaria control in the near term in order to make gains in the long term that were much more economical. So what is shown here are two different graphs in which they proposed very high expenditures against malaria in the short term with the long term result that the number of cases out here and we are talking long term 2040 would be lower than if the support for malaria control were reduced in the near term. The number of cases in the end would be greater. The denominator that they were facing this improved version of malaria control was cost per case averted which was $17 in their vision versus $28. But not only did they propose increased funding against malaria in the near term to lead to greater efficiencies later they went beyond that and this is where they became controversial and that they actually proposed that if such decreases in the number of cases could be accomplished that those arrows point to what? Zero. So they began to think and to widely promote the idea that not only malaria control but malaria elimination might be possible. When I say elimination what I mean is a regional or an area wide elimination of transmission. Eradication would be the global cessation of transmission. That's formidable not only is there one malaria parasite but there are four different parasites transmitted by many mosquitoes. So this is a big job. But they put the idea of eradication back on the table and because they were bringing so many dollars to the picture it got attention of many people. The way that they proposed that this could be accomplished was to begin reducing the burden of malaria transmission in the near term. Once that significant burden of malaria had been attained that sustainable control would be put in place eventually eradication would be accomplished. And how did they propose to do this? Develop new tools. The Gates Foundation is very technology oriented so they want new insecticides. They want more effective drugs. They want new repellents and so on and so on. Any out years these tools would be implemented in some way to lead to eradication. That's all well and good thus far. There are two tools against mosquitoes that are very effective. Indoor residual spraying of insecticide on the walls of dwellings. Mosquitoes come and rest on the walls and then die. The other one is ITNs insecticide treated nets which is simply a bed net treated usually with pyrethroid insecticide. The mosquitoes are less prone to feed. There is some mortality. And both of these have been shown to be very effective. So having effective tools, albeit not totally effective, useful tools was considered to be a key part of the program. It's interesting though, even though these tools appear to be very simple from a social aspect, they're very difficult to implement. There are questions such as should people buy the nets or should the government give them the nets? Who should sleep under the nets? Should the mother and the child? Should they be given to everyone in the household even though they are at great risk as the mother and child might be? So there are multiple questions. On top of that are the other considerations of insecticide resistance, which is appearing widely, drug resistance of the parasites and so on. So we're a little bit weak, quite honestly, in terms of the tools that we have. Even though we know they're effective, they do not totally eliminate malaria transmission. So what if you go into the literature and you begin to read about the different programs that are attempting to reduce malaria. What you'll find are descriptions of many different activities that are going on. But I would argue that if we're talking about elimination of malaria, they fall short of being adequate. So what I've shown here is just an excerpt from the WHO for the Rollback Malaria Program, which is a global program by which reductions in transmission are intended to occur. And what you'll notice on this side right here are several very laudable goals in terms of activities and outcomes. Countries with lowest achievement toward the Abuja targets, which I'm not going to talk about, they catch up to some previously defined goals. Coverage of interventions, and that's primarily and or residual spraying and insecticide-treated nets, reaches 80%. One-third reduction in the under five-year-old mortality rate and so on and so on. All of these things are very good. My question to you is do these goals and accomplishing these goals have anything to do with elimination? And the problem is that malaria is a very difficult disease to remove from the transmission cycle because of its cryptic nature in people. You can have asymptomatic carriers of parasites, of the fact that there are often numerous mosquitoes that transmit it, and you have people moving around who carry the parasites. So if we go back to this graph, the question is do those arrows that the decrease in the number of cases indicate will they actually ever reach zero with regard to malaria? And there's an analogy I like to use for malaria.  And that is very analogous to the current situation with malaria. We're seeing tremendous advances in terms of the number of bed nets distributed, the number of dwellings being sprayed with insecticide, the number of diagnostic tests being performed, the amount of drugs being distributed. But if you're talking about elimination, then you have an English ivy situation. And the question is, if these tools do not completely remove the reservoirs of the malaria parasite and the means by which they are transmitted, we are faced with a situation where we're doing the same activity year after year with no hopes of actually reducing, in a permanent sense, malaria transmission with durable solutions. Okay. So these are things that I think are unquestionable. The exercise I'm going to have you do contradicts to some extent does, but it's to make a point. So I think these things are widely agreed upon. The existing donations are not sufficient for near-term, global, sustainable control. There just is not enough money currently to go around. What does that mean to you? That means that somebody is making a choice about where the money goes and how it is used possibly at the expense of other countries. So the resources are not sufficient. Bill and William Gates Foundation predicts, and I think most donors agree, that the amount of donations will eventually decline. There simply is not enough moral will, if you will, to continue donations at the present levels, much less increase them indefinitely, unless a solution occurs so that the amount of funding for malaria control can eventually be reduced, then we will be back where we were ten years ago. The existing tools are not sufficient for eradication. Only in very special circumstances, islands, areas of low transmission, epidemic, malaria, and so on are the existing tools really adequate. For locations where there's hyperendemic malaria, few would argue that the current tools we have are good enough. That means we've got to come up with more, right? Or they have to become more efficient through some modification. At this point I've described, and I hope you understand, it's a pretty blink scenario if we're talking about malaria eradication. Because we don't have the tools, we don't have the money, so here is your opportunity for your Nobel Prize. That is figuring out a way forward. And in order to help you come up with a way forward, I've advised a very artificial exercise that I want you to complete in approximately 15 minutes. And I had thought originally that I would divide you into small groups, but because of the configuration of the room, I'm going to give you some handouts. I will set up a scenario.  And then at the end of 15 minutes, we'll discuss what your solutions were. And I will be available to give you advice as you go along. Now I think we only have 25 sets of handouts. So some of you are going to have to share. So if you're sitting next to somebody you don't actually absolutely import, work with them. So you'll have to divide these up. There are three sheets. And they describe the setup for this exercise. Okay, what I've drawn here is a hypothetical region. The Democratic Republic of China. Okay, it's corny. I know that. And I've set up a scenario here where there's malaria transmission in these villages. And your assignment as a program manager for using the available resources is to eliminate malaria transmission for the maximum number of people. The way I've set this up, in these villages, in each of the villages, there are different numbers of people as indicated on the village, the little hut. The prevalence of people who carry parasites in each village is 5%. I don't know who they are necessarily, but they're 5%. Your objective is to protect the maximum number of people by going through this very simple exercise. Now what's the nature of what you've got to work with? The villages are distant enough that infected mosquitoes or mosquitoes that carry parasites are not moving between villages. Okay? People move between the villages but only by the roads. The likelihood of a person coming into a village who is infectious is the same as the prevalence of parasites in the adjacent village. So if I come from a village that has 5% prevalence, the chance that I will introduce that parasite into the village is 5%. One person enters each village by each of the roads almost each month. If you enter a village and you have the parasite, I set it up so that the likelihood of infection is 100%. Each household contains 5 persons, so that means there's 20 dwellings in each of these. When immigrants come into a village, you know who they are and where they came from. A village becomes malaria-free only after one year of no malaria transmission. And it can become malaria-less again only by reintroduction. Okay? So these are the basic ground rules. Now, I'm going to give you resources in this simple model. You have resources that you can spend. You can carry over anything that's unspent the next year that you can't overspend your budget. You can spend your money on accurate diagnosis, which 100% accurately diagnoses the presence of parasites. You can spend your money on long-lasting nets, which fully protect everyone sleeping under them. But you have to purchase at least one for every two people in a household, or you can spend your money on drugs. A person treated with drugs becomes unaffected, unaffected, but he could become unaffected the next month. And we're only going to give drugs to those who have been diagnosed as having parasites. So what I want you to do, I've given you a cheat sheet on the second one, showing you what the annual costs or the cost of, like, drug treatment and diagnosis is. I've also given you the cost of distributing bed nets. And what I want you to do, mostly in groups, I hope, is you're going to have some people who are going to latch on to this very quickly and say, oh, this is easy, I know how to do this. And you're going to have others who are like, oh, I don't know what he wants me to do. So please, work together. And what I want you to do is come up with a quick budget not only for each year, which is temporal, but stationally, which will address which of the villages you will try to protect when. So the way you win this game, as it were, is to protect the most people possible. Questions.  All right. Go for it. A challenging exercise, especially since you had to complete it very quickly. But in fact, this is very similar to what people, I think, granted, they have more time, but this is very similar to what people have to do. They have limited resources. They have to decide where to deploy and how effective it's going to be in the long term. So now I have a question for you to determine who the winner is. Hands up if you protected at least 100 people permanently. 100 people? Yeah. At least for the duration of this project. At least 100. Yeah. Okay. 200. They got 200. Several of you. 300. Okay. 400. Still not forward. How many did you get? Come on, man. 500. Okay, great. 600. 700. 800. Excellent. How many did you end up protecting? Well, I'm not going to defend this right, but I have 1100. 1100. I think it is possible to protect almost everyone. Can you describe briefly how you did it? Yeah, I first went for village A just because it's 200 to protect diagnosis tree, which I assume that's protecting too. And then also with since I didn't have that much left, I put up the L-L-I-N for village C which was, that was 300 people so far. The next year I took I had 150 left over the dollars that is and then I went for village I which was the second largest and I yeah, I diagnosed and treated J also. Okay. So that was 300 people. And then the last year I just set up L-L-I-N with village K, D, D, F, and E because I figured there's a lot of traffic between sort of outliers, huh? Yeah. Okay. I'm not sure you did it right either. Okay. Because the diagnosis and treatment only protects people for a month. So you would still have to consider it before coming in. Right. The point though of the exercise of this is that you didn't have enough resource to do everything at once, right? You couldn't just distribute bed nets everywhere and give everybody protection. You break the transmission cycle. So somehow you've got to divide this up between the different villages in order to isolate them to bring some form of control. And when I did this exercise with my colleagues at the CDC actually one of them did come up to protect everybody, following the rules which I understand is quick. So it is possible to protect everybody. But the way you did this if you were successful is you didn't have resources to eliminate all malaria at once. Therefore, you used the resources you did have strategically with spatial and temporal consideration. So you did something one year, the next year that allowed you to do something different, the next year something different yet. You consolidated gains allowing you to move your resources. So you're not pounding your resources in the same location over and over again. You're bringing some sort of a durable solution to some of the areas so that those resources are then available to go do something similar elsewhere. The next thing you did if you did well in this exercise and this is perhaps controversial, you delayed implementation for some communities to achieve durable elimination for all of them. So this is very much a difficult decision you can imagine and often it's influenced by logistics, by political influence, by existing infrastructure and so on. So it's not simple. So what I'm working up to here is that much of the malaria activity that's being conducted today is useful in terms of suppressing transmission that it has no durable effect. And the way I formulated this proposition and asked my colleagues at CDC since Malarian issue, I asked them, I said if the malaria control program that you managed received only 5% of its current funds five years from now could you maintain the same level of control for five years? Everyone said no. If we removed 95% of the resources in two years we're back to the same level of control that we had before. So the point I'm making to you is that in terms of regional elimination within adequate resources we must think strategically temporally and spatially in order to distribute those resources in a way that can accomplish elimination. So the resources and these are kind of by take home points. They have to be focused initially, particularly on areas where durable elimination is possible. After that they must be shifted to remaining malaria areas in this situation. The strategy must be temporally and spatially structured and that is by and large what is totally missing from malaria control efforts today. No consideration of where they are used and when they will be used in terms of making resources available later on. The gains controlling malaria must be consolidated. You simply cannot continue spending at the existing levels indefinitely. That means you have to consolidate some gains or you're going to go back to it. Consolidation is one key factor. Many of the schemes that recognize consolidation is necessary kind of put it out this way. Look, let's just distribute that then we'll do IRS everywhere. We'll get as much suppression as we can and 30 years from now we'll worry about consolidation when the transmission level is low. I don't think that's necessary. I think considerations of consolidation and the implementation of it can be done from the very beginning of the programs. Now, how do you pull this off in a country like Africa that has 50 different countries that have malaria risk? That's a tough problem. Many of these countries aren't exactly the best of friends. I think it's going to best be accomplished where there's strong transboundary cooperation or within countries where you can do this kind of implementation with consolidation on a small basis. And the last point on these bullets I think is that even though many of the measurements of the effectiveness of malaria interventions now they'll say number of lives say, or number of dailies not lost to malaria. And it's usually put forward in that that kind of a metric but really we may need to be considering is what we're doing effective in terms of leading to elimination. And so I'm suggesting that it might be better to measure our success by the durable spatial and strategic accomplishments rather than simply the reduction in morbidity and mortality. And let's see if I can go to the next slide here. Maybe that's my last point. I think it is. So again, the take-home message is it's not just what you do and how much you do. It's temporally and spatially how you do it especially with a disease like malaria where it is so focused in certain areas and it's so well defined by the ecology, the population, the climate and so on of that area. So the key for your Nobel Prize then is to ensure that as you work for a disease elimination, whether it's malaria or another, if the resources are not available to do the whole job at once is to think strategically about how these resources can best be used for a long-term, durable solution to the disease problem. So thank you and I'll take some questions. We have a time for quick answer. Since the gates are a huge benefactor of this can you or do you have a slide on what they're thinking to be known of it? I don't have a good sense that they are thinking I mean on paper certainly they're thinking a long-term eradication but I'm not saying much evidence that there is a specific strategy about how the resources should be used up to that point to ensure that this happens. And I did have one other slide and I think it's maybe important that I show this one because it's not just me who thinks this and this is a quote by Tom McCutcheon and who I think is I'm not a malaria here's a guy who I think should demand some respect he says there's presently no agreement or even much discussion regarding the structure approach that would address the whole of Africa and he says success against malaria will however also involve the initiation and implementation of regional programs whose success can be monitored and a strategy to expand these programs into all endemic regions of Africa. So certainly there are people who recognize that a strategy is not merely how I'm going to get enough money for more red nets next year and how I'm going to deploy them. If we're talking about elimination there's got to be a strategic vision that says when and how those are going to be used with certain outcomes matching those with the resources available. So look I'm not a Gates recipient and I'm not privy to what they're thinking but I don't have a lot of confidence that there is a strong component of specific planning about using resources to accomplish these goals. My impression is they're much more oriented toward developing technology that someday might be capable of reaching these goals rather than the play out itself. So when are the countries that declare the unification as the goal? In 2009 today? In this country we have two resources here, the mine and the middle range of the Arctic Monument for tunnel systems. Now one of the major difficulties across the North the transmission is very low but in series of the process interactive it's a major issue so then this it's much bigger sphere and they must bring the process in this thing called local transmission. So I don't know this PMI program of all human beings but there's pretty much focus on the control of this transmission. Not much into the surveillance whether there will be any cost to change the resource of the region so surveillance becomes an issue. So the point is as in the illustration the exercise, did you notice that once you've gotten control in a certain area then you need the introductions become very important and that's definitely the case so for example in Zanzibar which is one of the PMI countries that is close to elimination this becomes very important identifying travelers identifying cases and the problem with malaria is that many people can have parasites and they're asymptomatic so it's very difficult to propose going around and covering the entire population and determine where they have parasites so you're depending on them developing clinical symptoms visiting a clinic and getting a proper diagnosis so there's a shift for example in Zanzibar from emphasis on bed nets and visual spraying although those aren't going to be dropped to diagnosis and treatment of the people who do have parasites so I think it's happening and I think it's more oops we're close to we're close to elimination what we do now in fact there's an article by Rick Stechiti where he suggested that exact proposition he said bed nets and IRS work we should know that and now what we do we've got transmission so low and we've got to change our strategy and that's the point and part of the exercise that I gave you and I think for the most part that shift has not happened as a consequence of foresight it's more a a consequence of good luck yeah so our question was if you're going to sustain elimination do you have to continually provide bed nets and it's a good question and I think it's really case by case I suspect there are many places where reintroduction rate is low enough that and the risk is low enough that if you just treat clinically ill people and maybe do some focal vector control and diagnosis around there the place where they live and so on that you could probably maintain elimination having said that a lot of people use bed nets not for enough please particularly which transmit malaria but for other pest biting species that just keep them from sleeping well so it's quite possible that even in places where nets are restricted for malaria people can continue to use them for these other species okay well thank you very much


I just want to give an idea of why they need this credit card form. You could use a transfer form to do a similar kind of thing, but let's just just so we can examine kind of the issues here of why they might be using these other different forms to get an understanding of it. If I was to go to this second one, so this one 309 is here. Let's let's imagine that I said, well, I just want to categorize it as an expense type of form. And then I'm just going to say that it's paying off the credit card. I won't even put the vendor here. I'll just say the category is going to be the credit card. So now it's going to be an expense form, which is the form that decreases the checking account. And I'm just going to assign the other side to the credit card. That would be the most natural thing that you would probably think to do, right? If you didn't, if you were just going to pick a form and you didn't know about this other form that you could use, right? So I could say, okay, let's do that. And then I could add it. And so now if I go, if I go to the credit card side, it may still be able to pair that, but now it's saying it's been matched. So it matched this one. So that looks good. So I could still match it on the other side, which won't record anything new because I already recorded on the checking account side. This will just match it and say, okay, yeah, it'll tie out helping us with the credit card reconciliation. So I'm just going to match it that doesn't do anything new, just shows both sides. And then if I go up the problem with that, and it's not a big problem, it's just, you know, I'll just show you what the difference is. On the checking account, it looks kind of normal because it's an expense form that's paying down the credit card. So it's going to be an expense type of form. The other side's going to a credit card. Where is it? Here it is. So there it is. So the credit card. And so you can see over here, it's just a normal expense form. So if I go into it, it's an expense form, boom, but that looks normal kind of because it's decreasing the checking account versus the credit card form. If I go into it, it looks like this, right? A payment for the pay down the credit card. So if I go into the other side, though, it looks a little bit funny because if I go into the credit card side of things, then now I've got, I've got the expense forms usually increased in the liability, but then I got another credit card, an expense form that's decreased in the liability. And that's where it gets kind of funny with these enter bank feed to bank feed type of transactions. Not a big deal. The transaction is the same. The two accounts are affected. It's not going to, it's not really hurting anything, but that's the issue. It doesn't look quite right in terms of the transaction type form that's being used. You might want to differentiate that to show the payments. So I can sort this. If I wanted to sort this by, by expenses, by the things that increase the liability, I'd like to sort by expense form. And if I want to sort by the payments that are made, then I'd like to have something other than an expense form so that I can see the other side of the transaction.


And before we get to weather, I wanted to mention we always like to give tours here of our facility at Lakeland PBS. And tonight I wanted to show everyone a special visitor we had here this week. It's a photo of me and Bemidji sixth grader Jane Mueller at our news desk here. Jane is a huge fan of Lakeland news and aspires to become a newscaster someday. In fact, Jane already has made up her own news desk at her home, which you see here where she does her own version of a newscast from her home occasionally. Now we really enjoyed having Jane in and visiting with her and her mom this week. It's very exciting Stacey to see somebody so young, so passionate about the news business. Yeah, so I wanted to take the rain someday. Yeah, definitely enjoy it. She can definitely have a spot here. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


The latest Xbox Game Pass release to garner no small amount of attention, Pow World, does so primarily because of the controversy surrounding its very concept. The game's art style and presentation are so very similar to that used by Game Freak's Pokémon games that you may well find yourself wondering how this is even legal. Isn't this just a clear case of copyright theft? Especially given the Pokémon company's standard zero-tolerance approach to fan games, and especially given that Pow World's big draw, at least from a meme perspective, is that it juxtaposes this incredibly Game Freak-esque art style with a level of violence that we don't normally explicitly see in the Pokémon world. So how, then, is Pow World even allowed to exist? Why is this game, this game of all Pokémon fan games, being given a pass by Nintendo and the Pokémon company when so many other fan games have been taken down? The answer is in how Pow World navigates the tricky waters of intellectual property. Believe it or not, but the extreme violence shown in the game is actually one of the strengths that keeps Nintendo and the Pokémon company off the game's back. First, before we get into this, a quick legal disclaimer. I am not a lawyer, this video does not constitute legal counsel. If you are making a Pokémon fan game of your own and you want to know where you stand from a legal perspective, do not use YouTube as your source of information. With that out of the way, let's talk about intellectual property law, and how Pow World has managed to deal the Pokémon company a critical hit. Right. Take this off now. Didn't fit anywhere. Here's my kid's hat. I've been wanting to do a video on this topic for a very, very long time now and have not found quite the right inspiration or the right moment to make it. And the release of Pow World certainly feels like that could be it. So I want to talk about how intellectual property law works. Essentially, for the purpose of this video and for the purpose of every fan game, there are three types of intellectual property that you need to be aware of. Most people think, oh it's just copywriting, something's infringing copyrighting, that's going to cause all the problems. No, it's actually a little bit more complicated than that. You've got patents, you've got trademarks, and you've got copyright, and all of them work slightly differently and all of them protect different types of intellectual property. And the way that Pow World gets around the Pokémon company's normally very strict, tight grip on their intellectual property is in which of these three it plays with and how it avoids triggering the problems that would constitute a lawsuit if used in the wrong way. Let's get patents out of the way very quickly, because they're not particularly relevant to what we're talking about today. Patents cover an idea, a particular type of design of a thing, something that you have thought of and that you have said, I own this idea. And in order to get a patent, you can't just have it automatically. You need to get it approved from a patent office. You need to apply, you need to pay money, and then the patent office will say, yes your idea is significantly distinct from everything else, and indeed your idea is specific enough that we can give you a patent because it's not a general widespread thing. You can't patent, for example, the concept of walking on two legs. You can't patent, for example, the idea of trousers or of shoes or of different things, but you can patent the specific design of the shoes. You can patent the way that the laces connect if you've got a particularly novel unique idea for how the shoes should hold their laces, etc. Where things get more relevant to Pow World are in trademarks and copyrights. There's a fair amount of overlap between these two, but they are their own distinct things. You can get something which infringes on copyright but does not infringe on a trademark, and vice versa something which infringes a trademark but does not infringe on a copyright. A trademark is very simply the mark of your trade. It is the identifier, the word or the image that people associate strongly with your brand. So the Pokemon Company owns the trademark on the word Pokemon. They are the only ones that are allowed to sell a product as being part of the Pokemon brand. Meanwhile, copyright, again very simply, is the right to make a copy of something. You can't copyright an idea. That's what a patent is for. So if I read a book and I like the concept of it, I like the core principle in the middle of it, I can take that and I can use that as the basis of my own book. This happened with the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Bageant, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. It is a theological book which puts forth the hypothesis that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and had children with her. The book then was read by Dan Brown, another author who loved the general concept so much that he adapted it into his fictional work, The Da Vinci Code, and it's a central point of the story of The Da Vinci Code. The authors of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail were not particularly pleased with this and attempted to sue Brown for using their idea in his book, but they were unsuccessful because you can't copyright an idea. To this end, the Pokémon Company does not own the right to make games about catching monsters, and indeed they shouldn't because they were not the first people to do it. There are many examples of the genre that I've heard called Mon Likes, which I quite like that as a name, such as Shin Megami Tensei, which long predate Pokémon. Pokémon was not the first game that featured Pokémon-style gameplay. Pokémon, though, did it in a way that was wonderfully palatable to a lot of people around the world and did it with a very distinct art-style. We've seen a recent boom in indie developers taking on the Mon-like genre and interpreting it in different ways. We've had cassette beasts, we've had Temtem, and now we've got PAL World, which does its own thing with this, even though it looks very, very similar to the Pokémon Company's game. Similar to how you can't copyright an idea within a game, you also can't copyright a gameplay mechanic and you can't copyright an art-style, and that means that all of the things that make Pokémon unique are indeed free and available for anybody to use. What the Pokémon Company can control, though, and what they can stop you doing is releasing any game with the name Pokémon in the title, and they can stop you from using Pikachu's face or likeness. This is because the appearance of Pikachu, the character, is trademarked by the Pokémon Company. He is synonymous with the brand. When you see Pikachu, you think the Pokémon Company. Now, the Pokémon Company has some Pokémon names trademarked, and some Pokémon names are not trademarked. So, for example, Bulbasaur is trademarked, Charizard is trademarked, Scorbunny I found is trademarked. There's a wonderful list, because of how trademarks work, of everything that is currently trademarked, and by which company and the address of that company, so you can very easily search for and find some of these names. At the same time, looking at the UK database of trademarks, I wasn't able to find a trademark for Cyndaquil, for Totodile, and for some other Pokémon names, so some are trademarked, and some are not. What's more, the appearance of these Pokémon, the specific design of these characters, aren't necessarily trademarked, but their exact design would be copyrighted. It's not an idea, but if you make a copy of the exact design as it appears in a different piece of work, you are still making a copy, even if it's not necessarily a perfect copy. To that end, one wrinkle in copyright law involves derivative works, the idea that if you just read a book, and then take large chunks of the text from that book, and put them into your own book, you are still infringing on copyright, even if you're not copying the entire thing across. Similarly, if you're making a picture that is based on a character that somebody else has designed, you are copying that character. No, you're not copying the idea, but you are copying the design, which is copyrighted. And if that seems complicated and confusing, and like there's a huge grey area in the middle, yep, welcome to copyright law. Like most copyright cases involve trying to puzzle out what actually constitutes a derivative work, and what is just fair use the use of a similar idea or a similar concept. Take anything that Ed Sheeran has had to do in any court case in the last year, and you've got a pretty good example. We've gone into detail in a previous video about the estate of Sherlock Holmes, and how they are very on it in protecting their legal claim, what they claim to have control over, which is the idea of Sherlock Holmes being nice. Because the character of Sherlock Holmes is long since out of copyright, he is within the public domain. But the idea of Sherlock being kind only appears in some of the later works, which were under copyright for a lot longer, and the Sherlock Holmes Foundation asserts that therefore any work which shows Sherlock Holmes in a compassionate light is infringing on their copyright, which is obviously nonsense. But this is how copyright law works, is that people end up trying to make a bigger claim than they necessarily can hold on to. Indeed, it's that attitude of the grabbing a bit further then and we can really reach and just seeing how things puzzle out in court, that is a large driver of the way that the Pokemon Company and Nintendo are often a little bit over ambitious in the way that they shut down fan projects. There are concerns that if a company doesn't maintain a strong boundary and says, no, this is ours, you can't touch it, even when dealing with fan works, that other companies might be eager to kind of sink their teeth into it a little bit, just kind of test it, push the edge, try and try and just help themselves to a little bit of what the other company owns. So Power World gets around intellectual property law surrounding trademarks by simply not using the word Pokemon and not indeed using a title that sounds anything like Pokemon just to be as distinct as possible. The game also does not feature Pikachu and it doesn't feature any of the names of Pokemon that we have seen in actual Pokemon games that might be trademarked or copyrighted. But what it does do is feature a lot of characters, a lot of animals that look very, very similar to the Game Freak art style in a way that we don't normally get in these Mon likes. Indeed, it could be said that Power World is in danger in some places of failing the squint test. In 2012, Tetris Holdings LLC sued Shio Interactive Limited over a Tetris clone that had appeared on the iOS app store. The game in question, Meno featured gameplay that was very similar to Tetris, which the judge reiterated very early in the case was not a problem because you can't copyright gameplay. However, the game also had a visual style that was almost identical to the Tetris games that were coming up for mobile at the same time. In this case, the game failed the squint test. If you took a screenshot of Meno and you put it next to a screenshot of Tetris and you squinted at them, it was very difficult to tell the two apart. And for that reason, the judge ruled in favour of Tetris. So according to the judge in that case, the border line as to whether or not a game is infringing on copyright is, quote, if one has to squint to find distinctions only at a granular level, then the works are likely to be substantially similar. So as said, in places, PAL World could be in danger of failing the squint test. The designs of these characters and the art style in general are so similar to Pokémon that it looks like this is copying Pokémon to a degree that is not transformative enough and would be considered derivative. And then we get to the other side of the gameplay. Because of course, that's the big meme with PAL World that it's Pokémon and it looks so much like Pokémon, but it's got that added level of violence. You'll notice I'm being deliberately very coy about describing what kind of violence, and there's a reason for that. This is YouTube, can't really talk about some of the things very openly. You can look it up on the internet, it's very easy to find, and indeed I'm probably being a bit too cautious, but whatever, this is a family channel, I don't want to go into it. To this end then, if PAL World was simply a mon-like in the traditional sense, with this art style, with this design, with these characters, then yes, it could potentially be seen as infringing on the Pokémon company's copyright because it is derivative, it is not substantially transformative of the original Pokémon idea and the way that most modern Pokémon games are presented. Because of the unique quirk in its gameplay, because of that weird twist to the formula, because it's the kind of game that makes people go, what, why, why did somebody make this, why? Because of that, PAL World is not actually infringing on the Pokémon company's copyright. And while it's not necessarily the kind of game that I personally would want to play, and while I can't speak to the quality of the game itself, I have nothing but respect for the way that Pocket Pear have dodged and swerved their way around intellectual property law in order to get this thing out the door. So then, the moral of the story. If you want to make your own Pokémon fan game, and again, this is not legal advice, but if you want to make your own Pokémon fan game, don't call it Pokémon, put in your own character designs, and add something weird to the mix.


Thanks everyone for coming out to my talk for your final presentation at Python Europe or Python. So this is sight unseen, but hopefully by the end of it, it won't be so hidden. Python is a very customizable language. I think we all know this. It allows us to do all kinds of things. It gives us the power to monkey patch, change the interpreter as it's running. And there's a lot of customization that can be done. Sometimes the customization is hidden from us, like when we use decorators or context managers, what actually happens isn't immediately obvious from reading the screen. And it seems almost magical, but it's not really magical. It's just that the complexity has been shifted somewhere else. And the same thing happens with the interpreter startup. We also have power to change how Python starts up. But a lot of it's done out of sight. And so it's not really magical. It's just that it's happening somewhere where you don't see it. But if you know where to look, it's not so magical and hopefully not so complex. The customization of Python as it starts up is done by module called sight. It's part of the standard library. And when you import sight, it does these things. It extends your module search path that is to stop path. Enable some interactive features for when you're going to use the interactive Python shell. And also executes further user customizations, basically letting you run arbitrary code to further customize Python. So if you import site, you get all these features. And I'm sure all of you have benefited from happening at some point, probably almost every time you're on Python. But I don't know how many people out there have actually run the statement import site. This is because the interpreter does it for you when it starts up before you get to your main script. It's already decided to go ahead and import site for you because really it's what you want to happen. Now Python still gives us the power. So if we really don't want it, we can turn it off with an option on the command line. Or if we decide later we really do want it turned on, we can still be explicit. We don't have to let Python do it behind the scenes. But site is not just a module you can import. It's also one you can't execute. So if you run it as an executable module on the command line, it'll print out some diagnostics that can really help you when you're debugging tricky, especially import issues. If we run site on the command line, it prints out something pretty much just like this. It shows us our entire sys.path as it will appear just as we enter our main script. And also gives us some detailed information about user site, which we'll get back to in a little bit. If we tell Python again to execute site, but we pass the dash s option, which means don't import site for me magically. It still works. It's kind of confusing sites being executed, but we told Python not to import site. But it turns out it's actually smart enough to work. And it just works so we can still debug path problems, even when we don't want to have the implicit import site. And just to prove to you that you don't have to use magic. If we tell Python not to import site for us, but we do it ourselves, we get the same result as the first time. So the first job of site is to extend the module search path. I think everyone probably knows how to extend search path using the environment variable Python path. Probably everyone out there has set Python path in anger at some point, because Python just couldn't find the thing that you knew where it was. I know I do this often, although I try not to. Putting Python path into the sys.path list is not the job of site, but every other addition to sys.path pretty much comes from site. So we have other ways of extending the search path. Specifically the site will add directories called site packages.  They all go into a directory called site packages that sits alongside the rest of the standard library. So wherever you have your OS and your path plan. There's also a directory called site packages, but it doesn't have a dunder init file in it. So it's not importable, but somehow everything inside of it can still be imported. This is because site goes and finds it and adds it to your sys.path. So otherwise you couldn't import any of those third-party modules. Next path also, or site, excuse me, also adds user site packages, which is a different kind of site packages. It's still site packages, but it's located under your user home directory instead of relative to the install location of Python. And this can be very useful because you always have write permissions under your home directory, and you might not where Python is installed in your system. So if you've ever tried to pip install something and got hit in the face with a big error that you eventually figured out was because you don't have write permissions to wherever Python is on your system. The answer to solving this issue is not to pseudo pip install your package. It just use the pip flag dash dash user, which will tell pip you want to install in the other site packages, the one that you have write permissions to. You might be using this and not even know it because for the last couple of years pip has released versions that will automatically fall back to the user site. So it's not just permission issues, but sites not done yet. It also adds virtual and so there's also a site packages in your virtual ms. I love virtual ms. I hope everyone out there uses them. But you spend all that time and effort isolating your dependencies from all the other environments and your base Python. But if that site packages doesn't make it on your sys dot path, that's kind of it's all for not. Even if you run Python from an activated state, if you have an imported site, you don't get to use any of those packages that are in the virtual environment so you kind of still really need site. And finally, path will read and execute path files. What are path files. They are any file that site found as it was adding these other site packages that ends in a dot pth. So for every one of these files that finds it'll read it and these files can contain two types of lines. They can contain a line that is a path anywhere local on your system, and it will be added also to sys dot path so it can be anywhere. Or it can contain import statements. In which case, site will execute those import statements. And so this provides a mechanism for third party modules that are in site packages to participate in the customization of the Python startup that sites doing. Because site is also extending your path and it's also being imported for you kind of implicitly path is a pretty advanced feature and if you don't know that you need it you probably don't need it but what could we do with it. Well, it's for modules that really need to set themselves up before you get to your first line of code. So if you want code coverage you probably want code coverage from your first line to your last line. And that's pretty tricky to do if you have to first import something and do some boilerplate setup. So if you were perhaps creating a new coverage library. You could drop this path into your site packages, which would add your source code to the system path, letting you import it as sort of an edible install. And you could import the setup so that your code coverage tool could cover its own code. So here's that command that we ran earlier just added comments to show where each directories coming from. The main transistor path is the directory you launch Python from that's always first. Then comes Python path, if it said, it could contain multiple things. And then your standard library. So these things are all set even before we get to site. But the last four are all set by site. So about a half of our search paths are dynamically at least in this case, could be more or less. So I added a virtual and site packages, a sort of random path from a path file. My user site packages and the base system Python the one that created the virtual line is last on the list. So sites done adding or inflating your system path. And now it goes on to enable some interactive features. This is when you're going to enter the Python interactive shell. A lot of what makes it nice to work with is because of site. So it will import and configure the redline module, which is another standard library that comes with Python and it's really just a thin wrapper around the sea redline library, which is a line editing library.  When you close the Python interpreter and reopen it, your old commands are still there because they were saved in history file which is from redline.  Eventually figured out you need to clear a whole line and start over. And for multi line statements and Python this means you have to clear the whole thing and start from the first line again. It's really nice having a redline set up for you. The other thing that site will do for interactive is it'll create new built ins. So, I said at the beginning that we can monkey patch things in Python we can monkey patch built ins. And in fact, site does this monkey patches new built ins every time you launch Python. So as a couple, including the help function and the exit function that you use. You don't exist unless you have imported site somehow. So if you had a script and you use the global exit function. This would work Python would execute and exit cleanly. But if you happen around the same script again without the implicit important site, you get a name error. Because it's not actually defined in the built ins class it's put there by site. So for scripts just always use the start exit. But for the interactive shell it's actually really nice to not have to do an import of sys just to leave the interactive shell. So next is user customizations. These are hooks that site provides for other code to participate in the customization of the startup. So so far everything's been kind of prescriptive but here site is going to give us some opportunities to just run arbitrary Python code before we get to our main script. The first way we can do this is through a module called site customize. So after site has inflated the full sys.path it will then attempt an import of site customized so if this is a module that exists in one of those directories it will be loaded. And because it's loaded all its global statements will be executed. So whatever it does affects Python. It's designed to be for system administrators or whoever was the person who installed Python on that machine. So they can make it work better for the machine or for the users, whatever they need to do to administer the Python. So if there was a really curious system administrator that really wanted to know every error that was happening they could use this site customized to set up a login handler where they got emailed. Every time anyone logged in error above on any Python process probably be very chatty but they'd certainly know what was going on. The next opportunity to extend what site does is user customize. Which is essentially the same thing as an attempted import that's done after sys.path is fully inflated. But this is by the name designed for the user the person who's launching Python to add custom code. So this is really opportunity for you to add whatever you want to change Python to behave differently so it suits you better. And really the sky's the limit because it's Python code but what's one thing you could do well if you maybe like pretty tracebacks. We have some pretty great ones in 311 and better ones coming in 312 but maybe you're on an older version of Python, or maybe you really want colors in your tracebacks and we still don't have that in the core. If you had this as a user customize, then any Python you ran, if it ever crashed, will give you a pretty traceback, even though you didn't necessarily put this important every script and every library that you used. The final opportunity for us to insert some extra customization is the Python startup, which is an environment variable that can point to any file on your system. So unlike the first two that are attempted imports, this one can be anywhere, it doesn't have to end up on sys.path. If it exists, it is exact, not imported, but only if you're about to enter the interactive interpreter. So that's important in a couple reasons. One is that we can customize Python in a way that's maybe slow or not useful in every situation because site customized user customers are going to happen basically every time you use Python for any task. But Python startup is only when you're entering an interactive session. So we can take the hit of even a couple seconds maybe if it really helps us out. And the second is that it's exact. And so whatever happens in Python startup is going to share the same global namespace as the shell you're about to enter. So any name bindings you do and things like that will affect your interactive session. So we can, for instance, always automatically apply future updates in our interactive session. We can, if you want to, are always doing it where it announces every time we open the interactive Python shell. We can just import some stuff ahead of time and they'll be ready as variable names before those first three arrows even appear in our terminal. We can change tunables about Python, things that aren't necessarily available to the command line or that are, but maybe you don't control them entirely. So it's kind of the end of what site does, but it's a lot, right? We've changed where you look for packages. We've monkey patched built-ins and we've executed some arbitrary Python code. So if things are going wrong, there's kind of a lot of opportunity, a lot of places to that might be affecting them. So how do you track that down? Well, we can run Python in verbose mode. If we do, many of the standard libraries that run during the start of the interpreter will pronounce some diagnostic information, including site. I think it's very chatty actually, but it can reveal a lot about how the interpreter is running. And if I'm having a problem specifically with import paths, I also like to use the C Python option dash x import time. This prints the time to import each module, which is not really a concern to me. I've never actually had to track down a long import time before. But what it does is it also by printing out those times tells you the real order that everything was imported. So when you start up or when you're running your own scripts, you know, you might have an import OS statement 15 times might import path live 12 times and encodings twice. But only one of each of those is a real import and all the rest are cached. So if you want to know the order of things, we're actually loaded up disk. This will kind of record that for you. So it gets very chatty several hundred lines just to run the site as an executable, but if we put a little filter on standard error. This is everything that the site module tells us about what it's doing. So it tells us where it's looking what it's adding and the order in which it's looking for things. So maybe we found the path that was getting in our way that was giving us the wrong import or the missing import. We might want to reduce how big sys.path is. And there's a couple options. Again, Python path and the current working directory are not added by site, but we can still turn them off through other mechanisms. So if you just unset Python path, then it won't be added to sys.path. And Python dash capital P does not prepend the current working directory to your sys.path, which is a great way to remove those bugs that of a module shadowing built in because it happened to be in the same directory you launched Python from there was a JSON.py or something. This is a great option, but unfortunately it is only available in 3.11 and up. So the problem is not our import paths or imports, but customization. Some of this arbitrary Python is going wrong or causing bugs. We can turn off the Python startup so we don't get exact code by just unsetting that variable. If we use Python dash lower s, that will turn off specifically just the user customized. So we still get the site customized. We still get our sys.paths. But the user import is not done. So that custom code is not running. If you use Python dash capital s, we saw earlier that turns off all sites. So this will not monkey patch built-ins. This will not add any of the site packages. It will not execute any of the arbitrary code. So you can't turn off just only site customized, but you can turn off all site. And remember if you don't get any site packages, that means that you have essentially disabled your virtual amp. So you kind of can't pick and choose there. Maybe you don't trust the user who is executing the Python code or maybe the user is you and you trust yourself, but you have kind of really mopped up your environment that you are launching Python from. So if you use dash capital E, you will turn off, or Python will ignore all environment variables that are for it. So all your Python path, Python startup, but also things that have nothing to do with site. They are all ignored. So Python break point, Python hash seed. It doesn't consider anything. Just use defaults. And dash is a shortcut for ES, lowercase s. So this means it will ignore your environment variables and specifically ignore your user customized. So you still have a chance to run a site customized. You still trust the administrator who installed the Python. And the packages that they installed because you still add your site packages. But if we add all this up, and we just still really don't trust what Python is doing, we can run a whole safe version of Python, a safe mode in Python SIP. This turns off all of site. So none of that customization, no arbitrary code running. Ignores all your environment. So you only get defaults. Whatever the interpreter was built to consider the default. And you turn off the prepending of the current working directory to the beginning. So this is a pretty boring Python. Your sys.path is just directors that have built-ins. You have no other modules. You haven't customized at all. Your interpreter, your interactive interpreter, if you want into one, is just very plain. And doesn't have any charm to it. But you've also eliminated a lot of possibilities for bugs. So sometimes we need to be safe. Sometimes we need to debug. And this is a great way to do it. But I do encourage you to take these lessons and go and customize code. Or the Python interpreter, because it's really just a tool for us. And we should make it productive for ourselves. And we should be on that. Just make it so that it's a joy to use every day. I've managed to mass a fairly long Python startup file. And I've shared this gist, which I know is a long string of just numbers and letters. But if you go to my GitHub, it's currently the only public gist. So it should be fairly easy to find. Thank you for coming out. And enjoy the end of your Eurobyte. Yeah, thank you very much, Emma. We have, according to the schedule, time for questions if there's any in the room. So let's have a hand sign if there is a question. And I see one. So, Mike, could you please go to the mic? It's in the back. I have a question about if you used virtual amps, if you use condo environments, are there any differences in terms of location for all those things? Do you know anything about this? And I don't know. I don't launch condo environments. If condo is using site packages as its install location, then condo uses condo with site packages in the site in a different for each environment. It creates a site packages, someone nested down there, which is the site packages. There's no global site packages for condo. Right. But if it uses it, I think, I think I don't know condo that well, but I think if it's using a directory called site packages, it's relying on it being found by site. Because site packages are added differently than other directories to stop path. But if it's maintaining its own cache and just adding that cash to Python path or something like that, then it would be going around site. Okay, thanks a lot for the question. I see at the moment no further questions. So we're going to take the opportunity to thank you again for your talk, and hope to see you again next year at your place. So let's have another round of applause for Jeremiah.


I must first begin by thanking Nathan Hale for providing me with this excellent chance to present a little bit my, it's not really even work, my working progress before such, before an audience with such an irradiation, which I can only dream of. And so today I, as you know, I have been working on the problem of grades in Tangud for a moment. And so today I'll just pick up where I left off back in Hamburg where, because I didn't treat the thing about the grade two. And so today I'll talk about it and talking a little bit, I'll be also talking a little bit about Chinese also. So I call the, I call the late middle Chinese, the Chinese dialect that is spoken by Tangus and the Chinese dialect that the Tangus learn, or learn Chinese well. So let's start with some basic information. So the most interesting to me category, phonological category in Tangud is the start of grades. So usually, by usually I mean by Huang Cheng, usually we reconstruct three grades for a Tangud on the basis of a conjunction of rhyme, order, and dictionaries. So in dictionaries like the one have all these C characters. And we have other lexicographic materials that present the exactly the same order of rhyme, of rhyme categories. So it's something that is very much agreed upon by the Tangud philologists themselves. And the other thing is the Tangud Chinese transcription evidence. There is a slight asymmetry between the Chinese to Tangud side and the Tangud to Chinese side, but for the grade problem it's okay. So as an example, we take the rhymes R34, so R34 to R37. And we see that so the first rhyme in this group transcribes almost only Chinese syllables in the Chinese grade one. And the second rhyme in this group, R35 transcribes only Chinese characters of the grade two. And the remaining two rhymes, R36 and R37, more or less indiscriminately transcribes Chinese grades three and four. In fact, these two are in near complementary distribution. And if we look really hard at the near part, we see that they are usually artificial. And we can, for most of these groups like this, we can make a case for real complementary distribution. So I agree with Gong Huang Cheng in reconstructing only three grades. So the traditional reconstruction of the value of the grade is made by Sofranov basically as a mirror image of the Chinese reconstruction at his day. So he considered the grade thing basically a thing of mediums. So the first grade has no mediums. The second grade has some kind of weak yard. And the third grade has some kind of strong yard. This is carried over a verb by Gong Huang Cheng. So you have the Niesge-Geslawi Yoda represented by a volcanic E in Gong Huang Cheng's reconstruction and the stronger yard represented by real yard. This creates the problem that it's very difficult to pronounce EA and EA. What's the difference between EA and EA? Well, I can pronounce a lot of things, but this one is a little bit difficult. So Gong Huang Cheng made a decision to, he basically invented an aliphany where in grade three the vowel is slightly raised. So you have EA and EA. What is pronounceable? A little bit pronounceable. But sadly it is not supported by the transcription evidence. So my favorite example is just the basic mantra in Mahayana Buddhism. Om Manipal Nehum. And if we look at the usual reconstruction we have Om Manipal Nehum. Clearly it doesn't work and it needs to be updated. And I have the whose part to consider the updating basically done. So at the moment let's start with a little bit context. So Tanggut, it is known already at the time of Wolfen Deng and Wang Xinru, that Tanggut is a Changi language closely related to languages like Chang, to Minyak, to Garongic languages. But at this time those languages are not very well described. So basically in order to be able to do the nice kind of comparison you need to really do great dictionaries of those languages and you like thousands of words before you can really get to something. So now with Guillaume Jacques, who has worked for more than a decade on Japook, he has a very great dictionary of Japook and he has looked for all the possible coordinates and he found some 300 of them. So now we have something very solid to work on which is the cognates between Tanggut and Japook Garong. So based on comparison with Japook Garong, which I will not explain today, I happily and gladly redo the presentation that I have done in Hamburg and elsewhere if you want it. And so basically what I suggest is that there is a phonological distinction of uberlarization, so between uberlarized vowels which are pronounced like bah, bah, and non-uberlarized plain vowels which are pronounced bah, bah. So the distinction between grade 1 and grade 3 which were reconstructed before as bah versus biah is now reconstructed as bah versus bah. This distinction of uberlarization triggers an aliphony for the velar, so basically the yain initials between qa and qa. It is very clear that grade 2 is uberlarized as grade 1 but we don't know what the thing distinguishes grade 2 from grade 1. So for now I will write an R for grade 2 and we will have a look in detail. So where does the uberlarization in Garong come from? Well, the first origin is what I call the primary uberlarization. It must be reconstructed back to proto-Changgi and it has some correspondences within my other silent Tibetan languages but it's too early to say anything serious about it. However, if we just look at Changgi languages the thing is quite clear. So for example, for past long it's boh uberlarized in Tangut and in zhibu garong the language I'm working on is dazwu dazwu with the velarized or uberlarized vowel which I call emphatic vowel and we have the same thing in Minyang the language which shares the name of Tangut is ba ba. So for willow it's uberlarized in Tangut and it's emphatic in zhibu etc. So this is the primary uberlarization which is inherited from proto-Changgi we also have secondary uberlarization so basically the root wasn't uberlarized at the stage of proto-Changgi but now there are other things which went to the syllable and which makes it uberlarized. So for example, if we have a uberlar if we have a uberlar called emphatic vowel so for example to we which is ta in zhibu there is the ge and this ge goes to the syllable and so we have not la but la for snake it is the same ta but in the first position so basically we should have pu or something for snake but it's ha pu and this ra this uberlarized element goes on to the syllable and makes it pu and not only uberlarized but veeler elements basically veeler codus and em which I hypothesized as having turned into some kind of another word than to this ge and these also make secondary uberlarizations so what do we find here we find the ubiquitous pattern the basic conspiracy in the historic phonology of Tangu which Mark Miyake describes as compression I have changed his definition a little bit and for me what is compression compression is that materials phonological or phonetic materials around the syllables so for example the codus or pre-initials or even some kind of minor syllables they all went to the main part of the syllable and become some kind of pan-syllabic feature which works for the syllable as a whole that is for example how we usually explain the origin of retroflexes in Tangu so you have pre-initial R or codon R which just extends to the syllable as a whole and itself it has disappeared so this is the compression and so the uberlarization in Tangu fits very well into this great picture of compression so we have left the second the grade II unexplained it has something to do with R so I will write it as R in capital letters but what is it? first we will look at this transcription evidence for this great R so for the Chinese transcription there isn't much to be said first it transcribes grade II second it transcribes grade III with Zhuangzu shengmu so with retroflex fricte for African as an initial the Tibetan transcription is more interesting I think it's for the Hanbi and Hanbi and am I right? where we have the vowel R in the second in grade II transcribed as R so for example this character which is Ba is transcribed as Ba and you never find the first find the grade I syllable in comparable circumstances transcribed with an R that's all we have got for the transcription materials it's quite hard to interpret it's more interesting to consider the etymological origins of the grade II capital R so the first origin of the grade II capital R is eulerization plus medial R so for example if you have Ka without the R you have Ka in grade I but in fact because there is an R it's krak so the R is reflected as the grade II also for wele it's zhembr and it is duly reflected as Ba with this capital R for white here the eulerization is not primary but comes from the code M however because there is the R so code M brings eulerization and eulerization plus medial R brings grade II the same medial R a non-neuvelarized context just disappears so for example this is a word which is shared by almost every Changi language so it's quite useful gr which means sinew and it is there is an R but it has disappeared because it's not eulerized so the same thing for clear water which is angri and just gi there's no difference between gi and gr so that was the first origin for grade II in Tangut and now things get more interesting here we have the R which has an euler initial with the vowels e, a and u so basically if any of you speak a language with euler so you know that it's very difficult to pronounce pi it's almost impossible to do q with a normal e so there is always some kind of intervening transitional element between euler initial and high vowel or front vowel and however in Tangut this thing is categorized the same thing as the other origins of grade II that is why I think that Miyake's hypothesis that 104 and 204 are grade II rhymes and not grade I rhymes is correct because basically you have other you have other initials one and two and one but you have almost only in fact euler initials in 104 and 204 so the R thing here is some kind of transitional element which has a low vowel in one of the garantic languages which is a variety of crossgap spoken in Wozi we have the same thing so for difficult which is you have however a normal word with a in Japhook is just reflected as e in crossgap and grade III e in Tangut and why we have this in Rai is because it's difficult to say if you say in Rai and you don't pay very much attention it becomes in Rai the last the last origin for for the second for the grade II in Tangut is retroflex initials I think I don't have the time to explain it clearly here so I've just declared by Fiat that the the shivalence so the Chantu the Chantu initials are pronounced are pronounced retroflex before a euler before a euler rise Rai so what does it say it means that because we have because shivalence are only compatible with grade II but not grade I it means that the R the capital R is some kind of transitional element between retroflex sound and a vowel and any vowel so for those of you who would love to look at a little bit at the argument I leave it here and let's go to the summing up so in order to recapitulate the evidence about the capital R so what does the capital R feel like first there is some kind of throttiness or backness because it is only a euler rise context and it's a transitional vowel between a euler and a high or a front vowel so it must be something like R or O or A or something like that that's our first intuition the second intuition is that the sound has an R-like character so otherwise it's impossible to explain the R in the Tibetan transcription and it would be difficult to explain also the origins with in R and with retroflex however we also know that it's not a real R because first we have the middle R in Tibetan and it's never transcribed as a middle R in Tibetan also it's in the how do you call it in the in the mantras if there is a word like and it will never be and you never find a grade 2 character used to transcribe in fact you have very few grade 2 characters in mantras basically it's used to transcribe the long vowel and nothing else and thirdly if it's really R it's impossible to explain why it becomes grade it's not okay grade becomes grade it's strange so what do I feel about it well I think that it's the I call it the eye hypothesis because I think it is an eye so phonologically I will call it a pharyngeal and phonetically it's the vocalis vocalis correspondent of an eye which is the A and very pharyngealized so for example white is pronounced difficult is pronounced grade and to cross the river is pronounced down and why do I think so well first it satisfies the the throatiness because you can't get really you can't get more throaty than the eye it's almost the most throaty consonant available and it also counts for the R-like character this subject is seriously little treated in the literature but if you ask anybody who works on Caucasian languages or on Arabic and you ask them what do they think in American English and in Mandarin Chinese you have this kind of rotic vowels and they will tell you that they are not rotic the principle acoustic and articulatory in those vowels is the pharyngeal construction and we find everywhere this kind of this kind of affinity between roticness and pharyngeal construction for example in the Chinese transcript of Arabic if you have an eye then it's rendered with one of the rotic vowels in Chinese that's my theory about that's my current theory about the grade 2 in Tangut and let's just project it back to Hexi late middle Chinese well, it means that grade 2 has some kind of RTR quality and it has a pharyngeal so my hypothesis is that the iron hypothesis is not only true for Tangut but it also works at least for Hexi late middle Chinese now the question is this is this grade 2 iron in Hexi Chinese influenced or co-evolved or anything like that by Tangut or it's more widespread in Chinese and in fact the Tangut is influenced by the Chinese well on the nature of grade 2 in Chinese basically we have two theories the A theory and the E theory the A theory is almost correct because if you look at modern dialects and if you look at all kinds of information it's clearly something like A however how do you get from Ra to A it's very difficult on the other hand if we use this iron hypothesis and so if Chinese grade 2 is characterized by strong pharyngealization then it's very natural to have the vowel A which is in fact the pharyngealized counterpart of A associated with grade 2 one is that we have this association between retroflex initials and A in Tangut and it's also very projectable to Chinese because not only in Hexi Middle Chinese but also in the early Northern Mandarin contemporary to Hexi Middle to Hexi to Hexi Middle Chinese we have the same thing we have the whenever you have a retroflex African or African in grade 3 syllables it is classified together with grade 2 so not only original grade 2 is grade 2 but in late Middle Chinese or in early Mandarin or in fact in most kind of Chinese retroflex plus everything gives grade 2 and we still have some modern reflection of this in dialects from standard Mandarin to Sano-Vietnamese every time if you the original retroflexes cause a lowering of the vowel just put Cantonese here but it works for any other language for most other languages as well so I have argued for the I true nature of grade 2 in Tangut and I project it into Chinese but it's not in fact it turns out that it's not dialect of Chinese but very common Chinese and the only thing it gives us is that the Tangut treatment you will arise into this kind of vowel from Chinese why do I say it because in modern Changi language you never find this treatment this particular treatment it's either preserved or lost without any trace or become some kind of real celebrity or it triggers the particular Tibetan sound change which brings gr to zh for example for the worst sign you have in northern in northern which is the select big vertices treatment and we have the Tibetan treatment zh in southern and this if you look at the dialect map the treatment are really scattered so it means that in most of the Wuhan map of Changi the middle R is preserved to a very late date so the most plausible scenario that Chinese all kinds of Chinese always had some kind of wine for grade 2 and Tangud has developed under the influence under the influence from Chinese so in our final slide can we speak about Heizhish Park I got interested in the first because I thought it would bring to some very clear area so Hexi Chinese is influenced by Tangud and Tangud is influenced by Hexi Chinese however I think Tangud is very strongly reshaped, restructured by Hexi Chinese however Hexi Chinese is just some very generic kind of north western Chinese even if the strange thing is that is this the only thing we can know anything about Hexi Middle Chinese is by Tangud transcriptions and if we just read the if we just listen to Tangud's speaking very heavily Tangud accent Chinese it just sounds like normal Chinese without any Tangud accent what does that mean it means that Tangud is so much reshaped by Chinese so that the phonological systems are almost completely compatible with that kind of thing for example in Hamdou where you have melodic languages with phonologies so those people if they speak Chinese they just speak it like normal Chinese etc however we also know that for example for the compression for all kinds of compression the dialect the Tibetan dialect used to transcribe the Tangud and have shared the same sound changes so I think we have a typical situation which I call the the Ottoman Balkan situation you have the Balkan Shafut where Balkan languages coexist in some kind of in some kind of Paxpanic and they influence each other and they are all influenced by Turkish it's barely influenced by by Balkan languages and I think we have the same thing so Tangud and local Tibetan influence each other they are all influenced by Chinese but Chinese is not influenced is not very much influenced by Tangud and that's all I have to say thank you very much